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And yet someone had to make toy sand-shovels for the world. What, in a just society, could ever induce someone to do that sort of work? Should all youths be conscripted to work in factories for a year? Should plastics-factory labour be reserved for the punishment of white-collar criminals? Finally …

I never entirely plumbed the reasons for his preferring labour, no matter how stultifying or demeaning or ill-paid, to collecting benefits

I was about to be sprung from my class status. My father worked in a factory, my parents owned a tiny house and a secondhand car, they were socially awkward and didn’t speak very good English; I didn’t really know what a rise in status would entail. I had no desire to work in finance or to join any…

I was fated to work in a factory. [...] My father managed to avoid working in the textile plants, but he couldn’t help being employed by ancillary businesses; there wasn’t anything else. When I was born he had been working for about five years in an iron foundry that made equipment for the plants. …

The last time I performed in their theatre—the Jo Ro, opposite the factory—I played Abdullah, a street urchin in Tennessee Williams strange, static play, Camino Real. I was thirteen years old. As Abdullah, I was photographed by the Yorkshire Evening Press, and the accompanying caption came very nea…