The Labour MP Harry Harpham, who has died of cancer aged 61, was probably one of the last of a breed of working-class politicians who grew to adulthood before spotting the dangling rope of education and then grasped it to improve his own circumstances and thus the lives of others. In his case, it was after 15 years as a miner, the last year of which was spent on the National Union of Mineworkers’ picket line at Clipstone colliery in Nottinghamshire during the strike that led to the end of the industry.
Harpham was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. “Lads from my community didn’t stay on in school,” he said once. “We left as soon as we could, put on a hard hat and went down the pit.” Aged 15, he left school on a Friday and went down the pit on the Monday morning. Yet his education resumed almost immediately when an older miner gave him a copy of Robert Tressell’s socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists a couple of weeks later. It was only after the miners’ strike, in 1985, however, that he moved to Sheffield and got what he called his “second chance”. He studied at Northern College, in Barnsley, the adult education “Ruskin College of the North”, and then graduated from the University of Sheffield.
Support for the Labour party was, in his word, a “given” for a man in his circumstances, but he joined the party and embarked upon a crusade for the people of Sheffield. “I joined because then, as now, working people have never been handed change. We have had to fight for it and I wanted to play my part,” he said. He was elected to the city council in 2000 and became a passionate advocate for the disadvantaged in the city. He himself lived in one of the most deprived areas of the constituency he came to represent and he was proud of being rooted there; connected to the reality faced by the residents of Brightside and Hillsborough. He worked as a night warehouseman and as a volunteer in an advice centre. “I live in the real world. I get it,” he told people.
In Sheffield he was a tenacious fighter for better housing and education and became the council’s cabinet member for homes and neighbourhoods. He was elected deputy leader in 2012 and also served as election agent for David Blunkett as MP from 2001. This was obviously an advantage for him when Blunkett announced his retirement from the House of Commons before the 2015 election, but Harpham still faced a stiff contest for selection for such a safe seat.
He held it with a comfortable majority – over Ukip – of nearly 14,000 in May, but discovered health problems very shortly after his election. He was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in September, but hid the extent of his illness in order to disguise his own disappointment at how brief would be the tenure of his political authority and his chances of making the world a better place, at least in Sheffield. It proved to be less than nine months. He told the House of Commons in his maiden speech what life was like in his constituency, where more than double the national average claim the job seekers’ allowance and the number of children living in poverty is twice the level for the rest of the UK.
In the time he had left, he continued to criticise the government in the Commons on humanitarian issues, housing, education and energy policy.
He last spoke, a fortnight before his death, when he attacked David Cameron for his crocodile tears and hand-wringing over the crisis-hit steel industry in Sheffield. At Westminster, he was appointed a member of the environment, food and rural affairs select committee and was chosen as parliamentary private secretary to the shadow energy and climate change secretary, Lisa Nandy. He supported Andy Burnham for the leadership of the Labour party.
Harpham was married twice and is survived by his second wife, Gill Furniss, the two children from his first marriage, Annie and Kieron, and the three children from her first marriage, Dan, Emily and Victoria.
• Robert Harry Harpham, mineworker and politician, born 21 February 1954; died 4 February 2016
