The dishevelment could only be made more depressing by the doubling of unemployment between May 1979 and January 1982, when it passed three million, or one in eight of those of working age. The
job losses brought in turn further signs of decay – closed and shuttered shopfronts and factories lying idle. Touring depressed parts of the country, the journalist Beatrix Campbell noticed
the extent to which the social landscape had been transformed by unemployment:
The first thing you see in Sunderland, Coventry or Rotherham is shopping precincts packed with women
and
men. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, men are sitting
around on public benches once occupied only by pensioners and mothers, you see denimed youths of nineteen or twenty pushing buggies,
queues of men cashing giros in the
same number as women cashing child benefit and old people collecting their pensions.
10
The explanations for what had gone wrong were as various as the prescriptions for how to put it right. At least those who were politically engaged saw the prospect of ultimate
salvation – whether through the Thatcherite medicine eventually working, or it being scrapped by a re-elected Labour government committed to a programme of extensive public spending and
tariffs to keep out foreign competition. By contrast, those who concluded that jobs for manual and unskilled workers would never return, because labour-saving automation had effectively abolished
an entire stratum of the job market, could only look to the future and despair. A similar mood engulfed those who believed that, regardless of whatever help government gave it, British industry
would never return to a position of competitiveness against the low-cost Asia-Pacific economies, and that the first industrial nation was fast becoming the first post-industrial one. The sense of
scarcely comprehending bewilderment was most memorably encapsulated in Yosser Hughes, a fictional Liverpudlian, whose plight in Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 series of five television plays,
Boys
from the Blackstuff
, made him a totem for the times. Unable to come to terms with an environment that could offer him nothing tangible, the increasingly desperate Hughes slipped towards
hopelessness, extreme violence and mental disintegration, while endlessly beseeching anyone he thought could help him to ‘Gizza’ job!’
For the one in eight without jobs, unemployment benefit – at £25 per week or £1,300 per year in 1982 – hardly offered in itself a viable alternative income. In January
1984, ITV’s
World in Action
ran an experiment entitled ‘For the Benefit of Mr Parris’ in which the young Conservative MP, Matthew Parris, was sent to live for a week in the
Scotswood area of Newcastle, where the male unemployment rate was 80 per cent, on an unemployed single man’s allowance, which by then had reached £26.70. He managed to make his money
last five days, which meant he had nothing for the weekend. Without abandoning his view that there was little that government could do to create jobs for which there was no longer a market, Parris
admitted that his fellow free-marketeers erred in implying that joblessness was somehow the fault of the unemployed: ‘Is there any way you can tell a man that his industry, his job and his
family are necessary, even glorious, casualties in the battle to transform the British economy and revolutionize social attitudes – and make him feel good about it?’
11
In most cases, unemployment benefit was not the only source of income, since three quarters of those on the dole also received supplementary benefit, while a further 1.4 million received
supplementary benefit without being on the dole. The growth of top-up benefits to deal with poverty on this scale
was a recent phenomenon. In the 1960s and early 1970s, only a
quarter of unemployment claimants also received supplementary benefit.
12
While the precise amount of benefit varied according to circumstance, an
unemployed couple living together with a child in 1982 might expect to receive £60–65 per week, at a time when those living in straitened circumstances in the Midlands or northern
England typically had to find £25–35 per week to cover rent, electricity and gas bills. By being frugal, the family food bill might be kept down to £15, but this left little spare
for more expensive, if occasional, items like new clothing and furniture, and almost none for luxuries. A study by the Child Poverty Action Group and the Family Service Unit in 1981 suggested that
80 per cent of those on social security borrowed money to meet their housing and fuel bills – which, in the case of some loan companies, involved repayments at very high rates of
interest.
13
By 1985, 9.4 million Britons were living on or below supplementary benefit level, an increase since 1979 of 54 per cent.
14
After Belgium, the UK’s unemployment rate in the early eighties was the highest in the European Community, and by 1982 there were thirty-two dole claimants for every unfilled job vacancy
(at the time of the 1979 general election the ratio had been five to one). It was the young who were the hardest hit, with one fifth of the unemployed being under twenty and 40 per cent under
twenty-five years old. Regional variation was especially marked, with joblessness nearing 20 per cent in Northern Ireland and standing at around 15 per cent in Scotland and northern England, but
remaining well into single figures in parts of the South-East, where the economy was driven primarily by the less depressed service sector rather than by traditional industries. In 1981, almost 13
per cent of manual workers, 9.5 per cent of semi-skilled manual workers and 8.3 per cent of skilled manual workers were registered as unemployed, though only 2.1 per cent of professionals, 3.4 per
cent of employers and managers and 4 per cent of other white-collar employees were similarly jobless.
15
The scale and geographical spread of the
deprivation made the 1930s the obvious historical reference point, with community support centres, reminiscent of inter-war soup kitchens, opening up to feed and clothe families in unemployment hot
spots. Inspired by the hunger marches of the period, and the 1936 Jarrow Crusade in particular, the TUC-supported People’s March for Jobs set out from Liverpool on 1 May 1981 and arrived in
London thirty days later, its core of five hundred marchers picking up sympathizers en route. Thatcher was no more prepared to receive the delegation than her predecessor in 1936, Stanley Baldwin,
and the accompanying 250,000-strong petition demanding government action to cut the dole queues was ignored. In practical terms, the march achieved nothing. The left had reason to find the 1930s
analogy alarming, not just because of the social consequences of a return to mass unemployment, but
because if there was a political lesson to be learned from that period it
was that socialism had failed to win power despite economic misery. In the thirties, as in the eighties, neither unemployment nor the fear of it was evenly spread across the country. Rather, the
recession acted to polarize the country between a relatively prosperous (and Conservative-voting) South and the depressed, Labour-voting North, Scotland and Wales. Labour’s problem was that
deepening resentment against Thatcher in areas that were already Labour heartlands would not be, of itself, sufficient to swing the next election.
For it was these heartlands – almost precisely the same areas as had been hardest hit in the thirties – that bore the brunt a half century later. Armed with a copy of George
Orwell’s 1937 survey of northern poverty,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, sociologists and commentators naturally sought to examine the strength of the comparison. When the journalist Ian Jack
visited Wigan in the autumn of 1982 he found that the industries around which the town had developed no longer existed: the nearby coal seams were exhausted and the cotton mills had closed down.
Wigan’s two remaining large employers were Tupperware and Heinz, whose vast factory was single-handedly feeding Britain’s baked beans habit, at a rate of two thousand tins per minute,
and whose three thousand employees could consider themselves the fortunate ones, given that almost 20 per cent of the town’s working population was on the dole. For the young, the
opportunities for play were curtailed as sharply as those for work. During the 1970s, the town had enjoyed at least one claim to cultural adventure as a centre of the Northern Soul scene, thanks to
its famous nightclub the Wigan Casino. On Saturday nights, dolled-up youths from Greater Manchester would catch a late bus or train to Wigan to dance through to Sunday morning (the unusually long
opening hours a product of the Wigan Casino’s lack of a licence to sell alcohol) at a club that, in 1978, the American magazine
Billboard
had claimed pipped New York’s Studio 54
as ‘the best disco in the world’. Even this accolade was not enough for it to survive in the harsh environment of the early eighties. The Wigan Casino closed in 1981 and, following a
fire, was demolished two years later.
Yet Ian Jack noticed there was little graffiti, litter or obviously antisocial behaviour. Locals proffered a variety of explanations for this, praising the town’s strong Roman Catholic
tradition (a legacy of nineteenth-century Irish immigration), contrasting it favourably with Liverpool (despite its similar ethnic and religious make-up), and expressing thankfulness that their
town had not experienced the wide-scale Pakistani immigration of Bolton and Blackburn. Tory voters might be thin on the ground, but a trip to the local newsagent showed little appetite for
left-wing journalism: while the shop made monthly sales of seven copies of
Tribune
, twelve of
Labour Weekly
and thirteen of the
New Statesman
, it was also selling twenty-two
copies of
Investors Chronicle
and thirty-six copies of
The Lady
. Neither were arguments
for socialism or capitalism remotely as popular as satire, with
Private Eye
selling two hundred copies a month. The most startling demand, though, was for computer magazines, of which the newsagent stocked twenty-five different titles, shifting an
impressive 2,500 copies per month.
16
If Wigan was showing signs of social atomization, then the cause could be attributed to its denizens staying at
home typing lengthy computer programs into their Sinclair ZX81s as much as to an absence of spare cash to splash out on an evening out. This apparent contradiction between tough times and access to
new innovations was not a new one. When Orwell travelled his road to Wigan Pier he noted that ‘twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio . . .
Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated in part by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.’
17
This was not the only continuity in the forty-five years separating the visits to Wigan by George Orwell and Ian Jack. Examining the household spending of the Armitage family – a husband
who had been unemployed for two years, his wife and two small children – living on £73.60 per week (£63.10 social security and £10.50 family allowance) in their council
house, Jack noted that the breakdown of their weekly budget was not so different from that of a similar Wigan family described by Orwell – albeit Jack conceded: ‘Which unemployed Wigan
miner in 1937 could have imagined that his unemployed grandson in 1982 would be able to afford a telephone, a washing machine and forty-eight hours of television a week?’ Nevertheless, the
shopping included a similar absence of fresh fruit (cans of fruit were the substitute), lack of quality meat and an emphasis on carbohydrates, such as pies and cakes. Furthermore, both generations
were relying on ‘clothing clubs’ to dress them, and holidays were all but out of the question. The 28-year-old Mrs Armitage enjoyed reading historical novels, which she borrowed from a
stall in Wigan market – paying a deposit, which was partially returned when she handed the book back, and investing her change in the deposit on the next title. She particularly liked
Catherine Cookson’s novels about life in the Victorian North: ‘They make your problems look like nothing,’ she pointed out, midway through describing a pit disaster.
18
Whether the Armitages, and those in similar predicaments, were displaying heroic stoicism or a sense of defeatist resignation was open to interpretation, but
Jack was left with the distinct impression that Wigan seemed ‘about as close to revolt as Weybridge’.
19
Long Hot Summer – The Brixton and Toxteth Riots
Where mass unemployment created a sense of alienation it could be expected that school-leavers would feel it most intensely. Of the 1.2 million
under-24-year-olds on the dole, over six hundred thousand were aged between sixteen and nineteen. There were particular black spots. In Manchester’s Moss Side, for instance, the
Hytner inquiry found unemployment among nineteen-year-olds exceeded 60 per cent and the rate in other deprived areas was not far behind. Even many of those who were kept active were not actually in
full-time employment. One hundred and eighty thousand of them were on the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), a government-run scheme for sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds which the Thatcher
government had inherited from its Labour predecessor and found itself, through necessity, vastly expanding. From 1983, every unemployed or non-college-/university-going sixteen-year-old was
guaranteed a one-year course (two years from 1985) on the YOP’s replacement, the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), which offered a mixture of work experience and further education. By 1986, almost
one third of school-leavers were joining a YTS scheme rather than going into a job. In an effort to keep idle youths off the streets and to provide them with an alternative to what had formerly
been offered by apprenticeships in different industries, the Conservatives found themselves presiding over a vast extension of state oversight. The experience of many on the scheme was that it was
more a device for companies to exploit cheap labour than a means of providing the effective on-the-job training it promised; though there was no compulsion to choose a YTS scheme over being on the
dole – at least until 1988, when unemployment benefit was finally withdrawn from those of YTS age who refused either to join the scheme or to get a job. As far as the government was
concerned, it was better to have young people doing something at least vaguely constructive than sitting around idly claiming unemployment benefit. The most vehement critics were not so sure and
considered it merely an elaborate deception, designed for no greater purpose than to massage the jobless statistics.