No I didn't get to watch it, but I did hear one Professor Jeremy Baker speak on Ashley's behalf on Radio 4's Today programme this morning whilst driving to work. If you missed it, please do listen to it, starting at about 7.30. I'm a fairly placid sort of person but I was shouting obscenities at the radio, I was sooooo furious.
His basic argument is that we don't want workers to get a "French system full middle class benefits from the start" and that they should work their way up in the "normal middle class way". After all, HIS children did internships, when they weren't paid and they were making coffee - and he was fine with that (unrepeatable obscenities from me at that stage).
He went on to say that we have to acknowledge that there is a global force coming in who don't have those aspirations and basically admitted that it was all about exploitation.
I am, by the way, a working class girl who, through aspiration, hard work and more than a smidgeon of good luck at being born at the right time, now finds herself a fully fledged member of the middle class. But the argument that everyone has the capacity and the opportunity to manage to do that flies in the face of the reality of many people's lives, particularly when their employment conditions and pay levels are so appalling.
As someone who knows Shirebrook, where the factory is, very well, I find it interesting that none of the reports I have heard have mentioned that a large number of the workforce in that factory, if not the majority, are immigrants. This is the underbelly of immigration folks - the bit that no-one really wants to talk about. Exploitation of the vulnerable and the desperate, so that we can get cheap trainers and that some individuals can become ridiculously wealthy. The surplus of cheap labour not only causes misery for the migrants, but it also depresses the working conditions of the local population as a whole.
I'm still undecided in the EU referendum but my working class roots are pulling me towards out. The question is whether things would get better or worse for those at the bottom of the pile with a Brexit (apologies if you are all sick to the back teeth of it, but I so rarely hear this argument).