The Storytellers (14 page)

C
HAPTER

A
S 1981 STARTED to show its hand, the new Republican President of the United States was cutting taxes and increasing defence spending at the same time as the Democratically-appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volker, was bearing down on inflation with interest rates approaching 20%. In contrast, the United Kingdom Chancellor was raising taxes and cutting public expenditure as well as using high interest rates to quell inflation. This cocktail was sustaining an uncompetitive currency, crippling Britain's exports, and pulverizing domestic demand. With unemployment approaching 2.5 million and rising, the British Government was deliberately pushing its economy into a recession that would be its worst since the 1930s.

So concerned were they about this policy that 364 economists wrote a joint letter to
The Times
newspaper saying that there was no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government's belief that by deflating demand they would bring inflation permanently under control and thereby induce an automatic recovery in output and employment. They went on to suggest that the government's policies would deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of the economy and threaten its social and political stability.

“They'd have been given short shrift if they'd approached us for publication,” George Gilder scoffed, adding with impish relish, “Besides, when have two economists, let alone three hundred and sixty-four, ever come up with an accurate forecast? They are the shamans of our age.”

“Why is it we need shamans?” Harvey wondered.

“Because the world is an uncertain place, Mudd, and we hate uncertainty,” his editor asserted.

“I guess that makes the government's strategy a shot in the dark as well?” Harvey posited.

George Gilder harrumphed and asked Harvey to do a piece on the miners' latest ultimatum.

* * *

On 10th February, the Coal Board announced its intention to close twenty-three pits. Some of the more militant miners went on unofficial strike right away and there were widespread calls for the National Union of Mineworkers' executive to declare an indefinite strike covering the nation's 240,000 miners.

The government quickly agreed to meet with the union and the NUM President, Joe Gormley, indicated his confidence that an understanding could be reached.

The Scottish Area president, Mick McGahey, a hard-drinking, poetry-loving, lifelong member of the Communist Party who had been outvoted for the NUM presidency by Joe Gormley, was known to be wary of any agreement.

The Scottish area president had become a miner at fourteen, following in his father's footsteps, as well as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which his father had helped found. Jack Pugh greatly admired him, especially when he read that McGahey had supported the Soviet Union's suppression of the
Hungarian uprising in 1956: the mark of a true communist, he felt, who understood that ends justified means. Since being hauled in by his country's security service, however, his view of the state had altered. Added to which, he found the area president's thick accent so incomprehensible that fraternal fellowship seemed unlikely. And now he was travelling north to Lanarkshire to address a meeting in support of the NUM President, not his communist hero.

* * *

“Last year's Coal Industry Act called for the cessation of operating grants to the industry,” the local NUM officer explained.

Jack sat on the podium waiting for his turn to speak. The room was full, with men standing at the back. This was their livelihoods, the future of their communities being discussed, not some political abstraction.

“As you know, comrades,” their leader explained, “the National Coal Board was established in 1946 as a public corporation to run all the mines brought into public ownership by the post-war Labour government.”

“And how much were the mine owners paid?” a voice called out from the audience.

“A deal too much, but that's a different matter,” the leader asserted, clearly of the view that no amount was justified. “I believe around two hundred companies were taken over at a cost to the taxpayer of over three hundred million pounds.”

“That's one and a half million each,” a mathematical type called out. “I'd be happy with that!”

The area president's withering glare from the podium faced down the ripple of excitement that trickled around the room at the prospect of such winnings.

“The NCB found itself responsible for over seven hundred
thousand men back then,” the local leader said, adding so as to prove his own mathematical competence, “which would have been about five hundred pounds a man if I'm not mistaken.”

“Or around ten thousand in today's money,” the mathematician called out, not to be outdone. But the mood was no longer on his side and besides, while all of the men knew that prices had risen in recent years, few could think in terms of £1 being anything other than £1.

“Ten years later, that number had dropped to just over six hundred thousand,” their leader continued,” and today stands at two hundred and forty thousand. The NCB has run our industry down even though we have enough coal to serve the energy needs of the country for a century or more: and its justification? Our coal is too expensive.

“Well that's hardly surprising,” he almost shouted. “West German coal receives four times our subsidy and French coal three times. Added to that, our mines here in Scotland, like those in South Wales, have been starved of investment. Now of course we can purchase cheap coal scraped from the surface in South Africa or Australia, but when the cheap coal's been scooped up and taken from people who need it a deal more than us, what are we going to do?

“We need investment, not pit closures. We need a continuation of subsidies to keep our mining communities intact, not cuts. This government wants to accelerate the contraction the NCB has managed over the last thirty-five years – if you can call what they have done management. Comrades, this government, through the NCB, intends to destroy our industry and we must fight them both.”

The room was infused with a comforting murmur of approval.

As representative of the NUM executive, Jack Pugh's comments were awaited with a degree of suspicion. Their own man had been defeated for the presidency by the present incumbent. Added to that, the NUM President had helped negotiate a wage settlement in 1977 that linked pay to productivity. This favoured the Nottinghamshire
miners, whose mines were amongst the most efficient, reducing the industry's sense of solidarity. The dictum of Karl Marx that true communism would march under a banner inscribed with the words
From each according to his ability to each according to his needs
was an ideal easier to pay lip service to than support with one's own money. Besides, needs were infinite and capacity constrained.

Harvey watched Jack Pugh rise to his feet. The national organizer seemed nervous. Gone was the brash certainty born of an ideology whose legendary promises had not yet been put to the test. It might have been too soon to say, as the communist Zhou Enlai once said about the beneficial consequences of French revolutionary protest, but Jack Pugh's time horizon had clearly shortened.

He greeted his fraternal colleagues and was asked to ‘speak up' which threw him. He fumbled his expression of gratitude to the others on the podium, thanking them for their hostelry instead of hospitality. After that his customary enumeration of Marxist imperatives became confused and rambling. When he got to the centrepiece of his delivery – the announcement that the NUM President had secured agreement from the government that no pits would be closed, that the grants would be continued and that the miners' claim for a 9.3% wage increase had been agreed – his peroration that the Thatcher Government had been ‘utterly defeated' received only muted applause rather than the loud cheers he expected.

The mood of the meeting was captured better by the Scottish area president who growled, ‘She's no ready te tak us on yet, that's a'.'

Within eighteen months, the NUM President would be replaced by the left-winger, Arthur Scargill, and Joe Gormley would become a Labour peer in the House of Lords.

* * *

When Harvey sat down to write his piece he found himself
unusually stuck.
The Sentinel
could not run a headline like
Thatcher Government Forced to Back Down by Miners
, as that would smack of weakness at a time when the rest of the economy was spiralling into recession and ministers needed to hold their nerve. Neither could it responsibly proclaim,
Government Makes Tactical Retreat
, as this was a supposition which would serve only to blow the government's cover, even if it was clear to many people that that was exactly what had happened.

By the time his train pulled into London's Euston Station he had still not cracked it, even though his notepad was full of jottings and drafts. Back home, he confessed to his mother that he was starting to see the neighbourhoods which had grown up around coal, steel and the manufacture of automobiles in a fresh light.

“These are families who have built communities,” he told her, “with men who want to work and pay their way.”

“Well of course they are, Harve,” she accepted. “And didn't these come about quite naturally? Enterprising individuals found ways to produce things people wanted, and ways to pay for the work that made it come about.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That seems to have been what happened. But now we have these communities without the activities to support them.”

“And whose fault's that, dear?” she challenged.

Harvey was often silenced by his mother's directness and as he pondered her simple question, he struggled to formulate a simple answer. He could take a leaf out of the Marxist handbook and blame it on capitalist exploitation, but without capital and enterprise the communities would not have come about in the first place. He could go to the other extreme and blame it on union militancy, but men had every right to organize themselves to improve their pay and conditions of work.

“I don't know,” he conceded. “Tell me.”

“Everyone who promised those poor people they could go on living off the same patch of grass is to blame's how I see it, Harvey. And too many people believed them.”

“Our need for shamans,” murmured Harvey, thinking of his conversation with George Gilder.

“What's that, dear?”

“Oh, just something we were talking about in the office.”

“There's a basketful to go around.”

“Of blame?”

“Of course blame, dear,” she answered tetchily, irritated by her son's apparent slow-wittedness. “When the grazing's exhausted animals move on. They don't form a union and insist the grass grow.”

“But mother, we stopped being nomadic millennia ago!”

It was now Harvey's turn to sound exasperated. But Sylvia wasn't about to be deflected.

“Yes, Harve,” she said, “and when we settled we built cities in which people doing their own thing could create fresh grass all the time so that no one had to move. That's what individual freedom makes possible. It's those people set on controlling others, even for the best of intentions, who cause the problems. They are the ones to blame, Harvey – always.”

The finality of this summary indicated that her exposition of the nation's ills was over, so he retired to his room intent on finally pulling his troublesome piece together. Unorthodox his mother certainly was, but her largely uneducated views invariably hit the mark in unexpected ways.

It was not long before her influence bore fruit.

Under the headline
Let Down By Government, Let Down By Big Business and Let Down By The Unions!
, he described the hardships being faced by families whose communities had been built around single industries. At the end he reported that the government and NUM had come to an agreement and trailed the government's new policy
of creating enterprise zones. These were areas stripped of red tape, in which individuals were being encouraged to build anew so as to counter the long-term decline of their old industries.
It may be too little too late
, he wrote,
but if it puts men and women back in charge of their own lives that, at least, is something to cheer
.

For once, George Gilder did not change even a comma.

C
HAPTER

A
NDREW CHAMPION was struggling to keep up with the news. A small group of Conservatives were rumoured to be planning a leadership challenge, so bad was the economic situation in their constituencies. The Labour Party hadn't had the stomach to elect its strongest candidate as leader the previous year, opting instead for a left-wing intellectual, and a new political party – the Social Democrats – had been formed by several of its disaffected members. And as if to confirm the confusion of the times, Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army on hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison, had been elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Andrew had taken to having a Monday morning meeting with the heads of his three companies to try and get ahead of the crisis unfolding around them. Since the start of the year, each week's sales forecast for the year had had to be revised down. Overseas customers were delaying orders, some of their domestic customers were cancelling orders and several suppliers had already gone out of business. Rumours were rife about banks calling in their loan facilities as a sense of raw panic spread though the nation's manufacturing
heartland.

Driving home at the end of each day, he felt like a general confronting an escalating body count with no prospect of relief. He supposed that he should be proud of his country for having won the Eurovision Song Contest, but if he had to listen to Buck's Fizz sing ‘Making Your Mind Up' one more time he would be ready to seek sanctuary in a Trappist monastery. But the unaffected were always able to laugh and sip exotic cocktails no matter how many bombs were falling nearby.

* * *

The Industrial Revolution, which powered Britain's rise to world dominance, is often thought to have started around 1750. Its roots, however, ran far deeper, at least to the ascendancy of the Protestant Parliament of Oliver Cromwell over the monarchy during the first half of the seventeenth century. And one could reach back further still. The knowledge of Ancient Greece, which sparked what would be called Europe's Enlightenment, or interest in applied knowledge rather than religious knowledge, found its way into Europe from the Muslim world, which only came to an end on the Spanish peninsula in 1500, eight years after Isabella of Castile sent Columbus off on an adventure which would bring the New World into Europe's view.

The second half of the eighteenth century saw revolutions of every hue, not just of the industrial kind. The Seven Years War (1754–1763) pitted Britain against the Bourbon Dynasties of France and Spain, adding French North America and Spain's Florida to Britain's existing American colonies. Only twelve years later, the American Revolutionary War began which would end in 1783 with Britain's defeat and France's near bankruptcy supporting the nascent republic against its old enemy.

So potent was the mix of economic strain and combustible ideas
that the absolutism engineered by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin and exemplified by France's Sun King, Louis XIV, broke asunder with the storming of the Bastille in 1789 amid calls for
liberté, égalité, fraternité
, democracy and republicanism. But after ten years of bloodletting and class genocide, the French again opted for absolutism, this time in the guise of a military dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte.

For fifteen years, Napoleon's armies spread republicanism across Europe before being undone by the Russian winter and finally defeated in 1815 by British and Prussian forces. At the end of these Napoleonic wars, the Holy Roman Empire, that coalition of countries in Central Europe left over from Ancient Rome's western empire, had been untied, German and Italian nationalism had found their voice, Spain's hold over its Latin American colonies had been weakened and Britain elevated to the status of predominant world power.

The war's end also filled London with demobilized soldiers without work and often without homes. Added to these was an influx of economic migrants from Ireland and also from Scotland whose rebellion against English rule had been defeated at Culloden in 1746. So concerned were the authorities by the criminality that accompanied such a large number of rootless people, that a Vagrancy Act was pushed through Parliament in 1824, giving the police power to detain individuals they suspected of being vagrant and so prone to criminality.

As the government-induced recession of 1980 accelerated into depression, large numbers in Britain's most populous cities, especially amongst the ethnic minorities whose parents had been economic migrants from Britain's West Indian and African colonies, found themselves without work or the prospect of any. Inevitably, criminality rose and the police dusted off the 1824 Vagrancy Act to stop and search individuals they suspected of potential wrongdoing. This SUS law, as it came to be called, set predominantly white police
forces against predominantly non-white communities in the most economically distressed parts of England's inner cities.

In March 1981, a protest walk to Hyde Park had been organized by the inhabitants of Lambeth, a London borough, to highlight what they considered an inadequate police response to a house fire in January which had killed several black youths. Although the bulk of the protest passed off peaceably, an altercation at Blackfriars between the police and a small number of the several thousand demonstrators was played up by the national press in racist terms. One paper even ran a headline quoting a march organizer that it had been ‘a good day', which it had, next to the photograph of a police officer with a bloody nose, which the organizer almost certainly knew nothing about.

Lambeth's depressed Brixton community had developed its own Afro-Caribbean counterculture. Drug-taking, gambling, reggae and street life were its hallmarks along with a high incidence of robbery, vehicle crime, burglary and prostitution. At the beginning of April, the Metropolitan Police decided to crack down on what they saw as its growing lawlessness. Codenamed Operation Swamp, plain clothes officers moved in, stopping and searching around a thousand individuals and arresting eighty-two.

* * *

It was Friday morning. Sheldon MacDonald and his friend Chris Tigo were walking down Railton Road to fetch some groceries for Olga Tigo's wedding. The atmosphere was poisonous. Short-haired white men in plain clothes were standing at every intersection. They would not have looked more conspicuous in full battle dress.

“Something's going down, bro,” Chris said. “I'd better call Olga and tell her to keep away.”

“That's a smart thing,” Sheldon agreed. “See if the phone in that box is working.”

Chris dove into the box and Sheldon waited outside, staring into a men's clothes shop. A blue tie with light grey polka-dots caught his eye. He was a snappy dresser and wondered if what he had picked out for Olga's wedding couldn't be bettered. While imagining himself in his white shirt and dark suit with the polka-dot tie, he became aware of a van, full of men, reflected in the glass. The van stopped and he turned in time to see ten or twelve rushing towards him. He started to run.

“Not so fast, sunshine,” one of the men said, grabbing his collar, while a second caught the side of his jacket, ripping a pocket.

“My jacket!” Sheldon shouted. “Look what you've just done to my jacket!”

“Easy, black boy. It didn't suit you anyway. Now let's have a name.”

He saw Chris emerging from the phone box and heard him shout “What's up, bro?”

Four of the men broke off and grabbed Chris.

“You jungle-bunnies working as a team then?” one of the men mocked as Chris was being pinned to the ground.

“Sheldon McDonald,” Sheldon answered, ignoring the provocation, as his friend disappeared behind a wall of attacking bodies.

“What kind of name's that? You got a kilt back home?”

“They wear skirts, these primitives,” one of the men jeered.

“A wee jock must have got up his mother's,” another sneered.

Sheldon turned furiously towards the insult.

“Steady, my little lovely. Now what were you doing in front of that shop? Planning to improve your wardrobe free of charge were you?”

Sheldon heard Chris shout, “You all right, Sheldon?” and then “Man, that hurt. What the fuck did you do that for?”

Sheldon tried to free himself to get closer to his friend, but couldn't.

“Now, Mr McDonald, it's time to see what a black Scottie dog wears under his fur – strip!”

“What the fuck for?” Sheldon shouted, his anger overcoming his fear.

One of the men rammed his baton into Sheldon's stomach, winding him.

“There's no need for that, Percy,” the one who seemed to be in charge said. “Mr McDonald here is going to show us what the good Lord gave him; isn't that right, Mr McDonald?”

As Sheldon undressed, a crowd started to form and the policemen began to look nervous.

“What you stop him for?” someone shouted. “I saw him. He was waiting for his friend. He was doing nothing.”

“No, he was doing nothing,” someone else shouted. “Why don't you do your job and find some real criminals?”

The crowd, over twenty now, was closing around Sheldon standing naked next to the pile of his own clothes. The men began to pull away. The one called Percy was heard to sneer, “and I thought these coons were supposed to be big,” as another gratuitously kicked at Sheldon's clothes. “Just lay off, both of you, and get into the bloody vehicle,” the one in charge ordered.

Only then did the crowd notice that Chris was being dragged into the van. “Tell Olga,” they heard him shout. “That's Olga Tigo…”

As the men and their captive sped away, the crowd closed around Sheldon.

“You a'right, man?”

“Was that Chris Tigo? His sister's getting married Saturday, right?”

“They's complete pigs.”

“They's fucking filth.”

The comments came thick and fast, turning from concern about Sheldon and his friend into utter hatred of the authorities.

* * *

“Send an ambulance to Railton Road.”

It was now 6.00 p.m. and a black youth with a knife wound in his back was being questioned by police. After five hours, Chris Tigo had been released from the station without charge. Still seething with anger, he was helping his mother prepare for Olga's wedding. On the street below, black youths, with a peppering of white, were congregating. The pack's dendrites were setting off synaptic rumours in every direction:

“They're roughing him.”

“He's being left to bleed.”

“He was pushed down.”

“They couldn't give a fuck.”

It was looking ugly.

“Send reinforcements.”

The call went out as police, some in their twenties and a few fresh from the academy, milled around anxiously looking down at the bleeding youth and across at the gathering human storm in front of them.

When wailing, flashing squad cars burst into Railton Road and black uniforms spilled out, the invisible thread restraining the youths snapped. Two hundred or so surged forward, raw with anger. Scared policemen lashed out at any black who came near as they fell back with officers screaming at them to hold a line. After an ambulance made its way through the mêlée and carried the stabbed boy away, an uneasy stand-off was established. In police headquarters the decision was made to send in more uniforms and continue with ‘stop and search'.

* * *

It was drizzling on Saturday morning. Around midday, Olga leaves the hairdresser to go down Railton Road. By the time she reaches Burton's she realizes people are not chatting and exchanging gossip as normal. Instead there is an eerie silence. The vibrancy of the community is gone. Later, in a nearby street, Sheldon sees traffic jamming up and notices a helicopter circling overhead as he makes his way to the church.

Olga is carried to her wedding in a white, open top, antique Rolls Royce, garlanded with cream-coloured ribbons.

By 4.00 p.m., rumours are spreading that the stabbed youth, carried off by ambulance on Friday, has died as a result of police brutality.

When two officers stop and search a minicab driver in full view of the enraged crowd, anger erupts. As if trained for this moment, youths become a fighting force, hurling bricks and stones at police vehicles as they speed down Railton Road.

Every time a brick hits its mark there is a cheer.

“Hey man, dat babylon he gat it! De beats is running scared.”

Two hundred yards away, Olga is married.

After the service, she and her new husband drive towards Brixton Road for the reception but are stopped by a line of police. The driver insists and they are allowed to continue at their own risk. As the Rolls approaches the people filling the road like ants, it edges slowly forward. The crowd parts, echoing the biblical Red Sea, and the bridal couple pass through.

Shortly afterwards, widespread looting breaks out across Brixton, with white gangs from other neighbourhoods joining in.