There is No Alternative (38 page)

If Brian and Harry are willing to concede that the economics of nationalized coal made no sense, I ask, why do they continue to maintain that Thatcher's policies were misguided?

Brian suggests that I am looking at it the wrong way: I am prioritizing economic efficiency, a typical American failing. “What I'm saying is,” he says, “where Thatcher goes wrong, she sees it in solely economic terms. If the market is all, and the workers are unprotected—there's a feeling about protecting your poor, which you feel fundamentally in the writings of Jefferson, you feel fundamentally in the writings of Thomas Paine, even more, and the inspiration of America, which you don't feel now. You know. So, and Thatcher is of that ilk, I think.”

We digress for a while, arguing (in a good-natured way, they are both good sports) about American history and the American trade union movement. Then I steer the discussion back to the impact of Thatcher's policies. “Some of the questions can't be answered,” says Brian, “because in one sense, the world is moving on very rapidly. But I don't think she was a long-term planner at all. She was good for a scrap in the Falklands, right? Yeah.”

“Yeah. There ain't any bloody planners. I mean, we were good for a scrap in bloody Iraq!” adds Harry.

“We were!” Brian agrees.

“But we're not good at fuckin' ‘What do we do after that?'” says Harry. “No exit strategy at all there! If you go down to Airedale now, there's still a similar educational standard to what when I were goin' to the pit, as it were. But there's no bloody pits
now, are there? . . . If me father came back and saw that, he wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't believe what had come here before it, and now it were gone, as it were. I'm just wondering, if there's this big change in my generation, how big a change is there going to be in the next generation? Is it gonna be a lot better? You know, it's all right saying there's wealth and prosperity. There's a lot of kids down there that are wealthy and prosperous. You need to be. But there's a lot of kids down there that are stuck, almost like bloody Victorian kids with their faces pressed up against the window. 'Cause they ain't got the bloody money to use it, anyway. But it looks nice. So yeah, if you go down, like I said, down there, there's a lot more crime, corruption, thieving. It woulda been almost unheard of, in my early life. Drug problems. Drink problems.”

“To what do you attribute the rise in crime, thieving, drugs, drink?” I ask.

“Lack of work. Lack of vision. Lack of some aim in life.”

“Why is there no aim in life?”

“Because aspirations aren't there. It's all right if you're born in a middle-class family that's got aspirations. Education is a thing you get directed at. Education for its own benefit, to start with. But then towards your own future in life. When you're born to a miner that's never worked for the last twenty years, what's your aspiration there? What's your incentive? Where do you get your lead from, as it were? The only place you get it is from outside.”

“If the mines were still there, would there be any aspiration other than to work as a miner?”

“Um—there'd a been some. There'd a been some. Not all miners produce miners' sons. A lot of miners advocated, ‘You'll work anywhere but in here.'”

“So why isn't that still the case?” I ask. “I'm not convinced yet that this has anything to do with the pit closures. You're talking about lack of aspiration, you're talking about alcoholism. And I can see the alcoholism just getting off at the train station—”

“Yeah, but you're comin' from a direction with no bloody knowledge of such things, I should think.”

“Which direction is that?” I ask.

“Well, you're a middle-class, educated person.”

In Britain, this line is used as a conversation-stopper. As one British woman from a working-class background put it to me, when it comes to political debate, being from the working classes functions like a Get Out of Jail Free card. The card does not work well on Americans who are indifferent to the British class structure, however, and more to the point, if I were coming from a direction with a lot of bloody knowledge of these things, why would I bother to come all the way to Yorkshire to ask
his
opinion about them? “That's why I'm asking you to explain it to me,” I say.

To his credit, Harry laughs. “You got—not just a family, not just an extended family. You got a village, a town, an area that's grown up with a certain aspect in life, a certain thing that is almost set in bloody stone. That's what you do. And all of a sudden it's not. It's not what you do. But the education system . . . it's the same quality, I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. There's nobody from Airedale school going to college. There's certainly none going to bloody university. There's no drive towards getting 'em there. There's no drive to getting anything further than sixteen. You come out of school at sixteen, and you're either looking for a low-skilled, low-wage job somewhere, or you're going nowhere, because your father's not worked for twenty years. He may not have worked for ten years, he may not have worked for five years. But certainly the direction that you're getting from your family would be little.”

“How do you fix that?”

“How do you fix that? It's going to take bloody time. And education.”

“But how do you get education, if no one in your family is telling you, ‘Get an education'?”

“It's true. It's a bloody hard point, is that.”

I am sympathetic to the point he is making. Middle-class people tend to value education. But the arrow of causality goes in two directions. People who value education tend to become middle-class.

I don't know what the solution is. No one does, if they are honest. I certainly can see this issue from his side. The men whose fathers and grandfathers powered the industrial revolution in Britain—men who spent their lives crouched in those filthy mines—were told that they were no longer needed or valued. Many of them were close to retirement age, well past the age when people naturally learn new skills, take new risks, become entrepreneurs. They were given incomprehensible speeches about monetarism and market economics. They weren't asking, in their view, for something unreasonable—just for the right to earn a living by their own labor in the only way they knew how.

Which image is more repugnant? Is it that of a middle-aged man, his body wrecked from a life of hard labor, being told that he must now find a new job, a new city, a new way of life far from his friends and from everything he and his family have ever known?

Or is it the image of Harry, at the bottom of a coal mine, tracing images in dust on the wall with his finger?

It has been a pleasant morning, and I have greatly enjoyed speaking to Brian and Harry. But finally I say it: Harry's life hardly seems to me an irrefragable argument against Thatcherism. They have been telling me that Thatcher's policies were a disaster. If they want me fully to appreciate what they mean, I need to meet someone who isn't doing so well.

They decide to introduce me to Johnny. Johnny, Harry explains, was a ripper. The ripper is a ripper of rock. “Basically, you're blowing that rock face, charging it with explosives, you're blowing it down, and you're shifting it with a gang of five, usually, shifting that with shovels. Johnny were a guy with a shovel that shifted this bloody rock every day.
Hated
it with a vengeance. You know,
the conditions were the thing that bothered him up. The dust. The water. And the heat, the temperature were . . . tropics with dust, muck. So not very good conditions.”

“No,” I agree.

“So he hated that with a vengeance. And I'll allus remember when the pits closed, 'cause he were one that would say, ‘I wish they'd blow this bloody pit up.' And I bet within six months of'em closing the pit, the next conversation I had with him: ‘If they were openin' Fryston tomorra, I'd dig it out with a bloody teaspoon.'”

Thus did we set out to find Johnny the Ripper in his garden allotment in the Yorkshire countryside.

Johnny, I had to concede after meeting him, is not doing well.

Yorkshire, Middle o' Nowhere: