Hannah Spencer explains why she got into politics

Speaking to Zack Polanski, Green candidate Hannah Spencer has explained what’s motivating her to run in Gorton & Denton:

Spencer also noted that the “shit about me online” comes from a vocal minority.

Hannah Spencer: “I’ve got to find a way to do this”

Explaining how she motivates herself, Spencer explained:

This is kind of what life is. A lot of us that do jobs where you’re often kind of in the unknown and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before but I think a lot of us have more skills than we realise for doing stuff like this.

And I think it’s a really natural thing for anyone to assume that I could never do that. I could never be a politician. I don’t know about politics. I don’t have this background. It’s like, but all the skills that you get in life are the exact skills that you need from doing this.

This is a leap into the unknown. But so was me training to be a plumber. So was when I trained to be a gas engineer. So is every time I go to a boiler that I’ve never seen before in my life. You just see what’s in front of you and you think I’ve got to find a way to do this.

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Polanski cut in to ask:

Wait, so you’re actually a plumber?

Spencer responded:

I’m going to set the record straight here and say, yes, I am a plumber.

Polanski later said:

There’s an Instagram post of where you went into the plastering college, and what had your… colleagues done for you?

Spencer explained:

Yeah, so I’d had the day off really kindly from my college tutor and they’d made a sign out of a scrap of plasterboard, and it said ‘Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering Hannah Spencer MP’. And they were all so proud of it, and I had a big picture next to me, and I was just smiling in such a cheesy way, and it’s really nice because there is a lot of shit about me online.

A lot of it’s very misogynistic, very sexist, like the idea that a woman couldn’t possibly do a job like this is still commonly held by some people, not the majority of people, but a very vocal minority. And so to go into this group of men who are really similar to me, like from a similar background, and just be accepted by them and not only accepted, but encouraged as well. And for them just to be like, you’ve got this, you’re absolutely going to smash it. Just, yeah, it just made my heart burst. I love that.

Featured image via Zack Polanski