When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (8 page)

The north-south divide had widened substantially while I was in America. Property price differences had accelerated crazily in the south, up to 20 per cent annually, while they remained static in the north, virtually cutting the country in half – ‘there's an exclusion zone south of Watford', said one frustrated Slough employer. Jobs were going begging in the Thames Valley, where firms were compelled to turn down orders because of labour shortages, and people were going begging in the north.

Inequalities in Britain are reported in dramatic terms in the United States. It is one of the few subjects that gets London-based American journalists off their bottoms: ‘
THE TWO BRITAINS
: the gap between stagnant north and prosperous south is wider than ever' proclaimed a headline in
Newsweek
a few days before I travelled to Durham. It contrasted pictures of Etonians disporting themselves in fancy dress on the Thames with the children of the unemployed playing amidst the dereliction of a shattered housing estate. ‘Some housing projects in Manchester seem straight out of the Third World', read one caption. Kids hanging out on a northern council estate – ‘For the country's underclass, few prospects of a better life' – were set against young people in evening dress at a party at St Paul's public school – ‘Laps of luxury'. Crude stuff, perhaps, but the persistence of such reporting creates exactly the image of Britain as a class-ridden, inefficient society that Mrs Thatcher's whole premiership has been dedicated to eliminating, and in the country that Mrs Thatcher admired above all others and wished Britain to emulate. American reporters quote Disraeli with relish: ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are being formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.' ‘You speak of ...' said Egremont (the hero of Disraeli's novel), hesitatingly, ‘the rich and the poor.'

Gordon Chopping, manager of the Easington unemployment centre, brought Disraeli up to date: ‘We will never provide jobs again on a sufficient scale. There is a new proletariat. It doesn't wear suits; it doesn't
have
suits; it doesn't use credit cards or banks; it doesn't pay taxes; it doesn't buy consumer durables. Any work it does is on the black economy. Its members are a million miles away from people who watch ads on TV and can say “Oh yes, we'll go and get one of those.” The trend is that if your father doesn't work, you won't. There is a permanent underclass, a dual society; whole streets where scarcely anyone works.' Mr Chopping, grey-haired and bearded, wearing a venerable dark pin-striped suit, was the modern, benign equivalent of the workhouse master. His centre ran 102 ‘community programme' jobs for the unemployed – which lasted for a year, and for which each worker was paid about fifty-five pounds a week – and it was his job to maintain morale, firmly chiding his flock with an avuncular authority when they invariably became negative. ‘We have to believe the pessimistic view is wrong. We cannot allow two societies to develop if we can do anything about it. We have got to continue on the assumption that everyone trains for work.' This is a difficult assumption to make in the east Durham coalfield in the declining years of the twentieth century.

In late 1986, unemployment in Easington stood at 18·7 per cent, of whom 38 per cent were under twenty-five and 41 per cent had been jobless for over a year. In seven years nearly four thousand jobs had been lost in coal mining, taking with them an estimated two thousand jobs in linked industries and services. Six thousand new jobs would have been needed within five years to reduce unemployment to the national average of 13·6 per cent.

Mr Chopping is a former journalist and businessman, with a sardonic realism about his charges. He angered his superiors by suggesting that one third of young people who seek help had sub-standard literacy. ‘That was based on asking them to write down their names and addresses, and the number who hadn't got a pen, and didn't care to use mine, and would rather bring the forms back in the morning.' The centre offered such work as decorating, draught-excluding, gardening, visiting the old and handicapped as ‘good neighbours', constructing a BMX park for the village youngsters, and working in the office itself. Women were far more likely to land permanent jobs at the end of their year than were men – especially if they had a skill that could be used in an office or in caring for the sick or elderly. For young men the outlook was as bleak as the cold December North Sea that pounded their despoiled beach. ‘Half the kids leaving school in this area will never have a proper job; for the lads there is really nothing,' according to Mr Chopping.

His centre was once the Co-op department store – a shabby supermarket still exists, but the store went the way of most other amenities, like cinemas, in such areas. ‘Even the fish'n'chip shop,' someone joked wryly, ‘closes for lunch.' In one room, the ‘good neighbours' – eleven women and one young man – were waiting for their weekly pay. The man was aged twenty, substantially overweight, had a round, pudgy face behind his glasses. He had left school two years earlier with one A and nine O levels, which would have guaranteed him a job in the south; yet more than seventy job applications to offices and banks had not secured him a single interview. (Several of his friends, despairing of their civilian chances, had gone into the armed forces.) Very few seated round that table were prepared to move to find work. ‘I don't see why we should: it's the government who should provide jobs for everyone. Young people from this area have got to stay here and keep this place going, haven't they?' said one. Each had a dismal story to tell: the fat woman who couldn't keep pace with piecework in a garment factory – she made thirty pounds a week against the norm of eighty pounds; the girl who was going to marry in six months' time, even though the coal haulage firm for which her fiancé worked looked likely to lose its only contract and he would be sacked. She spoke of her father, a miner, redundant at forty-eight – ‘he's no ties, he's not bothered now, he goes up to the garden and that.' Another young woman had been out of school for eight years, of which she had only worked for one year; an older woman said she saw no hope for her own son. A heavy silence fell regularly. Gordon Chopping, who had been listening to this catalogue of despair, told them: ‘People who put themselves out most get a job.' He was rounded on by a middle-aged woman in a blue pullover: ‘Pack it in, Gordon – we know we're going back on the dole. There are thousands of young 'uns competing for the jobs. When you go for one, there's someone from a government scheme doing the job already.'

Upstairs, the decorators were sheltering from a sea ‘fret', a heavy drizzle that reduced visibility to the width of the street. Allan Parrish, a thin man of thirty-two with a wispy ginger beard and spectacles held together with Sellotape, had left school in 1970, trained as a lab technician, and worked at a comprehensive school for ten years. As a result of government cuts, teachers had taken over lab work and, after a year on the dole, he got a similar job with a sixth-form college in Middlesbrough. Science teaching was centralized, and once again the lab jobs went. That was three years before I met him, during which he had applied for ‘a couple of hundred jobs' and been granted five or six interviews. Mr Parrish, unlike those downstairs, would have moved anywhere – he had tried London and Leeds. His father and grandfather had been miners, and what he found bitterly ironic was that his siblings, who had never trained and did manual jobs, were all better off than himself. Two nineteen-year-olds, Peter Sugden and Arthur Bannister, had had their names down for the pit, but it ceased recruiting a few months before they left school. They felt cheated of their heritage. Neither had worked since, apart from government schemes. ‘I've a pile of regrets that high,' said one, indicating a couple of inches with his finger and thumb.

‘The difference,' said Mr Chopping, ‘between the twenties and thirties and today is hope. Vandalism didn't occur then as now; kids are disassociating themselves from a society that has failed them. Their parents grew up in stages, through school into a job. Now it comes to a halt at sixteen: everyone knows that YTS here is not a proper job. There's no hope.' Often I was struck by a local sense of fatalism about the bad times, as if they, like the weather, were beyond human control. Mr Chopping said: ‘You need an income to be politically active, a lift if you are going to a meeting, money for a drink afterwards. It's easy to understand why people give up: they might write between thirty and two hundred applications without getting a reply. You can't keep your phone up. You can't go on spending three pounds a week on stamps. You stop getting up particularly early and concentrate on getting your cabbages in, so the days get shorter.'

Outside in the rain a youth on another government scheme was gathering litter into a blue plastic bag from a seemingly endless supply on waste ground behind the bus stop. When he had finished the litter remained so abundant one could not tell that he had been. His futility was a pathetic microcosm of the region's futility. Across the road from the Co-op, and past the gaunt miners' welfare hall, a notice on an iron gate announces the ‘Easington Colly Parish Council Welfare Park', a memorial to a tragedy that struck the pit and community a generation ago. Fifty yards from the gate, past another posse of ‘make-work' men, scrabbling at the dead, grey grass in desultory fashion, was a bronze plaque.

On the 29th May 1951 81 men died together in Easington Colliery following an explosion and in the rescue bid two men gave their lives. The trees here-about were planted. The memorial avenue was made and this tablet placed on a stone from the scene of the accident.

TO HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THOSE
WHO LOST THEIR LIVES
.

Let passers-by do likewise, get understanding and promote goodwill in all things.

Roses still bloomed in drab December around this shrine, on which was scribbled in large letters ‘the Parky Stinks of Fuck Head'. From the brow of the hill beyond the memorial, I looked towards the sea, across an unlovely cluster of houses known as ‘East', most of which were boarded up awaiting the outcome of a dispute between the ground landlords, the Church Commissioners and a housing trust for miners. Each was designed with a tiny yard, where washing turns grey in the smoke-filled air. The last tin bath wasn't thrown out until 1968.

Redundant men in the north contrast the poverty of their environment with the wealth that has been drawn from it and taken elsewhere. J.B. Priestley on his
English Journey
in 1933 remarked that there was ‘easily more comfort and luxury on one deck of the
Mauretania
' than there had ever been in the drab Tyne towns where the shipbuilders lived. He speculated on all the fine things that had been conjured out of one Durham mine – ‘the country houses and town houses, the drawing rooms and dining rooms, the carriages and pairs, the trips to Paris, the silks and the jewels, the peaches and iced puddings, the cigars and old brandies'.

Today the connection is less glaringly obvious, but the people of the Durham coalfield, tucked away in grimy villages where no stockbroker has ever visited, did help lay the foundation of Britain as a prosperous society. And some, like the eighty-three men commemorated in the parish park, gave a great deal more than just forty-five years of back-breaking toil one thousand feet below the sunlight. Every £100,000-a-year City whizz kid, as he switches off his computer terminal, climbs into his BMW and heads for dinner in a Chelsea restaurant, ought to say a little prayer of gratitude to the people of Durham and such regions and to those people's forefathers. The miners' legacy is back-to-back colliery houses, a closed Co-op store and the worst health in Britain. The brass went elsewhere and the muck remained behind. Would today's Gstaad skiing, Concorde flips to New York, Porsches on sale in central London for £83,000, cashmere dresses and Italian boots, weekend cottages in Gloucestershire, fine-art auctions, booming wine sales have been possible without the generations of riveters, miners, steel men, platers, whose children are now spied upon for collecting lumps of coal from the beach?

The new Conservatives, with their homilies on dietary ignorance and bikes, are as harsh in their attitudes as Dickens's Gradgrinds and Bounderbys. Perhaps the compassion that went with the paternalism of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was not fully appreciated at the time, but it is greatly missed now it has been replaced by hard-nosed Conservatism. Alan Cummings, the Easington NUM representative, said: ‘It's the Tory philosophy that you should move to work. This area has built this country's wealth. The government owes it to us to attract employment. Money has never been ploughed back here. We're down to the bare bones, most of the flesh has gone.' Northern Conservatives, with their roots in the soil and the community, know it. Sir Michael Straker, chairman of the Peterlee Development Corporation, is every inch a Conservative of the old school – Eton and Coldstream Guards. When we met he had been ‘farming', and wore an elderly tweed jacket and grey trousers above brown shoes. From time to time he looked over his half-moon glasses as if to a better past somewhere in the middle distance. He had just learned of a friend's son who was leaving the army to go, guess where? ‘That's right. Into a merchant bank. It's a tragedy. His father was a nuts and bolts man. Politicians,' he said, ‘get it wrong. You've got to have a feeling for coal, and what coal has meant. It will last probably another decade. Neglect that at your peril.' He spoke, in a way that no doubt sounds romantic nonsense to new Conservatives, of the companionship and loyalty created underground – ‘tunnelling, naked to the waist, sweating shoulder-to-shoulder. If one man fails, he lets the team down, possibly costing them their lives.'