The Telegraph recently featured a desperate piece of writing by Alex Proud, entitled "Time we stopped worshipping the working class."

This was yet another attempt by the right-wing media to demonise working-class people.

The article, emblazoned with a photo of "working-class hero" Frank Gallagher of the TV programme Shameless, proceeded to criticise those who were formally working class but have now made it big by becoming celebrities or film directors.

What was ironic was that Proud decided to defend his own working-class roots by giving us a story of his father's working-class credentials before going on to lambast others who do this.

It is a common thread of the right-wing press throughout this coalition's tenure in government since 2010 to seek to mock, shame and downright degrade anyone who is or was working class.

We have seen the ridicule of people on Benefit Street being openly paraded on television as a kind of middle-class sport, their lives and backgrounds raked over to provide ammunition for people who were lucky enough to have had a better start in life, usually a private education which led on to a good career.

We have seen people like the talented and now successful Jack Monroe being hissed at by Edwina Currie on a Channel 5 debate on benefits, and mocked about her grandparents' class and what Jack's own roots were - like it mattered!

As a woman who survived on benefits with her small son and blogged about getting by on £10 per week for food, creating exciting recipes and hauled herself off the breadline when a publishing company decided to turn her recipes into a book, Monroe should be lauded - not condemned by an out of touch, has-been ex-Tory MP who incidentally thinks there are no need for foodbanks either.

It is indeed difficult to get working-class success stories into the media. Why? Because the right-wing press don't want to know. To them working-class people are - to use their rhetoric - the "unemployed scroungers who don't want to work".

Hence the Shameless photo on Mr Proud's article. But those of us who are working class, but don't happen to have our own column or feature in the national press, still have everyday stories of the ordinary everyday work we do that may not put our names in lights outside a West End theatre but without it, our country would not survive a day. I am talking of: factory workers on zero-hours contracts, carers on £59 per week caring for disabled relatives 24/7, nurses, train drivers, bus drivers, teachers, unemployed people struggling to find work.

These are working class, working proud people who do a job which benefits the smug middle-class writers like Alex Proud, who deign to write about their life experiences.

And to those working-class people who make it big? You often find that when their salary raises them above ordinary people's wages, they decide to help those around them who are less fortunate.

They may become MPs, like Ian Lavery, Grahame Morris and Ian Mearns, who strive to fight for the rights of their working-class constituents and promote the cause of unions in the workplace.

Or they may be showbiz people who, however rich, decide to speak out about the suffering of the poor during austerity, like Fiona Phillips on ITV Breakfast or Paul O'Grady, the comedian and chat show host.

There is nothing to poke fun at, nothing to ridicule when someone from a working-class background becomes successful, yet people like Proud seems to think there is.

Mr Proud says in his article, "In general I'm sure it was harder for you" (to make it big coming from a working-class background) but he doesn't want to hear about it. Why not? Shouldn't those ordinary people who have become successful shout from the rooftops they have done so?

Couldn't they be the person who inspires a teenager in school to take a similar path? I know as a working-class woman of middle age I am impressed, admire and look up to those who have succeeded in their path to a political career, striving to protect and care for the most vulnerable of their constituents, and sometimes having to ignore their own party line to stand up for what they believe is the right thing to do.

Proud also asks: "Is growing up poor really that bad?" I would say No, growing up poor and becoming working poor may not be "that bad" in some respects, but how relentless that poverty can be and how grinding.

Growing up poor gives children a sense of shame, guilt even, that they do not have enough money to take part in activities like their peers, or afford the clothes and modern-day gadgets middle-class children take for granted.

Growing up poor can have the advantage that nothing is taken for granted and possessions are treasured. But then most poor children become poor adults.

The never-ending cycle of poverty affects their life chances. After having my home repossessed in 1991 when interests rates rocketed to 15 per cent, no one values space as much as I do after spending just shy of three years in a one-room B&B with a husband and two small children before being allocated a council house. Poor?

I was virtually destitute at the time and experiences like mine and those of other working-class people need to be aired in our newspapers and on television in a rebuttal of articles like Proud's.

So I applaud and trumpet the achievements of all working-class people - those in ordinary everyday jobs and those who have made it big. The only "Shameless" people are those like Mr Proud who seek to denigrate us. We're working class, we're working proud.