When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (11 page)

One dark afternoon, when the wind chased clouds of every shade of grey across what seemed to a city dweller an impossibly large sky, I drove to Bishop Auckland. The cold had cleared the streets, and I felt I was leaving the modern world as I turned under the clock tower and through the Gothic arch into the grounds of the castle, official home of the Bishop of Durham. The Rt Revd David Jenkins is affectionately known in his diocese as ‘Bishop David', and is much approved of by socialists like John Cummings, leader of Easington district council. He is less affectionately known and less approved of elsewhere for his supposed heresies on the literal truth of the New Testament, and his identification with the Labour cause. Bishop David's mobile face beneath a shock of white hair might have been created for ‘Spitting Image': his hands, as he emphasized points from within a deep armchair in his study, were seldom still. He has, said a vicar's wife later, the ‘air of a precocious schoolboy'.

Why, he wondered aloud, had the nation again become obsessed with the north-south divide? After all, it had long been with us, Disraeli and all that, and in hardship terms the people of Sunderland and Jarrow experienced nothing today like the deprivations of the twenties and thirties. (Although he added the caution that further cuts in supplementary benefits might yet reduce the poor to the dire straits of the past.) Was the renewed fascination, he suggested, because – despite the brave new world apparently emerging from the ‘Big Bang' in the City of London – the more probable future for most of us lay here in the north where the post-industrial age had already dawned? Two Swiss television teams had recently been in the region pursuing just this thesis. It seemed unlikely to the bishop that money could perpetually breed money in the way it appeared to in the City of London. In this the bishop is in tune with his flock: an Easington miner said: ‘We can't all live on services like tourism, like those buggers in Spain.' The bishop himself had just heard of what he considered the ultimate unproductive service industry – a company set up in London to deliver takeaway food from restaurants to diners too idle to go themselves. Sooner rather than later we were all going to be forced to tighten our belts, said the bishop. The sort of economic policies thrust on the country – and he cited deregulated buses – were ‘a sick or nasty joke up here'. Seen from the midst of a shattered region, the remedies of neither Militants nor monetarists held much appeal. Politics, he said, had become self-indulgent – moral and theoretical: the tests ahead, he hoped, would return them to the pragmatic and prudential. In the nineteenth century, belief in progress was tempered by a realization that it would take time and require hard work. Now both extremes promise instant solutions. When people with whom we disagree fail, we feel we are entitled to hate them. He saw ahead a ‘leaner, more communal Britain. The north is leading the way.' In the meantime he fears that the widening gap between the haves and have-nots may cause violence and unrest.

John Cummings said the region had suffered a stroke rather than a heart attack – just as potentially fatal, but less dramatic, and therefore easier to ignore. Miners I talked with spoke of a feeling that they were close to ‘the last kick of the match.' These men saw the bishop's class war coming, with the police being equipped for the front line. ‘There's a boom now, but when the spending stops, what then? The government's answer is to have a highly trained, paramilitary police force,' said one miner. ‘All we want is a decent job, a decent standard of living, a decent education for our children and a holiday once a year.' Those modest requirements are already out of the reach of many British people. When you work in hard and dangerous conditions, it is difficult to accept that your activity might not be economic. I had recently visited a mine in South Africa where the coal is scooped out by the bulldozer load, with no one going underground. Each man – black and white – was something like sixty times as productive as his British counterpart. The manager told me – with only slight exaggeration – that they could wrap each lump in gold foil and still deliver coal to the British market more cheaply than it can be produced by British miners. We live in a global economy – as the people who once made cars and television sets in this country know to their cost. Britain still produces industrial cannon fodder rather than the technicians needed for the international trade war which is now fought from computer terminals.

Before I left Easington I drove to Shotton. In 1933 this small mining village shocked J.B. Priestley more than all the other horrors and poverties of the industrial north. He described it as a village beneath ‘an active volcano'. ‘The atmosphere,' he wrote, ‘was thickened with ashes and sulphuric acid; like that of Pompeii, as we are told, on the eve of its destruction ... the whole village and everybody in it was buried in this thick reek.' Priestley hastened away, wishing that the volcano would ‘always be there, not as a smoking “tip”, but as a monument to remind happier and healthier men of England's old industrial greatness and the brave days of Queen Victoria'.

I don't know whether Priestley returned before he died in 1984, but his monument is now a gentle grassy hill, grazed by sheep. A parachute club, made homeless when Nissan took its previous site for its Sunderland factory, is to create a small airfield on what was once its summit. The village air is clear enough today, and many of the poor houses Priestley saw have been pulled down. There remain some back-to-backs, with cobbled streets, but the environment is now no worse than rather drab. A village store sells everything from gaudy wreaths to clothes, and the assembly hall is boarded up. I suspect there was a great deal more village activity and community life in the days of the volcano. The fire and the sulphur have been replaced by a bleakness; and a visitor still leaves thanking God that he lives elsewhere. Unlike the unfortunate people of the inner cities, whose riots are clear-enough statements of utter frustration, the human survivors of the industrial north-east have no voice. The population of Easington District has declined by fourteen thousand in the past twenty-five years: industrial workers are no longer needed for the battle, and, like old soldiers when the war is over, they are fading away.

Charlie led the way across the frosted ground, limping at a fast gait. His feet slipped erratically inside his battered, oversized sneakers. He wore a soiled dark blue overcoat and on his head a filthy trilby. He was tall and thin and angular, and his shoulders were slightly stooped: from behind, under the occasional street light, he looked like an animated scarecrow, escaped from the Berkshire fields. His companions were equally bizarre to the eye. One, Nigel, was arrayed in an old mac, flapping jeans and heavy boots, his dirty face punctured with small scars. We crossed the railway footbridge above Newbury station, an echoing metal structure, refrigerated by a cold wind slicing through smashed window panes. ‘I've slept here,' said Nigel, ‘a railwayman woke me in the morning, gave me 10p for a cup of coffee and told me to move.' It was a matter-of-fact statement, without rancour.

Late commuters travelling the fifty miles from London pulled their collars up and moved aside. The ice was already thick on the windscreens of the few cars left in the station car park. ‘Hello, darling,' Charlie shouted to a lone policewoman in a small panda car. She ignored him. Past the still-lit council offices, round a corner and through a hole in a high wire fence that was just the size of a man bent low. Sharp right into the back of an abandoned do-it-yourself shop, where once timber, steel and glass were stored for improving the homes of high-tech yuppies who have colonized the Thames Valley. A faint light shone through the shop window. We stopped in what once must have been an office: abandoned files and papers strewed the floor. ‘This is where we sleep,' said Charlie defiantly. One could just see some filthy bedding. Something stirred heavily upstairs – cats? winos? Charlie shrugged.

‘It's warmer than you might think,' I said encouragingly. ‘Not at 2.00 a.m.,' replied Charlie, ‘it's fucking cold then.' ‘I can imagine.' ‘No you can't,' he said fiercely. ‘You can't start to imagine that cold unless you've tried to sleep in it.' He was right, of course I couldn't, heading back eventually to a centrally heated home. We were in another world, yet only a few yards from estate agents, restaurants, boutiques, as removed from comfortable society as if we had been in Fagin's kitchen. Charlie and his companions were like rats: by day an eyesore that affronted decent citizens as they scavenged and begged and got drunk in public. By night invisible in holes. When I left them, a young, well-dressed couple, hand-in-hand, on their way for a night out, looked strangely out of place: visiting that squat, and meeting those poor, bare people had worked a subtle change on reality.

Four and a half years ago, when he was nineteen, Charlie had ‘got on his bike', headed south from Merseyside, where his parents had been destitute and his several siblings jobless. The only work he had ever had was on Youth Opportunity Projects. He had not had Dick Whittington expectations, and he found a job, as a care assistant to handicapped people at Aldermaston – £127 a month plus food and lodging. ‘I thought I'd make a go of it,' he said. It lasted sixteen months. That gone, for a while he had a bedsit in Reading.

Had he worked since? He drew in his breath. ‘Not since '84, not since then. No,' he said. The slide had been rapid. Once he had lost his bedsit, he could no longer present himself in respectable enough clothes to expect the most menial of jobs. Why didn't he go back to Liverpool? ‘I've made my mates down here, like. There's nothing up there for me.' The future? ‘For me?' he stroked the fluff on his chin, surprised that anyone might think he had one.

Nigel, who had been brought up in Stafford, walked out on his parents because they were always arguing. Like Charlie, he was to be twenty-four a few days later. He had never worked. What would he like to do? ‘Work in a record shop.' The way he is now, it would make as much sense to wish to be a brain surgeon. He reflected: ‘I hope to get a bedsit in the end. I can't go on living like this for the rest of my life.'

The contrast between their destitute lives and their Thames Valley neighbours' affluence did not escape them. Everything Charlie owned, he wore. A rag merchant would have burned his clothes. ‘Most people here have got a lot of money, so they have the attitude we should dress properly. We're isolated because we're out of work and everyone else's in it – leading normal lives, with cars, houses and families,' said Charlie.

I met Charlie, Nigel and their companion, a local man, in Newbury in the Royal County of Berkshire. An hour later, in Reading, in an overnight refuge for homeless men, an unemployed man called Martin told me how he had boarded a bus in Peterlee, Durham, at midnight on Sunday. He had had five pounds in his pocket, and in his head an idea from mates who had gone south that there would be building work in Reading. Martin was lucky: the refuge in a castellated former army barracks – known as ‘The Keep', and, in the frozen mist, the perfect backdrop to a Gothic horror film – had had to turn several men away into the inhospitable night. It is only allowed to take thirteen.

Like Charlie and Nigel, Martin was twenty-three and the only work he had had since school was also on government schemes. He had never had a proper job, only occasional ‘fiddle work' on the black economy. His mother had said: ‘What are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life sitting waiting for the dole cheque to come through the post?' So here he was, respectably dressed in blue windcheater, check trousers and light grey loafers, but penniless, hope oozing out of him like a falling tide. In the outer room, his twelve companions for the night, having finished their soup, watched television. Most, like Martin, were tidily dressed: the ‘tramp' types kept to the back. Three days' searching by Martin had failed to turn up either his mates or work. Three consecutive nights is the limit in The Keep. If his luck hadn't changed by the morrow, when he was hoping to find a bedsit and get it financed by the DHSS, he said he would hitch home, and perhaps try again in the spring or summer, when there might be seaside work. There was no point looking for work if you were sleeping rough.

Martin, Nigel and Charlie were the ultimate victims of the accelerating unemployment gap between north and south. Their varying plights served as bleak and unhappy human evidence that more people than we may care to consider have fallen off the last rung of the ladder. Their problems were not purely geographic: they were none of them stupid, but they were uneducated, without skills and poorly motivated. As such they would probably have been unemployed even if they had been born in the affluent Thames Valley. The two Englands are increasingly divided between those who have a relevant skill for the late twentieth century, and those with a broad back, a pair of hands and a limited degree of commitment. But in coming from the north, the young men suffered further disadvantages, which, in at least two of their cases, had nearly crushed them. Their tragedy is our tragedy. As they rot on the margins of society, Britain's national capacity to compete is being eroded by a shortage of skills, and by a critically undereducated population. But, even if Charlie and his companions had had marketable talents, their chances of establishing themselves in the south would have been very remote. The odds are overwhelmingly stacked against a northern working man moving south, however skilled, and however strong his motivation. If he has a council home, with whom can he exchange it? If he owns a house, how can he sell it for anything like the value of a home in the south?

Before I met Charlie and Nigel, I had spent two weeks in Slough, looking at the community and economy to which the ten Peterlee YTS trainees were to come for their engineering apprenticeships. It had been dark for an hour as I stood on my first evening on Buckingham Avenue in the heart of the Slough industrial estate. Lights shone from the office windows, and from the factories came the sound of men at work. Lathes were turning; computer terminals were flickering busily; forklift trucks were carrying finished goods to waiting lorries; other lorries were delivering steel sheeting; machines, of impossible complexity to the lay eye, were turning out parts to make other machines. In the reception areas of mostly small and medium-sized firms, there was a regular ebb and flow of visitors – buyers, salesmen, engineers. In one, a grey-suited, bespectacled team of Chinese – themselves, in their earnest similarity, the human embodiment of component parts – were checking in with elaborate courtesy, having just arrived for training on machinery their company was to import. A production engineer, talking specifications with a visitor, was paged twice in three minutes. Outside on the street, men sat in Ford Escorts and BMWs talking on car phones.

The buzz of a highly charged atmosphere was apparent everywhere. This is how it had once been in Coventry, on Merseyside, along the banks of the Tyne. Making things can be just as exciting as making money. Hours later, long after conventional going home time, lights were still burning that December night in many of these factories, as workers on shifts or overtime bent to their machines to meet deadlines. Those who went home promptly joined a line of cars that took thirty minutes to edge its way one mile from the industrial estate to the M4. If anyone doubts that some people at least are gainfully employed in Britain, let him come to Slough. It is the cockpit of the Thames Valley, and therefore of modern industrial England, itself unfashionable and disregarded – as travellers on the M4 strain to catch a glimpse of Windsor Castle in the opposite direction – but a town at work in a manner that is only a memory across vast tracts of Britain.

I had just left the down-to-earth production manager of a typical Slough firm, which employed 140 people – sixty to seventy of them on manual production jobs. The company was between ten and fifteen people below strength, despite conducting recruiting drives across the country, and, if they could have found them, would have employed next morning fabricators, electricians, machinists, designers and people to quote prices. The labour shortage was so acute that they took unsatisfactory, highly priced agency workers by the week, who travelled up to sixty miles daily.

‘It is iniquitous,' said the boss, ‘people are crying out for work, and we can't get any staff here. Something is wrong entirely.' That something is, of course, housing. It was a theme I was to return to in every conversation I had in Slough. In a town of drear estates and uninspiring architecture, the top floor of a pebble-dash, thirties terraced house, ‘converted' into a maisonette – and described as a ‘starter home' by the estate agents who proliferate in this climate like frogs in a pond – commands, at £45,000, a substantially higher price than a four-bedroomed detached house in the industrial north. Even presuming that a northern working man owns a marketable home, he cannot – on the most lavish or slavish of overtime – bridge that gap. In late 1986 the average price of a semi-detached house in Greater London was £76,215, while in Yorkshire and Humberside a similar house was priced at £26,317; the average flat in Greater London fetched £52,720, and in Yorkshire it was priced at £16,699. Slough, I was told by the relative of one valuer, has the worst pound-for-pound bricks and mortar values in Britain, and I could well believe it.

When the production manager goes north on a recruiting drive, he takes with him Slough newspapers to show not only the property prices, but also that there is both plenty of employment to which the worker can switch if the first job proves unsatisfactory, and that there is stacks of part-time office work for women. But such marginal blandishments are seldom sufficient for people who are not only faced with gigantic mortgages, but also with the emotional shock of leaving the close-knit support of their home towns. ‘It may take three to five years for a northerner to get back on his feet,' said the manager; a daunting prospect even for desperate, long-term unemployed who sincerely want to get a job. It helps, naturally, if the northern job-seeker does not have children: with few exceptions, the people I did meet who had transplanted themselves were childless. Several said they were ‘fortunate' to be so, a sad and amazing assertion forty years after the foundation of the welfare state, and a generation after we were told that we had never had it so good.

I asked the manager if he had thought of moving his firm north. Yes, he said, but by so doing they would lose their most highly skilled people, some of whom reached their full value to the company only after three or four years of employment. Such people could easily find alternative work in Slough. He estimated that only half a dozen of his present workers would be prepared to make such a move. The dilemma, as he put it, was that if the firm stayed it couldn't get sufficient basic workers; if it moved, it lost essential staff. (To mitigate the labour shortage, he was ‘de-skilling' jobs, using computers to enable unskilled men to carry out skilled functions.)

He bore also a prejudice, which I was to find to be common in Slough, against northern working practices. He had seen them firsthand, when, as a young engineer, he travelled the region maintaining machinery. ‘Our northern cousins,' he said, ‘don't do themselves any favours.' He recalled spending two days on a job he estimated should have taken an hour and a half because a different ‘craftsman' was required at each stage to perform such sophisticated tasks as unplugging the electrical supply. He spoke of ‘torrid' times, adding, ‘I wouldn't relish putting a manufacturing plant into one of those areas.' His company no longer recognizes trade unions, ending its agreement after its workers had been forced into a national strike, although the firm was already paying more than the amount for which the strike was called. A partial remedy to the critical labour imbalance, he said, was for the government to spend some of the money now going in dole on resettling skilled men where they are needed – say £20,000 a man – before their skills waste away or changes to their industry make them redundant.