When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (13 page)

Bernie Beeston is one of the people Matt Sobol had in mind when he talked of the traumatized unemployed. A universal miller by trade, he had been out of work living in north Wales for four and a half years – ‘I can tell you exactly when I was made redundant: 4.10 on Friday the 10th of September 1980. I was given twenty minutes to pack all my kit and sling my hook' – when he read an article about job opportunities in the south. He rushed to his local Job Centre, and demanded to know why he hadn't been told of the national vacancies computer, mentioned in the feature. ‘They said I was too old at thirty-eight,' he said incredulously. ‘If I hadn't seen that article, I'd still be sat there drawing my dole money now.' The computer threw up nine or ten suitable jobs, one of them at Production Machines, which had been vacant for nine months. While Mr Sobol had been scouring the country for just such a man, Mr Beeston had been eating his heart out for just such an opportunity. So much for the efficiency and coordination of the national system.

Mr Beeston was rusty after his years on the dole, but Mr Sobol stuck by him. However, his troubles continued. After a few months in a furnished room, he raised a mortgage so that his family could come south. But, after years of living on ‘Maggie's money', the Beestons plunged into debt. ‘As soon as I was working again, I was handed credit by the bucketful. It was easy to go mad on carpets, fridges, microwaves.' Those debts and, more crucially, the mortgage, broke him. The bank repossessed the house. His family had to return to north Wales and Mr Beeston to a bedsit. The story had a happy ending for the Beestons: the family found another house, this time in south Wales for £16,500 – ‘it would have been £70,000 in Slough' – and, after some months commuting from Slough at weekends, Mr Beeston landed a job near his new home. Mr Sobol had given a good man a fresh start, but was himself again left with a vacancy. Mr Beeston said: ‘The biggest bugbear in the south is housing. If anything is going to break your back it will be that. No working wage is enough. If they chop your overtime, you've had it. People who say “on yer bike” don't know the half of it.'

Tony Whitworth, an articulate man in his early thirties, with curly, prematurely greying hair, is another Sobol success story. He was working in Oldham, but was unhappy, living on a derelict estate – ‘“rough” wasn't the half of it' – in a lousy house that shifted on its foundations so the doors wouldn't close. He felt in a rut, and found management-worker relations poor. ‘Loyalty was a one-way street. If you had problems, tough luck. If they had problems, they made you bend to them. Gave me the hump.' He said that the northern companies he had worked for had been concerned only with getting the goods out of the door. Workers, consequently, had been less flexible. They downed tools on the stroke of time – ‘on the nose, straight into the washroom. They timed it to the minute. Here you might spend ten or fifteen minutes handing over to the next shift.'

The divide between ‘them' and ‘us', said Mr Whitworth, was much greater in the north – a view that would surprise the Durham miners who contended that class distinctions chiefly existed south of the Trent and that southern employers were more likely than northern ones to exploit their workers. The Oldham working class, according to Mr Whitworth, are stuck away on their big council estates. As a man in work, he was a freak where he lived. He estimated that 80 per cent of the estate were unemployed – ‘they looked at you as if you were a monster when you came home.' Vandalism, burglary, foul language on the street, even glue-sniffing were a constant menace: the Whitworths didn't allow their children out to play. One set of neighbours, he said, summed up the estate: ‘the man in his late twenties had been out of work for six or seven years. He had no intention of working; three months was the longest he had ever held a job. He sat on his backside and did nowt. He told me they had more children to get more money. They had four and one on the way when we left. They had a seventy-foot back garden. They threw their bottles out there. You'd hear them shout to the kids: “Don't play in that back garden, there's broken glass out there.” The only people who bothered with gardens were those in work.'

Before Mr Whitworth took the Slough job, he had considered emigrating to Canada, but his wife didn't want to go that far from home. ‘When I see the Mounties on television, I still get a little touch here,' he said, tapping his chest. It was for the Whitworth family that Matt Sobol pressurized a council flat out of Slough Council. Until Mr Whitworth gets to know a long-term Sloughite properly, he is cagey about this stroke of good fortune. ‘They don't take kindly. The first question is “How did you get it? My brother's been on the list six years”.' The flat was in poor condition, but Mr Whitworth has been improving it. In late 1986, he was earning, with overtime, £15,000 a year, and planning to buy the flat, which – with the discount to sitting tenants and the years of ‘credit' he had accumulated on his council home in Oldham – he would be getting for little more than half its market value. Had he owned his own house in Oldham, he could never have afforded to come south. In his case property-owning would, ironically, have been a bar to mobility.

His wife was learning word-processing skills at Slough College: a local agency told her she could have her pick of fifty jobs to suit whatever hours she wished to work. ‘Fifty! The
Oldham Chronicle
wouldn't have had fifty across every category of employment,' said Mr Whitworth. He was intending to vote Conservative: ‘85 per cent of people are in work, and a government has got to look after them. It's no good biting the hand that feeds you. Labour would be restrictive on people.' (He told me that in November 1986, and from that moment I was convinced Mrs Thatcher would win the impending 1987 election comfortably.)

We had been having this conversation in a barren roadhouse where the waitresses wore Beefeater dresses which, far from creating the cheerful effect presumably desired by the management, accentuated their sullen attitudes. When I ordered food, one waitress, with a pinched face and peroxide hair, looked furtively at her watch, clearly hoping I was too late. There was not an ounce of generosity in her whole frame. The drinkers looked morose or lonely, men who'd spent too much of their unfulfilled lives in such bars: one in an unclean, shapeless jacket and trousers was vaguely in control of a mongrel that scavenged round the jukeboxes and fruit machines for scraps. The decor was oak beams and counterfeit loaves of bread gathering dust behind the food counter. Why do we British tolerate such cheerless places? On the way back to Production Machines, in a steady downpour that washed away what colour there was on the back roads of the industrial estate, Mr Whitworth suddenly burst out: ‘Look at all these people at work.' It was a spontaneous cry from the refugee from the Oldham council estate – a man who has lived in both halves of divided Britain, revealing a fundamental happiness at being in work, having a home he was about to buy, and being amongst other citizens equally gainfully employe – that any number of depressing bars or wet days couldn't suppress.

Mr Whitworth, with his council flat, is a lucky man in the context of the ‘on yer bike' debate. Many others, just as well motivated, have been driven back north to unemployment by their failure to find anywhere to live. In late 1986, there were an estimated 250,000 unfilled jobs in the south-east, as a direct result of the housing shortage. British Rail alone had seven thousand vacancies, which makes more explicable, if no more tolerable, those persistently cancelled commuter trains. A Conservative MP initiated a job-link scheme between Cleveland in the north-east and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, but after a few months only 24 of the original 100 participants remained in the south. One who went back to the dole had found a £140 a week job as a caretaker. He left his wife and two small children in the north, lived in lodgings, and spent every evening for seven months searching for a house he could afford. His own house on Teesside was worth £15,000 and anything large enough for his family in Buckinghamshire started at £35,000. A fifty-year-old electrician persevered for a year, hoping for a council house.

Employers have tried bringing workers from Birmingham and south Wales into the Thames Valley on Sunday nights, putting them up in local digs, and shipping them home again after work on Fridays. Such schemes, born of desperation, seldom survive long, as the transported workers tire of the weekly commute, and are always looking for jobs nearer home. Other would-be migrants simply can't get jobs despite their eagerness – although there are vacancies for skilled men, there are not enough semi-skilled jobs to go round. A Maidstone garage received one thousand inquiries from the north-east for twelve vacancies after its managing director had written a letter to a Geordie paper complaining that he could not fill the jobs with Kent labour: he had to carry out the interviews at a secret location for fear of starting a minor riot. (This company solved the accommodation problem by buying property to let to its northern workers.) A Sussex hotel manager wrote a letter to a national newspaper reporting that, despite a six-month advertising campaign, she had been unable to fill ten jobs. She was instantly swamped with four hundred applications, and three young Liverpudlians hitched nearly three hundred miles in the speculative hope they could land jobs. The ten Peterlee trainees, housed in a YMCA hostel and protected by a ‘moral tutor', were cosseted by sponsors who naturally wished the experiment to succeed. The lone job-seeker must do without such organized support. Damien Wolmar, a Slough careers officer, suggested there should be tuition in the schools' careers programme on coping on one's own. ‘On yer bike' assumes all sorts of skills to survive away from family and community which few teenagers have.

Despite the transatlantic parallels favoured by Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues, the British context is totally different from the American. While I was reporting from Washington DC in the early eighties, a devastating recession swept the north-eastern ‘rust belt' in the United States. Ohio steelworks shut down, throwing up to ten thousand out of work in one blow; redundancy figures of an order of which we have, fortunately, no experience. Most of those who lost their jobs faced ruin unless they rapidly shifted for themselves: their unemployment pay expired after six months, welfare payments only started when they were virtually destitute. So they packed their belongings into camper vans and headed south and west in the tracks of generations of pioneers. Often they stopped at the first town that offered a job. The smart ones spotted a need in their new communities and started catering for it: soon they might be employing one or two others. In four years, as six million jobs were wiped out by recession, nine million new ones were created. It was a staggering achievement, which on a smaller scale we have managed in the past. The Scottish ‘Mac' or ‘Mc' is the most common prefix in the London telephone directory; tens of thousands of northerners and Welsh came to the south-east and the Midlands between the wars. Midlands towns like Coventry grew on labour from elsewhere. But such migrations will never again be emulated in our cramped and cold islands: slashing the dole, American-style, would simply convert the unfortunate into the destitute. Even in the States, as times began to get harder in ‘sunbelt' states like Texas, there were limits to opportunity and tolerance: local communities attacked camper-van migrants, much as their grandfathers had turned on the Okies who struggled west from the dust bowl of the Great Depression years.

In Britain it is easier for the middle than for the working classes to migrate. Their removal is often subsidized by employers, and they are more likely to have worthwhile property to sell. But even they end up with gigantic mortgages and living in houses far inferior to the ones they left. A Newcastle academic, occupying a spacious home, laughed when he told me how he invariably had to sleep on a sofa when visiting colleagues who had taken posts in the south. It was rare for them to afford homes large enough to have spare rooms. Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, wrote in late 1986 that the rise in housing values in the south-east encouraged not the enterprise culture, but ‘parasitism'. ‘There is something very wrong with a country that rewards people lavishly for doing literally nothing but sit in a property, while depriving them of almost two thirds of their income when they start to do something useful.' He concluded: ‘If the discrepancy in house prices grows, there really will be two nations in this country. The northern unemployed will continue to include skilled, middle-class people who could easily find a market for their abilities in the south, but who would not have the capital to set up house there … the gap between London and Liverpool could all too easily resemble that between Milan and Naples in the old days.'

The gap is surely already that wide, which should be sobering news for people on both sides of the divide. Those who smugly boast of the continuously rising value of their London homes forget that it is a worthless value unless they intend to make themselves homeless by selling and blowing the cash on holidays; that if they were to move north, they could never break back into the south-eastern property market; and that one day their children will need homes, which – on beginners' salaries – they will no more be able to afford than will migrating northerners. When small houses in a working-class town like Slough cost what they do, the value of money has been distorted to a point that threatens economic stability. Professor Stone calculated that in two years a man could make more profit on buying and selling a large middle-class house in Oxfordshire than a doctor could earn in eight years.

A Slough training officer told me that he had come south from Manchester because he felt that he owed it to his children to launch them on the world in an economically buoyant environment. He said: ‘I was comfortable: I could have stayed where I was. But friends said, “You've had your go. Your son deserves his now.” He's nineteen, and the comparison with opportunities in the north is so great that I sometimes feel it is immoral. He thinks he can change his job at any time. In many ways there are too many opportunities.' This man's mortgage payments had rocketed from £27 a month to over £300, and he was punch-drunk at the altered value of money, laughing slightly manically at the figures. Like several recent arrivals to the south-east, he said he was overwhelmed by the pace of life. He had just been back north to visit friends and found the gentle tempo unnerving. ‘We were all sat down and relaxing, and kept on talking. At six o'clock my friend said we'd better get changed because we were having a party. We sat a whole day, and didn't do anything.' When his family came south, his wife had had to change her car for a more powerful one, so that she could break into rush-hour traffic at the bottom of their road.
That
appeared to be the ultimate distinction between north and south: if even the cars have to be slicker and faster, there must be two Britains!