When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (34 page)

His parents moved to Skem when Frank was seven, and the town was still ‘Wilsonia': ‘There was no vandalism. We had a three-bedroomed house, with a car port and a back garden, which was unheard of. There was a brand-new, excellent primary school.' However, his father, who had been ‘on the buses', had patchy work experience, moving once to Devon, and once back to Liverpool. Eventually, tired of the vagaries and emotional strain of the Skem labour market – ‘wherever he took a job, there was always talk of redundancies' – he left for good for Milton Keynes. He could not believe the dramatically better economic environment he found there: for the first time in his life he had a choice of jobs and could change when he wanted to. He has had, said Frank, ‘four or five jobs through personal choice. In Skem you grab and hold on to a job.'

Frank spent eighteen months writing plays, and had two produced. He was married at nineteen, and realized there was more to life than the dole. A BBC series – ‘The Boys from the Blackstuff' by Alan Bleasdale – influenced him enormously. ‘They were real; said more in five plays than the Labour Party has said in five years.' Despite that, he joined the Labour Party, and took a job as a community worker in a Skem secondary school. ‘What can you say about the youth of Skem? They have absolutely no hope. Apathy in schools is unbelievable: it's bred into the town to such a degree that you fear for the future. Kids see no incentive. They argue “What's the use of working? Towards YTS? That's slave labour, and after twelve months they kick you out.” It sets in as early as the first and second years.' Later I noticed a pamphlet displayed in the Skem public library: ‘
LEAVING SCHOOL
? A Guide to Social Security.' A Labour councillor told me that teachers meet what amounts to a physical barrier when they try to persuade children that they must have qualifications for the distant day when things will pick up.

Mr McKenna's strategy in Skem was to build residents' groups, make his presence felt through campaigns – one residents' association had just succeeded in getting gas connected to their estate, and, with central heating, at last had a hope of drying the damp from their houses. He sought eventually a federation of residents' groups, with whom the council could negotiate. ‘People have been passive too long. Councillors seems to think that the people aren't interested. They are, but they need a way to get involved.' One of his main problems, he said, was building up the confidence of the unemployed. Mr McKenna, a tall, thin young man with a sharp, birdlike face, had the sardonic Scouser sense of humour. The local bus service had long been atrocious, he said, but was worse since deregulation. ‘Profiteers go where the profits are, and basically there are no great profits in Skem. If you could work out a route that went straight to the dole and back, you'd make a fortune.'

Belonging to Skem, he said, was bad news outside the town. People at conferences would say ‘you poor bugger.' Local kids identified with Liverpool. Teenagers were turned away from Wigan discos when they gave a Skem address. ‘Go for a job interview, and God help you if you are from Skem,' I was told. Mr Nolan, the plumber, was going to use an ‘Ormskirk' telephone number for his heating business, rather than a ‘Skelmersdale' one – the two towns have the same code – because people ‘class Skem as cowboys.' The residents of Ashurst, the unvandalized estate, once tried to change their postal address. And I was told that the director of finance for the West Lancashire district council, a man charged with handling millions of pounds of public money, had difficulty getting his cheques accepted because his house – although outside the new town – had a Skelmersdale postal address. Twenty years on, the Skemmers still bitterly resented the Scousers. A third-generation local GP told his retirement party: ‘The main change has been the building of Skelmersdale new town, which has effectively ruined the area. I think it is a case of bad planning. It has brought with it a considerable number of undesirables, and spoilt the Lancashire nature of the area.' He was talking about his own patients.

Crime is a major problem. Burglary victims do not in the main live in middle-class suburbs but in places like Skelmersdale, where there were burglar alarms on the £10,000 homes of the unemployed. The police were not greatly respected. Mr McKenna had recently issued a press release reporting on a residents' meeting, which had been told that ‘between 8.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. there were only four policemen on beat patrol throughout the town'. Residents reported that police cars drove off when stoned by youths, and that officers responding to a complaint did nothing when their own car was violently rocked by the troublemakers. ‘What astonished one most was that none of the residents was at all surprised by these revelations. All the residents' associations seem disillusioned with the town's police force', Mr McKenna wrote.

A young man, who had once considered enrolling as a special constable, was walking home in the early hours of the morning a few hours after the birth of his first child. He had drunk lager with friends – less than a can each, he said – and in his hand he carried a plastic bag containing disposable nappies. He was two hundred yards from his front door, when a police van screeched (‘American-movie style') to a halt beside him. He claimed he was pushed around – he felt in an effort to provoke him – and finally thrown in the van, charged with being drunk and disorderly, and locked in a cell. He was convicted – his word against three policemen's – and has lost much of his former faith in the police.

A close observer of the town's police said: ‘The police have given up on Skem, which festers like a bad boil – particularly vandalism. The force is under strength, and the easy way out is to drive around in a panda. People want to bring back the bobby on the beat: fifty yards into one of the housing estates is a difficult environment for the police. There is cynicism on both sides. The police have limited faith in the people of Skem as honest British citizens: they are conditioned to believe that vandalism and hatred of the police are the norm. The people then don't have much faith in the police.' While I was there, a senior policeman issued a statement to the local paper, complaining that the force received very little public cooperation. ‘On many occasions people are witnesses to offences, but for one reason or another seem very loath to give information to the police. We have been told by people that they know who is involved, but will not tell us about it.'

I sought an interview with the town's superintendent, but after several calls was asked to submit my request in writing, together with a questionnaire, asking such things as ‘Are there particular difficulties in policing a new town?' I could visualize the minimal return for the time involved, and desisted. The superintendent was the only person in either Liverpool or Skelmersdale who declined to see me.

The town's politics are complicated. As I have described, it is essentially a one-class community, of semi-skilled Labour-voting Liverpudlians. The ‘missionary' professionals live in the centre of the community, and a few other professionals – like some of the town's Indian doctors – live on a small estate of Californian-style housing. A white-collar semi-professional, who bought a new town house when Mrs Thatcher's sale of council houses policy took effect, stayed only two years. ‘It wasn't a place to come home to after a hard day's work. You could feel the depression and the poverty. There was nowhere to turn to.' He estimated that seven of the first fifty buyers had been white-collar workers, but that very few of them had stayed. The town therefore always returns a fistful of Labour councillors, but they remain a minority on a Conservative district council which is largely elected by rural voters and Merseyside commuters who live in the surrounding countryside. If the town had grown to its projected 80,000 population, the people of Skem – and therefore Labour – would have become the majority, and the boot would have been firmly on the other foot.

It was a microcosm of the national political picture: a Conservative administration ruling over hard-core socialists. But in Skelmersdale there was mutual tolerance, respect and understanding of a quality that has been absent from the national dialogue for a generation. Even Frank McKenna, a committed Labour supporter, conceded that the town's Conservative masters – about whom he had previously heard nothing but ill – were prepared to listen. It was also refreshing that no one beat about the bush. Out of politeness and deference to residents' sensibilities, I had approached the town's problems somewhat crabwise, but very soon my interlocutors would be talking about ‘unmitigated disaster' or ‘the most unsuccessful new town in Britain.'

The council leader was an avuncular, white-haired, retired educationalist, named Robert Hodge, who had been a member of the Development Corporation. Skelmersdale was first thrust upon his council in 1974 – he felt largely because neighbouring authorities didn't want it. ‘I'm not sure that the new town concept was ever achievable. I doubt it. I don't think you can just pick people up and dump them in a new environment and expect them to grow into a satisfactory community. It was probably doomed to failure,' he said. He sympathized with Labour's resentment at being controlled by people not only not of their party, but also not from the town. ‘We accepted we had a duty to understand their problems, which encouraged us to listen to the councillors from Skelmersdale on issues like housing. They are the voice of the area. Our people listen with a degree of acceptance, more than would be usual. Skelmersdale has different problems from those we are used to.' I tried to run those sentiments through my head in Mrs Thatcher's voice, and failed.

He had to persuade his colleagues that Skelmersdale needed help over matters that people in settled communities took for granted. Village halls, for example, run themselves: Skem required a Frank McKenna to get community associations into being. Mr Hodge had been to bat for Skem against central government, arguing in vain that it should retain its urban priority status, worth an annual £250,000. The money had been spent on smartening up amenity areas and putting right some of the worst eyesores. ‘It might sound peripheral, but I don't think it is. The government argued that urban aid was being spread too thinly. Something that looks thinly spread from Whitehall or Westminster doesn't look so thinly spread from our end,' he said, adding that a community like Skelmersdale might not have as many projects or people in need of help as Bristol or Birmingham, but it could still have the same depth of problems. Mr Hodge told me that the council had refurbished one clapped-out estate, replacing factory-built walls with traditional brick, tearing down vandalized garages, and blocking up basement areas where rubbish was dumped. Problem families, who used to be concentrated in this one area, were spread around other estates. The result had been a considerable improvement in the morale and physical appearance of the estate. It was thoroughly ‘wet' talk.

In the days when Skem was an urban authority in its own right, it had, I was told, pioneered the ‘loony left'. A council leader had protested against a royal visit by sitting prominently on the town hall steps chewing a chip butty while the royal personage passed by. The current leadership of the group belonged, I was further told, to the ‘cuddly or Kinnock' left. The four leaders I met were anxious to convince me that Skem's reputation for bolshy workers was a slander on the town. They handed me a report – ‘Skem: The Broken Promise' – to which David Sheppard, the Bishop of Liverpool, had written a sombre introduction:

Once claiming to offer its people a new and better way of life, [Skelmersdale] now embodies the human results of the collapse of manufacturing employment, the regional and local concentration of economic decline, and the wholesale redundancy of manual and unskilled workers …

Skelmersdale is special in being in the travel-to-work area with the highest unemployment rate in the north-west and in having its own story of promises broken and hopes dashed.

The report refuted a national press claim in the seventies that ‘the town's troubles were the result of militant trade unionism … and the mud of that campaign has apparently stuck'. It cited findings by the then Development Corporation that in Skelmersdale ‘the loss of industrial working time was only one third of the national average figure'.

Almost everyone in Skelmersdale contended that companies had abused the regional grant system that had lured them to the town. Incoming firms received 22 per cent of their capital costs. The allegation was that as soon as a company had been in the town long enough not to have to repay the money, it engineered a reason to get out and shipped its machinery elsewhere. I was told that plant removed from Skem factories was in full production not just in south-east England, but also in Sweden and Portugal. Councillors had grown cynical about businessmen riding into town with a fistful of promises. They told of one man who was going to employ 1,200 people manufacturing buses and lorries. ‘What that company was going to do for Skem and the razzmatazz were nobody's business: everyone was talking in the pubs and clubs. The Job Centre was inundated with requests for job applications: in the event, the company didn't even put in a light bulb,' said one of the councillors. (The vehicles were to have been for Nigeria, and the potential deal collapsed along with the oil price, after which the firm could no longer get an export credit guarantee.) ‘It's wrong to lift people's hopes up. We take it now tongue-in-cheek. We tell them “We're with you buddy, let's go.” Three weeks later they often have gone – straight down the M6 to London!'

The councillors, after some hesitation, did acknowledge that Skelmersdale's lack of skills was a problem. Entrepreneurs researching the town found that it lacked the necessary skill base. But, said the councillors, capitalists only have themselves to blame, because they ‘refuse to take responsibility to train the kids up'. The result, as they admitted with the candour that I had come to recognize, was that Skelmersdale had a ‘social security culture. A vast amount of the money that circulates in the town is from Giro cheques and pensions. We are not in a position where we can take off.' That speaker was Councillor Frank Riley, an unemployed librarian, who had been working on another of the reports on Skelmersdale – ‘People in Need of a Future'. He said: ‘The days of Thorn and Courtaulds have gone. Skem was the creature of central government:
they
owe Skem.'