When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (10 page)

Westminster and Whitehall have been fitful in their attention to the region. In the early sixties, Lord Hailsham donned his cloth cap and took a brief interest. The first Wilson government appeared to offer some hope: it provided a moment of local optimism. Wilson himself came to open the Labour Club in Peterlee. T. Dan Smith was ‘Mr Newcastle'; John Poulson was designing civic buildings suitable for a newly affluent proletariat. Regional incentive schemes came and went. Peterlee discovered to its cost that its houses were more suitable for a Mediterranean climate than for the bitter north. (They had been built with flat roofs, which held the water and had to be replaced.) Peterlee Development Corporation did a sound, if unspectacular, job. Employment grew steadily. In late 1986 there were seven thousand jobs on the corporation's estates – half male and half female. But the corporation – described by Ed Henderson, its chief executive, as the ‘most successful job creating agency in the sub-region' – was philosophically offensive to the Conservative government, which was pledged to dismantle it. (One reprieve was granted and another was being sought when I was there.) ‘They didn't analyse what we were doing, thirty guys getting on with the job in hand,' said Mr Henderson. Without it, job prospects would have been worse.

Private capitalists, then falling over themselves to get a piece of the ‘Big Bang', would not finance a site in Peterlee even for such a risk-free enterprise as a new factory for a national food conglomerate. Mr Henderson complained that the government believed that the only public help that private enterprise needed was roads, as if the north-east was as desirable to venture capital as is London's docklands. If the dismantling of government ‘quangos' contributes to equality and efficiency, I'm for it. The ‘great and the good' should be sent packing. But the north-east clearly needs special treatment, and in Peterlee the Development Corporation was well spoken of by both the guy with the spanner, one hundred pounds and a bright idea, and by multinationals like NSK of Japan. Mr Henderson said: ‘I get a tremendous kick out of bringing companies to our area. You cannot enjoy seeing your own people without work.' The north needs people who care: market forces are not enough.

The Development Corporation's advertising budget is spent in London to overcome widespread boardroom prejudice against the region. One television commercial showed a board meeting at which the chairman trotted out a series of misconceptions about the north-east, while his nose grew longer and longer, like Pinocchio's. The corporation produces a booklet, containing pictures of executive-style housing, wild, unspoiled country, new shopping centres and historic buildings. A four-bedroomed house, with four acres of land, on the outskirts of a pretty village was available for £65,000. Managers and professionals who are sent north often fall in love with the life, and resist when their time comes to return to London. But the prejudice remains. ‘What we are up against,' a Yorkshire planning officer said to me, ‘is the attitude of a businessman I was trying to persuade north. “My wife,” he told me, “would never leave Surrey.”' Mr Henderson claimed that old-fashioned work practices are not a problem in the new industrial environment of Peterlee, though they might have been a few years earlier along the Tyne and the Tees. There, when new industries offered fresh jobs, the attitude was, ‘You were shop steward last time, Tommy, you'd better do it again.'

I had been in South Shields, a few miles from Easington, in the early months of Mrs Thatcher's first government, when the ‘on yer bike' philosophy first hit the headlines. The people I was seeing were middle-aged shipbuilders, men past fifty, a Rubicon age for the unemployed, recently made redundant by the collapse of their industry. They had as much control over their fate as Bangladeshis trapped by a surging delta flood. These were hard-working, decent men, of an age to have served in the armed forces – some of them had fought in the Second World War. They had risen before dawn for thirty-five years and gone to work in cramped, noisy and dangerous conditions, which I found hard to tolerate even for thirty minutes as a mere spectator. By Tebbitite standards, they may have lacked foresight, living complacently in their council houses, taking little thought for the morrow, which, they were led to believe at successive elections, would take care of itself. They came – like miners – from a dependent tradition, working, when there was any, for large employers, who often also provided housing. (‘Six generations of my family have been “nurtured” by Murton Colliery,' one miner told me, a choice of word that summed up the umbilical relationship.) They may have been too easily led into demarcation disputes and wildcat strikes, so contributing to the decline of their industry, but when shipbuilding collapsed, it collapsed worldwide. They were washed up at fifty: they would never work again. ‘The new leisured class,' said one bitterly, ‘are people on the scrapheap. Geordies could end up like Red Indians – as extras in films about the north-east.' Their skills were redundant, they were too old to be considered for retraining, they were anchored to council houses which could not be exchanged for hovels elsewhere in the country. Proud men wept as they talked of the collapse of their lives; their derisible redundancy – men had been bought out of a lifetime's work for four or five thousand pounds – had already gone on carpets and sofas, and, yes, even colour televisions. Then on those very televisions appeared this gimlet-eyed man, with his thin slicked-down hair and his flat, south-eastern accent, telling these men to get on their bikes, as if tiny, overcrowded Britain, with its clapped-out industries, was a land of milk and honey, of limitless pioneer possibilities like the United States. ‘We were already in the gutter,' one ex-shipyard worker said to me, ‘now we are being kicked in the groin.' It wasn't elegantly stated, but it was language Norman Tebbit at least would have understood.

The northern tradition bred a collective identity, rather than an entrepreneurial, property-owning society. Property was owned by someone else. The northern working class lived on the margin, the loss of one week's pay packet was an economic disaster, which involved getting the weekend food ‘on tick' to be repaid at the rate of ten bob each Friday over the following months. I calculated in 1964, when I lived in the West Riding, that the average family's possessions in the south Yorkshire coalfield were probably not worth more than three hundred pounds, an amount that even then an upper middle-class family might have spent on a holiday. Today a miner in work is much better off than he was then – ‘we were bought out of the class struggle in 1974,' one grumbled only partly in jest, pointing to the irony that they finally achieved a decent wage just as much of the coal industry was being wound up. In pit car parks new vehicles have replaced the old bangers held together with the resin used to stop minor underground rock falls. I met smartly dressed wives, who were stylish in a way that would have been inconceivable in the pit villages of their mothers' time. The homes I visited were well-carpeted, contained comfortable modern furniture; children played on computers, and two video stores in Easington Colliery village thrived.

But the attitude of mind from those years of dependency has changed little. One couple (a sophisticated pair: he had been on a scholarship to the United States, and she, in new boots, jeans and sweater, was snappy and bright) had moved some years previously the unimaginable distance of five miles to a new house in Peterlee. They hated it, feeling isolated from the womblike community to which they were accustomed. The wife only slept there two nights a week, when she could have her sister with her, and, after eighteen months, they were once more in a colliery back-to-back, two minutes from the pit gate. A few streets away I met another miner, now retired – he had been on the NUM executive throughout the miners' strike. This man's son had trained as a chef, and, after a spell at a colliery canteen, had got a job at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda. He was back – ‘don't laugh,' said his mother – within a week, saying that everyone he met in Bermuda had been on drugs. He was now twenty-four and had been out of work for three years since that brief transatlantic adventure. The young man was ‘under the doctor' for depression. I sensed that his parents subconsciously preferred to have him at home, even if that meant being out of work, than gainfully employed an ocean away.

Ed Henderson's father was a miner, who always swore that his son would not follow him underground. Mr Henderson, now chief executive of Peterlee Development Corporation, fulfilled his father's expectations, pursuing a career in new towns and local government. Eventually the time came to move for promotion. ‘I said, “Mam, dad, I'm leaving.” “Why, you've got a good job here, why do you want to move? Can't you develop your career in the north-east?” They had three other children living almost on top of them, and I was only going to the Midlands, yet if they could have locked me in a room and not allowed me to go, they would have done so.'

Many Durham people's ancestors had been economic refugees at least once – from Ireland, from the Highland clearances, from the Cornish tin mines. Moving is linked in the subconscious to defeat at the hands of harsh landlords or uncaring capitalists: moving in the eighties would mean another defeat, inflicted by a hated prime minister. That gut reaction lies at the root of much of the opposition to Tebbitism. ‘A crying shame really, lads going down south, dividing us still further,' said the retired miner whose son had fled Bermuda so precipitously, when I told him about the scheme to send the engineering apprentices to Slough. This, naturally, is not the way the man who devised the Slough scheme, college lecturer Alan Dixon, sees it. He argued that individual young people ought not to be sacrificed for a dubious principle or local pride. He had no problem with them leaving the region in pursuit of opportunities. The only thing he regretted was that he could not offer the trainees at least the choice of a worthwhile alternative nearer home. ‘Young people do not improve with time. They are not the same after two or three years unemployed.' As for ‘on yer bike' being an answer to regional unemployment, Mr Dixon laughed. ‘It must be apparent even to a fool that that is nonsense. Jobs in other areas are not of the same magnitude as people here in need of work.' Bright kids in depressed areas, he suggested, face two particular disadvantages. Children perform less well at school than elsewhere in the country, lacking motivation because they feel there will be no jobs for them at the end. (While I was in Easington, government figures were published showing that local O level results had been considerably below the national average for the previous three years.) They also accept jobs for which they are more than adequately qualified.

The ten youths who were going to Slough were mainly from working-class backgrounds. They had been attracted by the prospect of an almost certain job at the end of their training, something for which they didn't hold out much hope in the north-east. One said that only one boy out of four hundred in his year at school had secured an apprenticeship. They had been impressed when they went south on a preliminary visit by how fast some young engineers had been promoted. They were going on a YTS scheme, but didn't feel it would exploit them as such schemes did in the north – ‘here we'd be just like a slave sweeping up,' said one. They weren't very analytical. There was work in the south, they said, because London, the capital, was there, and because, with better opportunities, southern children could become ‘doctors and so on', leaving humbler vacancies to be filled by the likes of them. They were not political: one said he had ‘nearly fallen asleep' listening to students at Peterlee College – where they do their theoretical work – discussing the government. Politicians promised a great deal, but essentially they are ‘in it for the money, trying to make themselves richer,' said one. Although most of them thought they might stay in the south, or even go abroad, they valued what they perceived to be homely northern virtues. ‘Southerners,' said one, ‘are snobbier. The only snobs we have up here came from somewhere else. In the south they keep up with the Joneses; here we say “to hell with the Joneses”.' To prepare them for the realities of living away from home, they had been instructed in such basic information as how to register with a doctor and what clothes not to mix together in the washer.

Self-reliance is also being promoted among young people on northern YTS schemes, many of whom have never been away from home. Trips are arranged to London and Brussels, and children are taken sailing. On one initiative test children were taken thirty miles from Cleveland and dropped in Newcastle, with enough money for lunch and a bus home. Some parents were outraged even by that. ‘They did what? Dropped Tommy in the middle of Newcastle. How dare they?' one parent complained. An organizer said: ‘If kids do move away, we'll get the blame. We'll be told “if you hadn't shown them, they wouldn't have gone”.' There are some new local jobs – like the four hundred at the much ballyhooed Nissan car plant just north of Easington. The Japanese ball-bearing firm, NSK, was about to double the size of its plant in Peterlee. When news of the expansion leaked out through the planning application – like many Japanese firms, NSK do not publicize their achievements, much to the despair of the Peterlee Development Corporation who want all the good news broadcast – lads came running to the company gate in the hope of being taken on. The Japanese want malleable young people straight from school, untainted by the industrial practices for which the north-east was notorious. NSK has ‘single status' – everyone has the same terms and conditions – and a single union agreement. Employees are expected to do (within reason) whatever needs doing regardless of their job titles. A maintenance engineer might be handed a paint brush. A company official told me that with his previous firm he had spent his whole time ‘fire-fighting' industrial relations problems, often aggravated by the existence of seven unions at the plant. Now he was free to make a more positive contribution to the company. After ten years of operation in Peterlee, the average age of NSK employees was only twenty-five.