When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (7 page)

I went on a pulse-taking mission to an industrial area of Pennsylvania. In Britain such a region, with its redundant heavy industry, its high unemployment, its working-class or blue-collar culture (pool halls, ethnic clubs, determinedly masculine bars:
Deerhunter
country), would have returned a Labour MP regardless of the economic climate. This Pennsylvania district was represented by a young Republican congressman, and supported Reagan. ‘Why?' I asked. ‘Because,' answered a redundant steel-worker, ‘he's a regular guy; he could be on the town bowling team.' For all Reagan's imperfections, he is the common man, trusted to understand the fears and aspirations of other common men. If you had said to those blue-collar workers that Reagan would be coming to supper, they would have been delighted, anticipating a memorable evening of baseball and Hollywood anecdotes. If you said to a British working-class family that Mrs Thatcher was coming to tea, they'd bolt the front door and flee over the garden fence for asylum elsewhere until the all-clear was sounded.

A government headed by a ‘regular guy' is more likely to be trusted than one headed by someone who has clawed his way through a deeply partisan system. (This is a general rule, I hasten to add, frequently breached in the past twenty years by dishonest or incompetent US presidents.) The result is an acceptance, which appears to have been lost in Britain, of the general direction in which society is moving. In the United States, I encountered virulent public antagonism on only two subjects. One was abortion, about which moral and religious passions run deep; and the other was Northern Ireland, ‘imported' whenever Mrs Thatcher or Prince Charles visited the country. In Britain, polarization intensified while I was away. People seem to hate those with whom they disagree, as evidenced by the miners' strike and Wapping. I have had virulent letters from
Observer
readers who disagreed with something I wrote or someone I quoted. One person, on reading the comments of a wartime bomber pilot on the city of Winchester, its cathedral and mellow medieval buildings – ‘This is what people fought for, why they flew aeroplanes during the war. If it was worth flying, it was for this – the England worth preserving' – wrote that he wished that Hitler's bombs had flattened Winchester.

After an article about an unemployed man in the Midlands, who dared to confess that he had twice voted Conservative, I received a shoal of hostile letters, as well, it is fair to add, as highly supportive ones, some offering the family help. I had described the man as ‘one of the bulldog breed'. One correspondent wrote: ‘They've had it too good for too long, and it's about time the bulldog suffered. Then maybe he'll have more sympathy with the so-called underdogs who have never had a slice of the cake and never will.' A second said: ‘What right have they to come whingeing to the British public over their troubles, when in my opinion they deserved everything they got.' So much for our common humanity.

This declining tolerance has spilled over into everyday life. The British even drive more aggressively than they did. The once common British saw of ‘giving credit where credit's due' no longer seems to have any validity. The chief executive of a northern new town said: ‘A lot of people do want to get things back to where they ought to be. However, a lot don't unless they get the kudos, so they set themselves against it. Some actually don't want to see things improve: their role in life is to keep things festering. We are retreating into tribal divisions.' That seemed a fair, if horrifying, summary of the Britain I found on my return.

I had been in Easington Colliery in the Durham coalfield only a few hours, talking to officials of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in their snug, creosoted hut at the pit gates. On one wall was a series of blown-up black and white pictures of the village. One of these showed tiny figures stooped on the beach scrabbling for coal. Slightly surprised, I asked whether much of this coal-gathering still went on. ‘Take a walk under the railway when you leave here,' said a miner. So I did, past a gaggle of garages and allotment huts that looked like a squatters' town, and past piles of filth and household rubbish. A second low, cavernous bridge was guarded by a barred steel barricade which would have stopped a small tank: it was, I learned, to prevent the coal-gatherers taking vehicles onto the beach, although they could drive on to it some miles to the south and make their way back to Easington Colliery at low tide. A squad of cleaners with high-pressure hoses and detergents was removing crude daubings from beneath this second tunnel. One way, a muddied track, led towards an overhead colliery conveyor belt, and the other, a well-made path, nursed the cliff top.

From the edge I could see dozens of men bent on the task of retrieving the sea coal: a fire, around which those drying out their sodden clothes had gathered, burned beneath the conveyor, and, immediately below where I stood, two ancient lorries were backed into the waves, each surrounded by men armed with shovels, who dug energetically in the shallow water. Further out the fierce wind whipped up venomous, coal-stained waves, and a small fishing boat was pitching and tossing some distance from the shore. The beach was as black as a coal tip, which is literally what it was. Later I was amazed to see men angling in the murky waters: one would have imagined that such a spoiled sea would have destroyed all living creatures.

A middle-aged miner appeared at my shoulder, and was obviously amused by the impact upon a visitor of a daily routine which the village took for granted. He had with him a fine collie, which barked with frustration at his master's stopping to talk to this stranger until silenced by being put on a lead. (Dogs and men are inseparable in the Durham coalfield, but few miners have such handsome pedigree animals as this collie: more typical is the tiny mutt I had seen peeping from beneath the denim jacket of a young miner waiting at a bus stop.) ‘You should see the lads in the summer when they strip down,' said my companion, watching two young coal-gatherers crest the cliff top pushing a brakeless bike between them, ‘they've bodies like prize-fighters, lovely builds on them.' He added, as if I might dispute it: ‘Work like a horse at two pounds a bag: they didn't get that coal for nowt. Their lungs are bursting by the time they get back to the top of the cliff. A lot of the lads still owe money off the strike.'

The workforce, he said, was demoralized; had the stuffing knocked out of it by the strike, which had then been over for eighteen months. Men in their forties were selling out their jobs for £1,000 per year of service. What were they going to do now? ‘Nothing: there's nothing to go to in the north-east. It's like Germany after the war. We've got to start again. The government has got to pump money in to open a few factories. There's no work for the youngsters: it's bloody awful for them.' And he laughed harshly at the memory of a Conservative MP who had recently attracted publicity by living on the dole for a week. ‘He ought to try it for a bloody year.'

As the miner left, his collie finally liberated to joust against the wind, two more men appeared pushing a bikeload of coal. They were deeply wary. ‘How much do you get for it?' ‘We wouldn't know: we bunk it.' One, an ex-miner with one gold earring, heaved the bike towards the shanty town of huts, and the other loosened up, though he said fiercely, ‘I don't want my name in your book,' as if there was some way I could divine his name from his sooty face. They would return to the beach, he said, for another bikeload: although it was so cold I could scarcely write a note, to them it was a ‘good day'. It depended on the wind. Sometimes there wasn't a nut of coal on the beach; at other times you could get thirty bags in a day, no problem. Later a friend would bring a three-wheeler truck, and they would hawk the coal round a housing estate.

Easington Colliery is where any film-maker who wants to capture the raw authenticity of a northern pit village should take his cameras. The air is pungent with the sooty fumes from a hundred coal fires. The pit itself, opened in 1910 when German freezing technology first enabled drilling through water-bearing limestone, lies between the black beach and the bottom of the steep main street, named Byron Street, and (further up the hill) Seaside Lane, a designation which mocks the concept of the seaside having anything to do with pleasure. The colliery spews its waste along an overhead conveyor, dumping it on to the margins of the sea. With every hundred tonnes of rock and stone are intermingled six tonnes of coal, trapped in the washing process which winnows the valuable black carbon from the rocky dross.

When I first saw ‘Coals', his bicycle was propped against a graffiti-stained bus shelter and he was sitting on the kerb, his back bowed with obvious fatigue against a wind that howled down the hill driving high clouds towards the slate-grey North Sea. He wore an orange wool hat and an elderly donkey jacket above jeans, which were black with damp coal dust, and muddy Wellington boots, and he gazed at the world asquint, half through and half over a pair of thick spectacles that rested partway down his nose. He was fifty-four and thick-set; his awkward, square body that of a man who had laboured hard but was nonetheless – perversely and unfairly – unhealthy, exhausted rather than fit. His skin was red and veined and flaky, and he showed at least two days' growth of beard. His wife, he said, had left him many years ago, and he lived with a 26-year-old son who had been unemployed for nine years, all the young man's ‘working' life; their diet was bread and butter, fish'n'chips and strong northern beer. His resting bike was carefully stacked with four large plastic bags of coal, three blue and one bright orange, flattening its worn tyres nearly to the rim. Was I, he asked with deep suspicion, looking at my relatively couth attire of blue windcheater and grey flannels, from the ‘Nash'? If I were, he said, he was ‘finished'.

Without having heard the term before, I could guess what he meant. The ‘Nash' – short for National Insurance and otherwise known as the ‘dolies' – are, I learned later, dreaded investigators from the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), who lie in wait for the likes of Coals, the men who eke out a meagre supplement to their state benefits by trawling the black beaches for nuggets of coal. If the dolies can prove this sea coal is being sold – it fetched then between two and three pounds a bag when sold door-to-door – they can stop those benefits (in Coals' case fifty-six pounds a fortnight) and haul the beachcombers into court. A triumph for the hard-working taxpayer over the shiftless, workshy scrounger. Christmas was coming and the investigators, an official at a local unemployment centre told me, had been ‘having a bean feast down there on the beach'.

‘Coals' – it was the only name he was prepared to give, though he did allow me to load his bike and his precious bags into the back of my estate car and drive at least close to his home – was nowhere near as organized as the other two men. He spoke about getting a van for £250, but I sensed it was a romantic notion indulged in to while away the agonizing hours of his daily haul. He could certainly have done with a vehicle. When I had discovered him, he was only one mile into a six-mile push to his home, much of it uphill. He had left at seven o'clock, well before light on a northern December morning, and, now that I had given him a lift, he would be able to make a second trip. He found companionship on the beach – ‘we bike lads stick together' – and a community round the fire with which his home life obviously could not compete.

He told me that, after working in the Hartlepool docks, he had become a miner in his forties. He quit after seeing his best friend killed ‘straight out' by a rockfall ten yards away from him. He had tried farm labouring for a time, but reckoned he was exploited. The last I saw of him was his stumpy figure pushing his bike up yet another hill in the incongruous modern surroundings of Peterlee, a new town a few miles from Easington. The veracity of much of what he had to say was hard to judge. But what was undoubtedly true was that, in middle age and poor physical shape, he was desperate enough to undertake a Herculean task, seven days a week if the coal were there – sometimes twice daily, to make a weekly sum that would scarcely buy him a pair of trousers in a central London store. What was also true was that no industry would have been allowed to despoil the beaches of Sussex as the coal industry has been allowed to despoil these Durham beaches, and that if several hundred residents of Brighton were forced to spend twelve hours a day bent double in the surf, garnering what amounts to waste in order to make enough money to keep their families in decent rather than indecent poverty, the scandal would not be tolerated by either parliament or press. Those who equate unemployment with being workshy should try pushing one of those bikes up the rutted path from the beach, and those who shake their heads over the ‘black' economy should try living on the dole and contemplate finding a job in an area where it is not unknown for seven hundred people to go after one vacancy.

By chance, a few days after I returned from Durham, Mrs Thatcher made one of her rare, and clearly distasteful, forays north of the Trent. A year earlier, on a visit to Newcastle, she described northerners as ‘moaning minnies'. Like other spineless, disadvantaged groups in Britain, they had, according to the harsh tenets of new Conservatism, only themselves to blame for whatever misfortunes they might suffer. Responding on this occasion to a complaint from the Manchester Chamber of Commerce (presumably not a body comprised of Militant supporters) that the government was doing nothing to narrow the widening north-south gap – ‘We search in vain,' said the Chamber's president, ‘for some indication that the government is adapting its policies to take account of the problem' – Mrs Thatcher described the divide as a ‘myth'. There were, she added, ‘areas of difficulty' throughout the country. Which is true, but it so happens that a vast majority of those areas, where the difficulties are particularly profound, are north of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel.

Newcastle University's Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) in 1985 produced a league table of 280 communities in Britain, judged by such yardsticks as the change in numbers employed over a ten-year period and by car ownership, which revealed that forty of the wealthiest fifty towns are in the south – those outside included Aberdeen, then still enjoying the oil boom, and such special towns as Harrogate in the Yorkshire Dales and Kendal in the Lake District. It also found that only five of the poorest fifty were south of the Midlands. The most prosperous town in the north-east was Hexham – at number ninety-eight on the scale! Consett, a few miles to the north of Easington, was at the bottom of the league, a poverty ranking confirmed a year later by a building-society survey of house prices. The people of this former steel town were, I was told, sick to death of the continuous trail of sociologists, journalists and European television teams that this unwanted distinction brought them. The Department of Employment's own job census, published early in 1987, showed that 94 per cent of the jobs lost during the first seven years of the Thatcher government were in the north, Scotland, the Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the same period the south-east had lost only 1 per cent of employment, and East Anglia had actually gained 3 per cent. The census revealed a 28 per cent national drop in manufacturing and construction jobs between 1979 and 1986 – a loss of two million jobs – the brunt of which had been born in the regions. (Japan increased employment in those categories by 4·9 per cent over the same period.) More than two thirds of the new service jobs created during the Thatcher years were in the south-east.

Devastating evidence of the harmful effects of the north-south gap was produced in the autumn of 1986 by Professor Peter Townsend of Bristol University. His report, on behalf of the Northern Regional Health Authority, made the overwhelming connection between the kind of social inequality suffered in such places as Easington, and life-threatening ill health. He published mortality figures – linked to joblessness, poor housing, low birth rates and overcrowding – which showed that 1,500 people a year die prematurely in the northern region from deprivation, and 13,800 suffer from permanent sickness or disability who would be healthy if they lived in more favoured areas of the country. Townsend compared the health records of the populations of 678 local government wards: six of the unhealthiest twenty-five were in the district of Easington, including the winner and/or loser, the village of Wheatley Hill, a community devastated by the closure of its pit. The report itself attracted a certain amount of attention, but was propelled into the national limelight by Edwina Currie, who had just been appointed a junior health minister by Mrs Thatcher (with whom she shares a birthday and much else). Mrs Currie pooh-poohed the connection between poverty and ill health, blaming the mortality figures on northern ignorance and a penchant for chips, booze and fags. ‘My family grew up in Liverpool, and they didn't have two beans'— presumably she was speaking figuratively – ‘but as a result of good food, good family and good rest, they grew up fit and well. The problem very often for people is, I think, just ignorance.'

I went to Easington to give a local habitation and a name to the nebulous concept of the north-south divide. Easington district council, fifteen miles south of Sunderland, includes most of Durham's remaining coalfield in scattered villages along and near the North Sea coast, together with the new town of Peterlee, which was built after the war to provide better housing for miners and factory work for their wives. I chose it specifically because it was the home area of a group of ten school-leavers, all bright boys with O levels and CSEs, who were about to head south for two years to the Thames Valley town of Slough to train as engineers on the government's Youth Training Scheme (YTS). No local employer was able to offer them both training and the high probability of a job thereafter, while in Slough firms were crying out for trainees, 90 per cent of whom secured permanent work when their time was up. I visited both Easington and Slough to see at first hand the mismatch between two communities, both of about 100,000 people, which illustrated much about Britain's chronic economic imbalances. In Easington, the YTS ‘Job Link' was a controversial scheme. ‘Bloody disgraceful,' said John Cummings, a miner and leader of the council who was elected a few months later as Labour MP for a constituency once held most improbably by Manny Shinwell. He interpreted it as a victory for the hated Tebbitite ‘on yer bike' philosophy. Jobs, say Labour stalwarts, should be brought to the people, not people to the jobs. (I was told of one trade unionist who argued that the offshore oil industry ought to be moved to the coast of Durham rather than local people being compelled to travel to Aberdeen!)