When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (6 page)

Expectations about working-class progress have been largely confounded. Without sufficient help from the other side, the gap in the end has been too wide for most to cross. Royce Logan, a lecturer at Warwick University, surveying his students in 1986, wrote in the
Guardian
: ‘What is most striking is the inordinately different levels of wealth, and of opportunity; the inordinately different starting-points in life. It has never been clearer to me than now just how much some people have to struggle against all kinds of adversity – financial, social, against disrespect accorded to certain regional accents – while others are handed opportunities on a plate.' The consequence was that those ‘trapped' on the wrong side of the divide either gave up or became alienated and embittered. (Snobbery, however, is a two-way street: the son of a friend was fired as a City messenger because he had two A levels. He had been acceptable, he was told, as a holiday relief, but the firm wanted the permanent position filled by a ‘real' messenger.)

A character in a play by Ron Hutchinson, a Coventry playwright, said of ‘Cov': ‘It became a graceless town. It seemed that if you gave the working man one and a half times as much money as he had had before, all he would demand would be bigger pubs, brighter clubs, somewhere to shop on Saturday and somewhere to park his car.'

From this proletarian culture grew proletarian politics, in which social class, in a sterile Marxist sense, was all. It was narrow, introverted, hostile. Dennis Skinner, MP, could boast that he did not possess a passport: even a holiday in Torremolinos was suspect as a ‘bourgeois' activity. Politics became vitriolic. A friend of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former Labour MP who quit a Merseyside constituency after a running battle with supporters of Labour's Militant tendency, said: ‘I don't think people actually realize what it is like under the “yobbocracy” of Militant in Liverpool. You find you are dealing with people who live by abuse and venom and by poison.' A union elected its general secretary on the grounds that he had never accepted promotion, and had therefore never ‘sold out'; that he ate in pubs, while his rival for office favoured restaurants; that he refused a taxi in a downpour, a gesture that caused a supporter to enthuse: ‘It's a return to grass roots; John is one of the lads.' An American worker is two and a half times better off than his British counterpart: his union leaders drive large Buicks.

Professor Townsend, a stalwart socialist, pinned the blame for the widening social gap firmly on Thatcherite policies. The government, he said, had masterminded a blatant shift of resources from poor to rich, motivated by a belief that the poor have had it too good, and that working people need discipline. The Conservative vision, he argued, was a future resting with ‘an elite bunch of computer-aware people', making do with fewer productive workers, and managing the rest as cheaply as possible. He bitterly regretted the passing of consensus, of Butskellism. ‘Even patrician despots then extended at least minimal benevolence towards the poor. Today, there is a kind of vindictiveness towards the poor, on whom blame is fastened,' he said. The mood, he argued, had been caught by the previously generous-spirited middle classes. In thirty years ‘there has been a divide of immense magnitude. It is hard to credit that attitudes could change so radically in one generation. Gone are the collective values, the fair shares and the queuing. The philosophy now is that we need inequality to give incentives.'

Professor Townsend argued that ‘we fooled ourselves as to the extent to which the welfare state has moderated inequalities'. The welfare state in Britain is now ‘pitiful' compared to many others, but, because it was one of the first, we take great pride in it. George Orwell suggested during the Second World War that getting rid of the public schools and the House of Lords might be a better use of socialist energies than nationalizing the railways. All the measurable indicators, such as disparities in health and wealth, show that the British class structure is still firmly in place. Professor Townsend claimed that his researches were beginning to show that deprived societies, like some in inner London, where unemployment among men was fifty per cent, were becoming so ravaged that the capacity to respond to each other's problems was being destroyed. People have, he said, sunk into abject depression. There has been ‘a disintegration of social values and such a generalized impoverishment that people have been driven into themselves, like snails into shells. They close their doors and don't go out, becoming isolated individuals no longer dependent on one another.' He broke off this grim catalogue of inner-city deprivation with a sudden outburst. He remembered that a friend had phoned him from Haslemere in Surrey to say she was starting to teach adult literacy classes – ‘Illiteracy! in Haslemere! for God's sake!'

A man of very different political stamp to Professor Townsend, Sir John Hoskyns, director-general of the Institute of Directors and once head of Mrs Thatcher's Downing Street ‘think tank' (though he had fallen out with the good lady subsequently), told me that if a man from outer space had wanted to fix British society to ensure that nothing fundamental would change, and that there would be no dynamic, he could not have made a better job of it than had been done by the British people themselves. Britain had had an admirable system for the rich to hold on to what they had, and an almost useless one for enabling new people to become rich. When we met over a splendid lunch in Sir John's Pall Mall office, another Britain was outside in force. It was the day of the Wembley football match between England and Scotland, and thousands of Scots were swarming over London, singing, climbing statues, waving flags and throwing up. Attentive retainers served us melon, salmon and fresh fruit salad. ‘We are not,' said Sir John, ‘a homogeneous population genetically programmed for failure. We may all be equal in the sight of God, but it is intellectually dishonest to suggest that special people don't make things happen. If they don't perform, we die. The best way for capitalism to care is for it to succeed.' Sir John dished it out with equal fervour to Whitehall, Westminster, Oxbridge – elites who have never taken a greater risk than crossing the street – and to the trade unions. ‘When I get an abusive letter from a left-wing activist, I write back that I created a company that now has a turnover of sixty million pounds and employs 1,600 people; that the taxes it generates help keep the hospitals going; and ask, what have you done except moan and groan that the capitalist system is a disaster?'

I was converted to the virtues of what has become known as ‘an enterprise culture', not by Mrs Thatcher's hectoring, but by the example of what I had seen in the United States. Nine million new jobs were created while I was there, almost entirely by small enterprises. In retrospect, it was shocking that my generation in Britain had been brought up with the sole presumption that we would work for someone else, no matter whether we left school virtually illiterate or emerged from university with a first-class degree. The only people who thought in business terms were those whose families had been in business, and the cultural pressures were on many of them to ‘improve' themselves by joining the professional classes.

One of the first people I interviewed after my return was Robin Cole, to outward appearances a thoroughly English ‘chap', wartime commission, Cambridge degree and all. He is also the kind of engineer and entrepreneur one encounters frequently in America – on domestic flights, in hotels – but here in Britain is a rare bird. In 1947, instead of hanging his hat on a pension, he and a partner rented a blacksmith's forge near Winchester for twelve shillings and sixpence a week. When I met him, his company, the Conder Group, a worldwide construction company, had 1,300 employees and an annual turnover of £125 million. ‘We took on anything that came our way. All we had to do was keep our eyes open to opportunities.' At one stage he was so strapped for cash that he had to sell a shepherd's hut on wheels, which served as his office, for twenty-five pounds to raise capital. Forty years later a reproduction hut stood beside the Queen Anne house from which Mr Cole worked. In the entrance hall of each subsidiary company, there is the bust of a somewhat quizzical man – a Greek philosopher? – which bears the legend ‘The satisfied customer: the most important man in our business.'

Mr Cole accepted that it was perfectly valid to wish for a less competitive society, provided the corollary of less materialism was also accepted. ‘Most people,' he said, ‘insist on TVs, cars
and
long holidays. It's inconsistent.' He said that ‘no-tariff barriers' – the resistance to buying foreign products – were lower in Britain than anywhere else. ‘More than half the people who shout about compassion drive a foreign car, never take a pay curb or buy British. They don't actually give a damn.'

It is the upper middle classes who buy most foreign cars and consumer goods. I suspect it is because few of them actually earn their livings making things. To them the connection between buying British and their own livelihoods is tenuous. Corelli Barnett is right to argue that much of our industrial inefficiency can be blamed on the public schools (and on the aspirations of those who send their sons there). Boys sent to public schools learn the habits and style of ‘gentlemen', and ‘gentlemen' naturally have nothing to do with wealth creation. So the chief educational resources in Britain have gone into generations of district officers, dons, civil servants, clergymen, school teachers (of the public school variety), service officers, and ‘real gentlemen' (on whom the investment was more wasted than on all the others put together).

But there is a yet more baleful inheritance from these schools: an assumption that all human beings will abide by the rules of the Eton wall game or are, at least, amenable to benign coercion. The schools are tightly controlled structures, which, through selection, exclude poorly motivated pupils and virtually all those who are not brought up with certain common assumptions. In such an environment social engineering is quite feasible. The pressures to play according to the rules are enormous: the coercive force of the school, peer group conformity, and potentially furious, fee-paying parents. A dissenter could be (and is) expelled. This may be a workable method of controlling a closed society, but – at least since Australia stopped taking convicts – it is not a practical way to run the real world.

After five formative years in that system, it appears to most pupils to be an accurate microcosm of the real world. Ex-public school boys boast that after that they can survive anything – by which they mean prison or the armed forces. But survival in a hostile, tough environment is not the same as understanding the forces at work in an open society. My sons go to an open school, ‘public' in the literal sense, where the education is imperfect and where they sit alongside children who are totally anti-social, have no stake in the school or wider society, who are desperate to shake free of whatever limited authority the school can impose, and create mayhem on a wider stage. My children suffer disadvantages they would not have suffered in a private fee-paying school, but they are under few illusions about the range and nature of human behaviour.

The cosiness of an elite, segregated education reinforces the natural instinct of movers and shakers to club together. ‘Them' and ‘us' becomes a natural frame of mind. ‘Us' seldom see ‘them': ‘us' rely on tiny scraps of first-hand information which travel from club to bar to office to dining table. Most of our decision-makers and commentators lurk far from the front line in the safety of Whitehall or ‘Fleet Street', safely out of shelling distance, like First World War generals. Promotion inevitably means further distancing from the grass roots. The political correspondent dares not leave Westminster in case he is scooped; the education correspondent seldom gets inside a school, or the industrial correspondent inside a factory. Their beat is news, and ‘news' is what the decision-makers, equally trapped inside this magic circle, create.

A serious newspaper will clear its feature pages (as it should) to bring a blow-by-blow account of the machinations behind the Westland affair or the Zircon spy satellite revelation – what the Attorney-General had for breakfast, and at what hour. It will be less enthusiastic about reporting the condition of Britain. People do like to know who's in, who's out, in London, and what policies are being fed into the machine, but what really concerns them is that they have a job, a decent school for their children, the right climate if they wish to start a business. It would be salutary for our leaders to remember from time to time that there are those who have no interest in what goes on in London: I once took regular holidays in isolated parts of Devon where locals scarcely knew the name of the prime minister.

Democracy in Britain is very remote: a few crosses against names for local and national office every four or five years does not leave much fine-tuning in the hands of the people. In the United States, tiny communities elect dog- catchers, judges and school boards; the House of Representatives is returned every two years. In Britain there is limited faith in the responsiveness of government – national or local. I was frequently told, as I researched this book, that it does not matter ‘which lot get in'. Whenever I write about a situation with which readers can personally identify, I receive not only a great number of letters, but also letters from people who have something to say and want to join in. They are tired of having the likes of Owen, Tebbit and Hattersley rammed down their throats; tired of slippery answers. They know more than their masters do of what it is like to have a child in a comprehensive school, or to be unemployed, to try to start a business. They are the reliable witnesses.

The British system produces elitist leadership. It is such a full-time task to reach the top that only professional politicians make it. By the time they get there, they are sincerely convinced they know best, and therefore have a duty to tell the rest of us how to manage our affairs. The American system produces ‘representative' rather than ‘elitist' leadership: members of the House of Representatives are cut from the same cloth as their constituents. The president is the people's choice.