When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (25 page)

They had developed the units because, with high rates, the empty parts of the mill were proving to be ‘very expensive fresh air'. What they were doing, he said, was nothing new: one tended to think of mills as having belonged to one person and having housed one business throughout their productive lives. However, even in the 1890s mill owners had split up big factories, letting out separate floors to emergent entrepreneurs, so regenerating the local economy. The problem I encountered when I last visited was that Mr Sugden's tenants were bursting at the seams – most of them having far exceeded expectations of how fast they would develop.

A few hundred yards from the mill, back under the railway viaduct that carries the main King's Cross line north, and past the Jaguar showrooms where cars are on sale for £26,800, two young men who had founded a glass-fibre moulding business in hutted premises were also running out of space and about to move. Only fifteen months earlier, when I first met them, they had still been converting the building, putting in a lavatory and a small office. Then Graham Wood and Graham Durant had both been twenty-eight. They had met at weekends to do odd jobs in their garages. They discovered that the glass-fibre wheel arches they bought were ‘like tissue paper', and they knew they could do better. Mr Durant already ran a picture-framing business, and Mr Wood was an unemployed car mechanic. They had scraped together what grants they could find, and had started to make cash desks for the Gas Board. They were working up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and had two youths to help them. What, I had asked them then, motivated them? Mr Wood, seemingly never out of his filthy overall coat and stained jeans, said: ‘I just don't want to go into work every day, and retire at sixty-five with a couple of hundred quid in the bank, and think “that's my life over.” When you are skilled and hardworking, yet have experienced unemployment, an iron enters the soul. Whatever the odds, it is better to pilot your own craft.'

When I returned, Mr Durant had given up the picture-framing shop, Mr Wood had graduated to a stained bomber-jacket, and they had far exceeded their aspirations. Their company, Durwood, employed eight people, and they were about to leave premises they had thought would last them at least five years. The gas showroom business had expanded, they were working with a national shop-fitter, they had a contract to supply cladding to hide flaking, stained concrete on high-rise flats and sixties offices. Pet ideas, like developing a glass-fibre tailgate for Range Rovers, had had to be put on one side. Mr Wood had two gripes. The first was that, although there was plenty of support for starting a new business, there was very little once you were up and running. By employing as many as they had, they had demonstrated a good return on the initial faith placed in them. ‘All we needed was a little bit more help on the side. But our success meant that we were not entitled to it. We could have expanded yet further, and employed more people. When you get started, you get great encouragement, a good kick in the backside. Then you're left in the world.'

His second complaint was more fundamental. It was hard, he said, to find willing and competent staff. ‘We want decent young lads with some bottle, interested in learning. Attitudes have really baffled me. They don't seem career-minded. You teach them something, and four hours later it's forgotten. They don't think further than tomorrow or the pub at the weekend.' He accused the Youth Training Scheme of not discriminating enough before sending young people to them. The two Grahams wanted to give the school-leavers a proper training, but had had a series of poorly motivated youths. Mr Wood regularly asked one who stood stock-still in a corner most of the day: ‘Are you on strike! He'd say “mebbe I am.” The rest of the time he spent washing his hands.'

The day I visited Durwood, the Association of British Chambers of Commerce reported that the lack of skilled labour in Yorkshire and Humberside was inhibiting companies' expansion plans. Problems to which the south-east had become accustomed were spreading north. Britain's lack of training looked likely to ambush any recovery. Two thirds of all Americans have a skills qualification when they look for their first job (there are also 1.3 million graduates each year): only forty thousand British school-leavers a year get the equivalent of an apprenticeship. The British employment crisis will increasingly be a mismatch between the skills available and the work that the modern world demands. The inadequacies of our hierarchical, rationed education system will haunt us.

That same day
Today
published a poll that showed that the majority of Britons – especially the better-off – would prefer surplus government money to be spent on improving such things as education and the Health Service rather than ‘given away' in tax cuts. The paper called it an ‘astonishing' finding, but it was not so to me: most of the business people with whom I had been talking were distinctly ‘wet' on the issue of public spending. Four directors of Kearns-Richards, with whom I had lunch, had agreed that some people ‘do need looking after', and that no one they knew at any income level objected to public spending, so long as it was going to benefit people and not swell the ranks of bureaucrats. One had broken out vehemently: ‘It's terrible that young people can't get jobs, the single worst thing that I can think of. Soul-destroying, and creating the two nations of the future.'

Rodney Walker, whom I had met on my first Wakefield visit, was the epitome of the self-made man, Rolls-Royce and all. After being thrown out of work in his twenties, he had vowed ‘to put myself as quickly as possible into a position where I would never be vulnerable again.' Fifteen years later he ran a highly successful business, and had a finger in every pie in town from the local radio station to trying to save Wakefield Trinity rugby league side from bankruptcy. He was exhilarated by American dynamism. After a two-week visit there, he found it ‘takes me a little time to settle back into the much slower pace of the UK.' He had recently flown to Hong Kong for a two-hour meeting, winning a contract that otherwise would have gone elsewhere. But he was deeply angered by what he saw as the squandering of North Sea oil, and wondered why it had not been spent on the national infrastructure. ‘What the hell are we going to do when it runs out?' he asked. The gloomy answer he provided himself was that the unemployed may ‘one day turn on us and destroy us all.' We had, he said, perhaps been purged enough by strong Thatcherite medicine.

Before I left Wakefield, I drove out to visit two young men, Ian Conniff and Steve Chapman, whom I had first met fifteen months earlier. They had been on the verge of going down the pit after nearly two years on the dole, and their families were delighted. It meant an end to the mooching, the despair, the boredom, the inevitable rows at home, the long, time-killing walks across the rolling Yorkshire hills. Their drab village, clustered about the pithead, was only four miles from Wakefield, but it might have been another planet. I asked one woman whether young people from the village ever went to work in Wakefield. She looked at me suspiciously for an instant. ‘Not from here, they wouldn't,' she said. Any alternative to the pit was unthinkable. The collieries, said Ian's father, a short, broad-shouldered pit deputy, were built for the people. No one had a right to take them away. His mother had added: ‘Ian wouldn't settle if he were to move away from home.' Steve's father, a union official, said: ‘I've been down that pit twenty-nine years. It's my pit. I wouldn't move if it closed tomorrow.' The heritage for which Arthur Scargill had gone to war was still intact for two families at least. Neither family had any regrets about the boys going underground. ‘We're not bothered so long as they're working,' said Ian's mother, and Ian showed me a tankard he (and all 1,100 miners) had been presented with to mark a colliery triumph in mining one million tonnes in a year. Theirs was a ‘long-life' pit, but the coal would probably run out when they were still relatively young men. Had they, I wondered, got it in them to become John Philpotts? No one was thinking beyond the weekend.

Moss Moor and Rishworth Moor high on the Pennines on either side of the M62 were grey-green in the misty February light, and the sparse woods black and cold. Huddersfield, Rochdale, Oldham – the names on the signs were redolent of British industrial history – slipped by, deep in their valleys. The sharp corners of the dark red, rectangular mills rose above the still-terraced streets, and, although there was no smoke from the tall, dark chimneys, a heavy smog lay across the towns. Clogs and cobbles and ‘trooble at t'mill', a slice of the past locked within the hills and largely forgotten: up on the motorway the heavy traffic sped between the white and red rose counties, past the reservoirs and the tall television transmission masts, a symbol of economic activity from another world. I drove round the margins of Manchester on what was supposed to be a motorway, single file at jogging pace between the road works, out beyond the south-western suburbs and the comfortable villas of the commuting classes.

Here there was another industrial landscape, more modern, with its gas holders, bulky power station building, cooling towers, complicated, twisting chemical plant, waste burning into the sky from a perpetual flame – a memorial, perhaps, to the unknown industrial worker. Incongruous cows chomped moodily at the crew-cut grass. Alongside the infant River Mersey, making its way to the Manchester ship canal, planners had dumped a Manchester overspill estate, an unlovely place of poverty, unemployment and deferred hope. A wayside pulpit proclaimed: ‘AIDS PROBLEM: The wicked are snared in the work of their own hands. – Psalm 9.' An ambulance pulled up beyond a litter-filled front garden, and an old woman was wheeled out, her feet swathed in bandages. The ramp was retracted, and the ambulance departed, taking the woman to the highlight of her existence – a day at the general hospital. Where I was going was a place of genuine hope, a beacon to enterprise, knowledge, talent, hard work, skill and guts. But, because it was such a place, it had nothing but two labouring jobs to offer the Manchester overspillers.

The Carrington Business Park began as an act of conscience, financed by Shell in expiation for massive redundancies from their once-thriving six-hundred-acre chemical processing plant. A seventeen-acre corner of it, formerly the site of Shell's chemical research operation, had been set aside and entrusted to Job Creation Ltd, whose brief was to restore what life they could – like landscape gardeners on a bomb site – to the derelict plant. Job Creation Ltd, an off-shoot from pioneering efforts by British Steel, was by then one of three hundred British companies – recession doctors – making their living out of economic regeneration. It had operations in fourteen countries. By being first into mass unemployment, the British had learned something of value to the rest of the world. The strategy was to attract small, up-market, emerging businesses at the first stage of expansion, which needed office space or studio workshops. In the larger buildings there was some fabrication; a ‘craft centre' was planned for activities like toy-making and picture framing, and a car park was to be used for off-airport parking for Manchester Airport: but old-fashioned metal-bashing activities – like car-breaking – were strictly deterred.

Carrington offered a package – secretarial services, telex, ‘faxing', heating, lighting, and the use of a coffee shop, to which clients and customers could be invited. When I was there, about a year after its launch, the existing space was occupied by computer firms, designers, a dressmaker, cabinet-makers, sign-makers, a dental ceramics engineer, a wine merchant, redeployment consultants, stationery suppliers and other similar businesses, a total of thirty-nine companies. The number of their employees had grown from seventy-two to 108 in three months, and the expectation was that eventually that first corner of the site would house four hundred workers, nearly as many as there had been in the days of Shell research.

The project manager, David O'Brien, was in his fifties with grey, bushy hair, and a monocle round his neck. He had been born firmly into the comfortable classes – his father was the managing director of an engineering firm; he was educated at Sedbergh public school and Cambridge – and his early professional life was conventional, the colonial service and Shell industrial relations. But he had been called on to diversify the ailing family business, and for some years was a highly successful exporting entrepreneur, equipping hospitals in the Middle East and Africa – he ‘built' the Bahrain military hospital. But the family firm crashed, and his company went down in the ruins, leaving him with one foot still in the traditional world of his upbringing – he is a governor of Sedbergh – and one in the more hazardous, invigorating world of enterprise. He has known hard times – after the family firm had been closed, his wife, a nurse, took patients into their home to pay the bills – and his consequent scorn for bureaucratic middle-managers, nestling in the ‘corporate womb', multiplying their empires, playing everything by the book, was total.

‘Managers,' he said, ‘are not risk-takers: they're keepers of the park.' That is a crucial distinction that our naturally conservative society misunderstands. The respectable way to be in business in Britain is to be a rising executive with a blue-chip company: to risk, to start from nothing is still to be a ‘cowboy'. As a governor at an upper middle-class school, Mr O'Brien saw that the parents' aspirations for their sons to have security and status – as lawyers, as doctors, as ICI management trainees – were in conflict with both the country's economic need and often the boys' own instincts. It is the parents and teachers, not the boys, who need exhorting towards enterprise and risk-taking, according to Mr O'Brien.

Since many of those who control capital – like bankers – are ‘respectable' and unenterprising, they curtail and frustrate the risk-takers, driving men like Brian Bottomley and Frank Smith to the paroxysms of anger I had encountered. Unable to raise capital, emerging entrepreneurs often succumb to takeovers. The larger firm imposes its bureaucratic straitjacket, creativity is suppressed, and the sort of inventive businessmen who ought to be the engine of our economy retreat to pilot floating gin palaces round Channel Island ports. The most valuable time for an entrepreneur, suggested Mr O'Brien, is the very beginning of his enterprise, when he has nothing to defend. As soon as he has structures in place, he closes his ears to criticism.