Chancellor Sajid Javid reveals he was spat on by skinhead thugs as he chats about growing up in 1970s Britain
GROWING up on Rochdale’s mean streets in the early 1970s, Sajid Javid always checked the colour of the skinheads’ laces on their bovver boots.
The National Front thugs used to stone and spit on him as a six year-old on the way to school.
The young Asian boy, who grew up to be Britain’s first ethnic minority Chancellor of the Exchequer, recalled: “A friend told me that if the skinheads have yellow laces, that means they don’t like people of Pakistani origin.
“And if they have red laces, they don’t like people that are black. So if they had red laces, they’d let you go.
“I thought, no, I don’t think it works like that.”
The senior Cabinet minister, who turned 50 yesterday, revealed his childhood racist torment when he took The Sun back to Rochdale, the South Pennines mill town where he was born.
Showing the modest terraced house where he lived until the age of six for the first time, the Tory MP told how it was also where he first learned to hate divisions.
The skinheads would pounce on Sajid as he walked to school with his two older and two younger brothers.
Mr Javid recalled: “They knew the typical school routes and would wait round corners, and then shout at you, ‘P***, P*** bastard’ and spit at you.
'WE'VE COME A LONG WAY'
“Sometimes they’d throw stones so you suddenly feel a stone hitting you, and you’d try to work out where it has come from. I was very young, and I was frightened. I didn’t like that, I hated it.
“I would always stick close to my cousins and my brothers.
“My older brother would say, ‘You guys run this way and I will try to distract them’.”
He added: “It was a very different environment then. As a country in terms of race relations, we have come a long way.”
Mr Javid’s passage from Rochdale’s tough streets to No11 Downing Street, via a banking career in the City, is one of the most extraordinary personal stories in British politics today.
His father, Abdul Ghani-Javid, arrived in Rochdale in the 1960s as an immigrant from Pakistan’s Punjab province, with just £1 in his pocket.
After weeks of waiting outside one of the town’s big mills for work, he persuaded the foreman to take him on by always being the first to arrive early in the morning.
Abdul’s ambition was to become a bus driver.
But Mr Javid recalls: “He wasn’t allowed because the union had a rule that all drivers had to be white. There was an informal colour bar.
“So he kept trying, and eventually he did become a driver.”
Mr Javid’s parents worked seven days a week, with his dad manning a market stall at the weekend after his bus driving shifts.
His mother used to stay up through the night, sewing clothes for his dad to sell.
Young Sajid used to help out, recalling: “I used to like wearing the money belt and trying to serve the customers. It was good training for the Treasury.”
'THEY'VE BEEN LEFT BEHIND'
The skinheads’ abuse aside, the Chancellor has fond memories of Rochdale before the family moved to Bristol when he was seven.
Much of his time was spent out on his street playing football and cricket.
“It was a fantastic community, a lovely place to live,” he said. “Everyone cared for each other, all the kids played together, you knew everyone on your street.”
Of Rochdale today, Mr Javid added: “Places like this are full of talent. But if you speak to people, there is a sense they’ve been left behind.
"It’s been too much about the South East and London, and we’ve got to do something about that.”
Overcoming background and division by liberating people to fulfil their aspirations is what the Chancellor insists he is most passionate about in his job in charge of the nation’s finances.
Randy pooches
By Tom Newton Dunn, Political Editor
SAJID Javid has revealed how he has to keep an eye on Boris Johnson’s “randy” new dog who has a keen eye for his pooch.
The Prime Minister’s Jack Russell, Dilyn, often tries it on with the Javid’s cavapoo bitch Bailey when are in the Downing Street back garden together.
The Chancellor also disclosed how he and Boris use their early morning or late night dog exercising moments to catch up on key developments.
And sometimes, Mr Javid said the PM will holler at him inside to come out into the large back garden besides Horseguards for a chat.
In an interview with The Sun he revealed: “We have met on many dog walks in the No10 garden.
“It is a good time to talk if we haven’t got a scheduled meeting, we will both be taking our dogs out for a walk in the early hours of the morning.
“Or I could be in my No11 office which overlooks the garden, and there have been a couple of occasions where the Prime Minister is walking his dog and he can see my light on, and he will go ‘Saj! What’s going on? What are you doing? Come on down.”
Quizzed on rumours about Boris’s dog’s affections for his, Mr Javid confirmed: “Dylan is a bit randy.”
It was also rumoured that the Javids have to pick up Bailey every time Dilyn comes near her.
Laughing, he added: “Not every time. We just have to make sure we are keeping an eye on them.”
In a bid to scotch rumours of bust ups between them when Mr Javid was first appointed three months ago, Mr Javid insisted: “There was no rift to heal.
“There is some industry out there that has always said that whoever is in No10 and No11, they don’t get on well, and they just keep saying it without actually looking at the facts.
“We couldn’t get on better. We agree on almost everything, and especially when it comes to the economy and the finances.
“And that was before he became Prime Minister and I became Chancellor.
“We have been friends and worked together for many years, sometimes behind the scenes.”
It’s why he says he feels deep anger towards the Labour leader.
Standing outside the small three bedroom house he shared with his mum, dad and four brothers in southern Rochdale, Mr Javid insisted: “Jeremy Corbyn is just interested in dividing people.
“Whether it is by class or by race or by the area they live in, he just wants to divide people.
“For Jeremy Corbyn, it is just a game. Let’s set them off against each other, and then try to get one side to vote for Labour, rather than trying to think is he actually helping these people.
“We need as a country look at ourselves as one nation where we all respect each other.”
He added: “And when it comes to being on the side of working people I passionately believe that we are the party of working people now.
“Look at what we’re doing - increasing the national living wage, cutting national insurance contributions, putting money in the pockets of millions of people.”
We need as a country look at ourselves as one nation where we all respect each other.
Sajid Javid
Mr Javid still has close family in Rochdale and visits regularly.
He eschewed a hotel during his trip there this week to stay with his cousin Rozina Ali, his best friend from childhood who is just three weeks older than him, and still lives in the town.
She affectionately dubs Sajid “Mr Hungry”, and recalls how he caught the political bug as a teenager, inspired by Tory-PM Margaret Thatcher’s reforms.
While in his home town, Mr Javid also campaigned for local Tory candidate Atifa Shah, who defected from Labour six months ago.
She is trying to overturn a 14,000 Labour majority in the seat that the Conservatives haven’t won since the 1950s, but are now making powerful inroads into.
Britain’s electoral map is changing as old allegiances die under the Brexit vote’s political earthquake.
Ms Shah, 32, told The Sun: “We live in a world of opportunity now.
“I tell people in Rochdale, if we always vote for who we always voted for, then we’ll always get what we always got”.
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