When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (39 page)

Knutsford had a first-rate teaching staff, young and enthusiastic – ‘I thought,' said one, ‘that I could do a better job than my teachers did for me' – quite happy, for example, to stay after school for a curriculum development discussion. Mr Teasdale attended one two days after his wife had had a baby. But the teachers were frustrated by limited resources and poor staffing levels. Several have compensated for the fact that nationally falling school rolls have meant fewer promotion opportunities by writing text books. Although many insisted that concern about money came after professional considerations, most obviously felt underpaid, and wondered where the next generation of teachers was to come from. Some complained that the children were spoilt. ‘Left to themselves, some of these children wouldn't have the wits to live in a shed,' said one. He added: ‘Teachers are not appreciated. The public thinks that we come out of university with our heads full of stuff that will last us for forty years. Parents want a lot for nothing.'

Mr Ings, whose two younger brothers – one an army sergeant – earned more than he did, said: ‘I am worried that I am going to burn myself out. I get emotionally tired, absolutely exhausted. But we've all invested so much time in teaching, we can't afford pessimism.' Several said they were hurt by society's stereotyped view of teachers. Maggie Jones, the head of business studies, said: ‘People make bland statements that teachers get thirteen weeks' holiday and finish work each day at half-past three. Nobody sees what it's like – the piles of marking that you're still poring over at half-past nine. It gets on your brain, and you don't switch off. I get into all sorts of arguments. We get blamed for so many things. Surely there must be blame for everyone.'

Miss Jones was one of several who did not resume taking sports sessions after the original teachers' dispute. Plenty of sports were taking place, but a widespread staff attitude seemed to be that if something was worth doing it was worth being paid for. Another teacher said that if parents wanted their children to play cricket, they should enrol them in a club, and not expect the school to provide teachers and facilities. The experience of the Thatcher years had turned them vehemently against the Conservative government. ‘The school isn't full of left-wing, radical Trotskyists, but you won't find anyone prepared to be an apologist for Mrs Thatcher,' said one senior teacher. A colleague said: ‘The mandarin class is totally indifferent to the state system.' He suggested that instead of spouting ‘unthinking nonsense', critics should come into school for a week. ‘That would dispel their worries.' If we are to get good teachers, we will have to cosset them. A head said to me: ‘If you had an eighteen-year-old, bright in maths, physics, computing or technology, would you encourage him to go into teaching? My God, no. You could probably count the number of physics teachers in training on the fingers of two or three pairs of hands.' Teachers no longer enjoy the status of revered community figures, equal in esteem to the vicar and the doctor. My grandfather, a Midlands grammar school head in the early part of the twentieth century, had enjoyed that kind of respect in his town. School then was still the source of all learning: now children enjoy positive influences like foreign holidays, but teachers also have to contend with the sad fact that many of their charges spend more time in front of television than in the classroom. A teacher wrote to me that the ‘lack of social status' was as bitter as the ‘constant denigration' in the press and the poor pay.

An educationalist told me that her 26-year-old mathematician son was already earning four times as much as he would have been getting as a teacher. The daughter of one of the senior women staff at Knutsford was paid as much as her teacher father within a couple of years of starting as a financial analyst. Joan Gregory of the Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools said: ‘Those in the schools are the only teachers we've got, and if we don't pick them up and dust them down, then we've got troubles.'

No school can turn every sow's ear into a silk purse: there must have been ‘Carols' at Knutsford who have fallen by the wayside, and ‘Johns' who failed to fulfil their potential. I was constructively taken to task by an
Observer
reader after the paper ran a feature based on my Knutsford visit. She described herself as ‘an old enthusiastic teacher', and accused me of writing a ‘panegyric'. She pointed out that there was no side-stepping the hard work that was associated with academic success in selective schools. ‘Everything will be boring for adults who, when young, were conditioned to be entertained without effort or concentration,' she wrote. ‘The satisfaction derived from learning by rote your multiplication tables, or three theorems or King Harry's speech before Harfleur – and fearing the consequences of not having learned them – would, if still present in our comprehensive classrooms, just tip the balance in the matter of their survival.' But I can see very few people as thoroughly exposed as I was – whatever their prejudices – coming away from Knutsford or a similarly well-run school without believing that such schools
can
work. With more resources, greater public and political support, and a full range of children, they might do magnificently. As a nation, we cannot afford for them to do otherwise.

‘KD' Patel sat in a red leather armchair with his feet tucked beneath him. The undone buttons at the neck of his white shirt revealed an enamel medallion on a gold chain. His toes peeped from the slip-on white sandals he wore beneath tropical slacks. His wife, Lata, petite and pretty in pullover, jeans and boots, served tea. She was, I was amazed to learn, a Labour member of Brent Council, which seemed about as probable as Sue Ellen being a waterfront organizer for the Teamsters. Her real-life presence was difficult to reconcile with the image of a demure, sari-clad woman, smiling from her election leaflets. We sat in one corner of a large, ornate room, in which the furniture had been pushed against the red walls, as it might be in the waiting room for a doctor who offered exotic cures for the illnesses of affluence. There were marble-topped tables, peacock feathers in vases, pistols and swords on the walls, and a bright, floral carpet under foot. Occasionally KD burped loudly.

Everything about the house and the man was unashamedly ostentatious: lions rampant on the suburban Wembley walls outside, palms each side of the front door, two Mercedes in the driveway, a vast enclosed swimming pool and disco area at the end of the garden. The property was a statement: ‘I have arrived. I have succeeded. You take me on my terms.' Facing the swimming pool there was a ‘guest' house, a three-storey town house. The whole property, said KD, was worth £850,000: I would have put it higher. The garden was ornate, with, I read in a self-publicity brochure that KD handed me, ‘symmetry reminiscent of Mogul Gardens'. Three Alsatian puppies romped between the white statues and the ponds. Mrs Patel's colleagues on Brent Council met beside the pool to plan a socialist nirvana for their electors. ‘Wasn't this just a little lavish for the home of a Labour councillor?' I asked Lata. She laughed: ‘I started on the petrol pumps: I am as socialist as any of them.'

KD's professionally printed biography, written by ‘a freelance journalist based in London', was entitled, ‘
KD PATEL
: A Flair for Fortune.' It opened: ‘Businessman, philanthropist and patriot, Kantilal Dahyabhai Patel … a neat, unassuming man, clearly at peace with himself without appearing complacent.' Walter Mitty could not have commissioned a more pleasing work of self-aggrandizement. But the achievements it reported in such gaudy prose were real enough. From a cotton mill in Gujerat at the age of sixteen, via ruination at Idi Amin's hands, to a millionaire in London, with little but his native wits to propel him. His father had died in Uganda when he was a baby, and his illiterate mother had returned to her village in India. KD's first capitalist venture had been a sweet stall, then a wholesale business that had gone bust: he re-emigrated to Uganda in his early twenties, still with considerable debts to settle in India.

While I had been in America, Britain's high streets were galvanized by a group of Asian immigrants – many, but not all, from East Africa – who were behaving much as immigrants to the United States have always behaved. With vigour, enterprise and courage, people like KD, many of whom had arrived penniless little more than the day before yesterday, were revitalizing corners of the British economy. They did it at best in an atmosphere of complacent patronage – CBEs and unwinnable parliamentary seats for acceptable Conservatives; at worst against violence and prejudice that make life for a person with brown skin in certain parts of Britain an inconceivable agony.

In 1972 I had covered the arrival of one identifiable group of these immigrants, the 27,000 Ugandan Asians sent packing overnight as the result of a dream by a bloodthirsty madman, whom the British never took seriously because he was large, roly-poly, awarded himself ridiculous medals, and who had served as a sergeant in the King's African Rifles. They were received here in a spirit of official pessimism. These people represented a ‘problem': they would need housing, welfare, schools, they would form ghettos. The anti-immigrant poison spread by Enoch Powell coursed in the public veins. Edward Heath's government was unequivocal in accepting its responsibilities, but politically no one dared embrace these new Britons too fondly for fear of a backlash at the polls.

There was no welcome for them to match that on offer to newcomers to the United States, where football stadia full of new citizens of every colour and belief are sworn to the allegiance of their adopted country amidst patriotic razzmatazz. American immigrants are wrapped in an emotional welcome that declares a new beginning, not just for them but for the society they have joined. ‘I am the son of an immigrant,' boasts Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, from the public platform. We demand ‘Where do you come from?' of people who were born here.

Those who already knew the character and achievements of the Ugandan Asians forecast that the newcomers would rapidly buy their own houses; would start businesses; and would ensure that their children were well enough educated to become major contributors – doctors, engineers, accountants, business people – to the society they were joining. Those who didn't know them, like myself, but who met them at the RAF camps where they were housed, were struck by the improbable optimism of refugees who, in many cases, owned no more than the clothes they wore.

Most people, plucked from their homes, jobs and businesses and dumped summarily thousands of miles away in a strange, cold, indifferent land, without fluency in the local language, would have been utterly demoralized. Yet some of the younger Ugandan Asians appeared then to be crazily excited. This was the land on which they had set their hearts; and, although they arrived in appallingly adverse circumstances, they were determined to succeed. A young man, wearing an open-necked shirt and two rows of cowrie shells, in Britain only ten days, said: ‘We were told there were not enough jobs to go round in England. In fact there are. The English just won't do them.' One brother already had a job in Dorset, and another a college place. That day one thousand supporters of the ‘British Campaign to Stop Immigration' marched in Bradford, and a further one thousand took to the streets of Birmingham. According to a spokesman: ‘We are not being racialist – if fifty thousand Eskimos came to this country, we could not take them.'

There were also older Asians, with poor English and no skills. They kept to their rooms in the camps, lacklustre and apprehensive. Their subsequent achievements were a greater triumph for human tenacity and the extended Asian family than even the business fortunes made by some younger people. Within ten years of their arrival, all 5,600 families who had been expelled by Amin had re-established themselves. A leading member of the community said: ‘The people forty-five years plus had trouble – language, jobs, even the weather – but eventually they found work, often in department stores. They learned the ropes, got to know how business worked, and then started on their own.'

KD, who had friends in London, had bypassed the camps. At first he had not believed he would be expelled, but rapidly changed his mind after soldiers had twice demanded the contents of his safe at gunpoint. Leaving behind four businesses, including a car rental company, a travel agency – through which he issued himself and his family getaway tickets – and several petrol stations, he arrived in Britain with £1,500 and a few suitcases of clothes. He had been stripped of property worth £200,000 – enough in 1972 to buy three or four houses in Chelsea. He first worked as a manager for the Heron chain of petrol stations, clocking up overtime to make the money to start on his own, establishing contacts and learning the tricks of the trade as he went. By 1977 he was earning between £20,000 and £25,000 a year. When he did launch his own business, he worked, he told me, an 86-hour week. His profile claimed it was a 110-hour week. ‘We didn't watch TV or have lunch breaks. By working hard, you can learn fast. If I had worked a forty-hour week, it would have taken twenty-five years to get where I am now.'

He said that a great crisis was required to bring the best out of the indigenous British. ‘Faced with disaster,' and he cited the examples of Napoleon and the Second World War, ‘they prove they are the best.' (I am writing this during the ‘great freeze' of 1987, when the papers are full of British plumbers charging pensioners £160 for mending a burst pipe, and spivs demanding £1.80 for a bottle of milk and £1.00 for a loaf of bread. The Dunkirk spirit, invoked
ad nauseum
in the post-war years, was, whatever its original proof, somewhat less potent by 1987 than it had been in 1940. We had uncorked it like drunkards to cope with economic calamity, three-day weeks, the Argentinians, industrial anarchy and the cold.) KD's business is selling petrol and repairing cars. He employs mainly Asians. The English, he said, finish on the dot, or before. They start washing at five o'clock for a six o'clock getaway. They do not respond to an emergency (short presumably of the Second World War) – like getting a job promised for that day finished before they go home. This is largely why, he said, Asians employ other Asians.

Why, I asked, should a capitalist, who had been a vice-chairman of the Anglo-Asian Conservative Association, now support a wife as a member of a council that had become the national symbol of the ‘loony left'? He was, he said, disillusioned with Mrs Thatcher, not because of her lukewarm enthusiasm towards the aspirations of brown-skinned Britons, but because she had not done enough for small businesses. ‘In the beginning she was all right, but after four or five years I expected something substantial to happen, but it didn't.' Millions of pounds, he said, are pumped into British Coal and Austin-Rover, yet there is no encouragement for the entrepreneur. It is the enterprising businessman, as in the United States, who creates new jobs. KD felt there was little scope for further expansion in Britain. ‘I am at a crossroads; I'm not satisfied.' He might, he said, try to start a new enterprise in the States. But he added: ‘I am grateful to the British in every respect from the day I landed. I do feel at home, but in the US my progress would have been much faster.' It was a self-assessment I was to hear from other Asians.

Asians, who outnumber West Indians two to one in Britain, are lumped together as one cohesive people in the undiscriminating native mind, yet they are as varied in their backgrounds, cultures and languages as are western Europeans. Imagine the response of the British skinheads who harass Asians if they were to be abused as ‘Eyetyes' when they travelled abroad on their beer-sodden package tours. A banker, who first came to Britain in 1933 to study for the bar, was later a chief minister in a princely state, then a judge and diplomat in independent India before returning to this country, is abused on Underground platforms as a ‘Paki', and told to ‘go home'. A former Conservative parliamentary candidate said: ‘Once every Indian in Britain was treated like a maharajah; now even maharajahs are treated like uneducated immigrants.' An activist in the Federation of Bengali Youth Organizations told a woman who gratuitously called him a ‘Paki' in an Oxford Street store: ‘You wouldn't know a Paki, madam, if you fell over one.'

I write in Chapter 11 about outright violence and intimidation, but even rich and successful Asians, living in what are known as ‘safe' areas, are affected by attitudes that prevent the British moving towards a genuinely multi-cultural society. To the British psyche, fashioned by years of empire, black or brown means inferior. A well-educated Bengali said: ‘A lot of people still expect you to speak with a Peter Sellers accent, and stare in amazement when you don't. Eventually they accept you, you're OK. It is just the “others”. You're an exception to the stereotype, but the stereotype never gets altered.'

I had first read KD's story in a tabloid newspaper, under the headline ‘
YOU CAN STILL MAKE A MILLION FROM NOTHING
!' and written, predictably, by an Asian journalist. Such reporting (and use of coloured reporters to do it) is part of the stereotyping: it is shorthand for ‘anyone who really tries can make it in British society, so don't start whingeing about prejudice and unequal opportunity'. It is also part of a patronizing attitude: haven't
they
done wonderfully well? But the East African and other successful Asians are exceptional. Brown and black British as a whole are twice as likely to be unemployed as white, and those whose families came from Pakistan and Bangladesh are three times as likely. In 1985, 16 per cent of white young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were out of work, while the figure for those of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin was 48 per cent. Of the ethnic groups, the Indians were the most successful, with 24 per cent of their young people without jobs, yet even this figure was half as many again as whites. The survey that produced these statistics showed there were 2,400,000 members of ethnic minorities in Britain – 4·4 per cent of the population. Asians, accounting for over one million, formed by far the largest group.

The reality of the problems facing ethnic minorities is illustrated by the slow progress made by the Vietnamese ‘boat people'. A Home Office research group reported: ‘It is difficult to identify any other refugee group arriving in any other Western country which has fared as badly.' While the Vietnamese elsewhere have prospered far beyond expectations, many in Britain live isolated, frightened lives – attacked even in Shropshire – without jobs, English or hope. Some families live in bed-and-breakfast hotels, a way of life that threatens the prospects for children born here. The only skill they have acquired after years in Britain is to operate the social-security system. Physics teachers, who ‘topped up' with British qualifications, are doing manual jobs.

In America, Asians are already outperforming whites in schools and universities – 94 per cent of children whose families come from the Indian sub-continent graduate from high school, compared to 87 per cent of whites. Other Asian groups – Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese – have comparable success rates. Ivy League universities are so alarmed by the imbalance caused by Asian achievements – especially in certain maths and science courses – that they appear to discriminate in favour of other groups. Siblings of Asians who came to Britain tend to do better in the United States. (Gujeratis have been concentrating on the hotel trade: the
Washington
Post
ran a business-page story under the headline ‘
MOTELS, HOTELS AND PATELS
'.)