Our debate on so many issues is conducted by ‘them’ rather than by ‘us’. When I watch programmes like Newsnight, it strikes me that those round the table are all protected from the issues they discuss. They are not just comfortable, but fireproof, as safe as armchair generals discussing distant wars. The voice of the people is rarely heard, maybe occasionally after riots when randomly selected bystanders are given their 15 minutes (in reality 15 seconds) of fame. Then back, with relief, to the studio.
How little anything has changed in the 25 years since Mrs Thatcher’s last election could not have been more empathically underlined than by the official verdict in March 2012 on the previous year’s August riots. The independent panel virtually parroted what I had heard forecast in so many poverty-stricken areas of Britain in 1987. The disadvantaged need ‘a stake in society’; ‘there are people “bumping along the bottom”’; 500,000 families have been ‘forgotten’. Many of those I met when writing this book understood only too well the widespread malaise that underpins social disorder. It was convenient for politicians to blame the disorder on acquisitiveness: what did they expect in a society that rams the supposed joys of new trainers and electronic toys down every throat, yet denies people the means to obtain them legitimately? As ever we responded harshly, with jail sentences for ‘looters’ who helped themselves to bottles of water.
The unreality of David Cameron’s ‘we are all in this together’ mantra was made crystal-clear when, just before Easter 2012, petrol-tanker drivers voted to strike. Motorists surged to the forecourts; fights broke out; garages ran dry; the mood was ugly. No, we were not all in this together. Far from it. In the Britain of today, as in the Britain of yesteryear, it is each man for himself. Petrol panic in suburbia was the comfortable classes ‘me first’ equivalent of rioting. Thatcherism is now deeply embedded in the nation’s DNA.
A business journalist told me that City trading firms were moving their offices a few hundred yards nearer the Stock Exchange in order to get information nano-seconds ahead of their competitors. If this does anything to help the rest of us and the wider economy, I for one don’t understand it. But it is, presumably, undertaken in order to make a few of the extremely rich even richer.
The royal bandwagon rolls inexorably on. Then it was Lady Di, now it is Kate Middleton. Hope springs eternal in the monarchist’s breast. There have been hiccups along the way – that three-in-a-marriage business (or was it more?), Harry’s Nazi party piece, HM’s failure to realize what her daughter-in-law meant to the sentimental British public – but nothing that another royal wedding or a jubilee cannot erase from the collective memory. The Bahraini suppression of its own people was a rather harder problem than the late-night excesses of princelings. Royals have this tendency to stick together, a bizarre form of trade unionism. At the time of William and Kate’s wedding, huge embarrassment for ‘Her Majesty’s’ government was only avoided when – at the eleventh hour and at the height of the suppression at home – the Bahraini crown prince stayed away. As I write, the King of Bahrain is due here for the Queen’s diamond jubilee. If you believe in the hereditary principle, you can’t pick and choose with whom you consort. Republicanism in Britain has fewer adherents than t’ai chi, and even a change at the top – unwelcome though that will be among many diehard royalists when the time inevitably comes – will not alter the British infatuation with a crowned head of state and a balcony of relations.
Unlike Norwegians who invested their profits from the North Sea, in 1987 we were already squandering our North Sea oil – ‘pissing it against the wall’ in the words of Aberdonian bumper stickers. We are in a perilous enough economic situation as it is: had it not been for oil we would be a basket case alongside Greece. Oilmen told me how the people who beat a path to their doors in search of work were mostly from overseas (one said he would find them curled up asleep outside his office when he arrived in the morning). Since then, the Poles have arrived in a big way on these shores. They are widely abused for ‘taking our jobs’. A farmer I know sought to do something about this. Hitherto he had employed east Europeans to pack produce for the supermarkets. In the spirit of ‘British jobs for British people’, he approached his local job centre in the hope of employing British people. Fifty showed interest, of whom five actually turned up. Four quit by week’s end, and the fifth somewhat blotted his copybook by drawing a knife on a fellow worker. Back, therefore, to the trusted and reliable Estonians and Lithuanians. A short time ago I was shadowing the Labour MP Frank Field for a magazine profile when he met five unemployed teenagers. The organizer of the gathering had had to visit their homes several times to get them there for the ungodly meeting time of 10.30. Throughout the hour we were together they texted each other and giggled, and what the courteous, concerned Field had to say was as water off a duck’s back. He asked one why she had given up a job in a café after a day. ‘The boss asked me to take the rubbish out, didn’t she?’ I can see no employer touching one of those kids: no wonder the Poles ‘take our jobs’.
The many further parallels in this book between Thatcher’s heyday and now will, I hope, jump from the page. Concerned as politicians are with the day (or more usually the minute), they are not great learners from the past. Most arguments paraded today as if they had just occurred were being kicked around a quarter of a century ago. Did the dependence on benefits (already a generation-to-generation phenomenon) sap the will to work and to embrace what the then Social Services Secretary called ‘the sheer delight of personal achievement’? Government secrecy (paranoia?), then as now, prevents us knowing what our security services do in our names. Yesteryear it was Peter Wright and his book Spycatcher; we were not allowed to read in this country though it was freely available across the globe. Now it is what our spooks get up to alongside the Americans in the ‘war on terror’. The US has changed. In these days of ‘homeland security’ my enthusiasm for the American way of life is no longer what it was when I lived there. The fall of the Berlin Wall – the greatest world-changing event since 1987 – proved not to be the end of history, but the beginning of a dolorous period of constant war. The enemy, ‘terror’, lurks in the shadows, while hundreds of thousands have died in the post 9/11 environment. Would Mrs Thatcher have ridden shotgun for George Bush as Tony Blair did? I fear and suspect so.
I wrote in 1987 that most Americans remained isolationist and wanted their overseas troops brought home. Since those two globe-altering events, the US has flexed its muscles with disastrous consequences. The war against Saddam Hussein was irrelevant. Yes, he was a tyrant, but then so, tragically, are many other vile national leaders. No benefit was derived from the invasion, the aftermath of which still haunts the wretched Iraqi people. 9/11 created a paranoia that touched the whole world. Elderly travellers are compelled to take off their shoes at airports; British citizens are extradited to life in jail without parole for alleged crimes committed on British soil; hundreds continue to die in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As a consequence of this paranoia, America is no longer at peace with itself: its politics have grown raucous, the harmony of the 1980s long lost. American friends, staying in London, had a sleepless night as they imagined bomb attacks at every street noise; they were visibly alarmed when an Afghan cab driver arrived to pick them up. This is now the common American mindset.
Thatcher was brought low by her own hubris. The first poll tax in 1380 led to the Peasants’ Revolt. It wasn’t peasants in 1990, but her ‘wet’ colleagues in pin-striped suits. The poll tax had divided the country as even the miners’ strike had not: the riots then were without doubt fuelled by pure political hatred rather than by an acquisitive tendency for new trainers. I was in the largely left-wing staff room of a large East End comprehensive when the news broke that Thatcher was stepping down. The cheer that went up from those teachers might have been heard from Limehouse to Tilbury.
I ended the first edition of this book with a downbeat prophecy, forecasting that the legacy of Thatcherism would be ‘a harshly divided societ
y’. I wrote: ‘It is not in Mrs Thatcher’s character to be a woman for all seasons.’ We older people often stand accused of looking back at a past that never was through rose-tinted glasses. In the years immediately after the Second World War, we didn’t have mobile phones, colour TV, cars jamming these islands from end to end, nightly wine-drinking in suburban homes. But we did have, or at least were moving towards, that elusive quality that Thatcher (not yet then The Iron Lady) promised. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Will we have a second chance?
A personal footnote: In my chapter on education, ‘A Little Learning’, I refer to my children, then just entering (or about to enter) a comprehensive school. The school did not have a good academic record (today, boycotted entirely by the people who can afford to live in its natural catchment area, it has a dire one), but all three children got good GCSEs and moved to a sixth-form college, where they got excellent A levels. Two went to Bristol University and one to University College London. They may have missed out on the polish on offer at fee-paying schools, and certainly missed out on the networking, blatant and cultural. But their exam results were as good as those of their peers who went private, and I hope that they understand the diversity of British society better than they would have done had their education been segregated.
ROBERT CHESSHYRE, APRIL 2012
Chapter 1
‘The Poverty of Their Own Desires’
It was 7.00 a.m., not a good hour when one has just flown the Atlantic economy class. I was stiff from spending eight hours in a seat like a straightjacket, shivery from lack of sleep, and vaguely queasy from inhaling the stale air that gathers in a Jumbo towards the end of a long flight. Half the lavatories, as ever, had been out of action, and somnambulant passengers had lined the aisles from the Irish coast till the seatbelt sign went on. Our sense of slumming it had been rubbed in by the occupation of the first-class cabin by mail bags and their escort of two security men slumbering in the wide luxury of their seats. That put us in our places. But if there is one thing worse than travelling through the night, it is the chaos of arriving before dawn.
‘BRITISH RAIL WELCOMES YOU TO GATWICK’ read a big sign; ‘London Victoria, trains depart every 15 minutes’. It was still dark, and a cutting wind drove along the buried platforms as if propelled by icy bellows. Someone – vandals? British Rail itself? – had skilfully removed the seats: the holes where the bolts had been showed mockingly in the tarmac. A loudspeaker barked: ‘British Rail regrets …’ It was one of those deliberately articulated third-person announcements that make the inefficiencies of public transport appear like acts of God. Not one but three Victoria express trains had been cancelled.
I had always enjoyed coming home. I recalled – as our train, filling with unknown yet familiar people, pursued its slow way towards London – the contentment I had felt as a small boy more than thirty years earlier when flying into Northolt Airport aboard a DC-3 of British European Airways. Then, as the plane made its approach, I had peered with high excitement to catch sight of the red-tiled roofs of Middlesex suburbia, which – drear though they might have been – to me were like a lighthouse to the returning sailor, the first glimpse of an anxiously sought land. My parents lived then in France, and it was a journey I had made three times a year for three years to return to school in England, and I had never been disappointed. My last, very much more recent, return had also been a great pleasure – a sun-filled August holiday in a borrowed house on Richmond Hill. But this was my first journey to Britain for two years, and shortly I was to resume living at home again after an absence of nearly four years.
Nothing could have tested my nerve more than arriving on a commuter train at the height of the rush hour on a bleak, cold February morning. Commuting everywhere depresses the spirit; passengers exist in limbo, their personalities temporarily on hold. Once the obviously resented disruption of the air travellers – several of them over-apologetic Americans whose tartan bags blocked the gangway – and their luggage had been absorbed, that morning’s London-bound workers resumed their quotidian routine. The elderly dozed, the young listened to headphones, from which the ‘boom-de-boom’ rhythm of percussion leaked, and those of in-between years read newspapers suitable to their station in life.
Looking round, I realized with a shock that, although I had been living in the United States for over three years, I could nonetheless make a shrewd guess at the circumstances of most of my fellow travellers – their education, their income, their prejudices, their place in the pecking order, even perhaps where they took their holidays. It was not something I had been able to do in the States – neither, several friends told me later, could Americans – and I had grown accustomed to being amongst people less easy to read. George Orwell, in his study of The English People written after the Second World War, had reached a similar conclusion: ‘The great majority of the people can still be “placed” in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance.’ The reminder that so little had changed was both comforting and alarming. I had been stimulated by living in an unpredictable and – by me at least – still largely unexplored society, but I had missed deeply the sense of belonging, of being amongst familiar, small-scale landscapes and buildings, of being with people whose outlook had been shaped by the same influences as mine had been, and of being wrapped in history and traditions that stretched in the mind’s eye back almost to the beginning of recorded time. I had, I confess, briefly considered staying in the States and seeking a further job there, but it had been a whim rather than a serious exploration of the idea. The United States had been an adventure, but Britain was home.
That Gatwick arrival was in fact the start of a preliminary visit, rather than my eventual return. I had gone ahead to scout out the territory for myself and my family; inspect our house; warn local head teachers to expect our children; dip a toe into office politics. We were due to return permanently six months later from Washington DC, where I had been the Observer’s correspondent. But this for me was the psychological moment of re-entry. From now on the questions for which there had been little time for thought for three and a half years would become incessant. What kind of a country was I returning to? What was the future for my children – at school and after? Had the British found cohesion and direction under Mrs Thatcher’s leadership? Were we a more open society? Were we less class-ridden? Were we still compassionate and tolerant? And, for me personally, how long would it take for the momentum of the United States to slow? Spies who had gone ahead, other Britons returning either to live or on holiday, deeply imbued with the expatriate outlook, had sent back dismal dispatches of overcrowding, filth, sour attitudes, inefficient shops and services, vandalism. (Twelve months later it took Mrs Thatcher a mere week in Israel to be sufficiently struck on her return by the physical squalor of the country she had then ruled for seven years to summon Richard Branson and order a national clean-up. Nearly twelve months after that, as I write this, the place is just as filthy.)
However, there was another national characteristic which I feared more than the physical squalor that I knew awaited: if anything dampened my enthusiasm for home, it was, without doubt, British insularity. Watching the commuters that morning; eavesdropping on conversations about late trains – ‘I went for the five-oh-seven last night, but they’d cancelled it’; the perils of winter holidays abroad – ‘the change in temperature’s too great. You come back and within a few days get a stinking cold’; I felt a degree of panic. A study of the news-stand at Gatwick Airport had brought to mind Ernest Bevin’s observation of forty years earlier that ‘the working class had been crucified on the poverty of their own desires’. The papers carried front-page headlines about Princess Michael; stories on football thugs; pictures of royal children; hue and cry over ‘sex fiends’; stories about ‘Dirty Den’, a television character rather than a sex fiend; one tabloid led its front page with a ‘he deceived me’ story about a professional footballer. A hurried perusal of the shelves turned up six m
agazines with front-page pictures of Princess Diana. Little had changed, certainly not the names. Little had changed either, so I was to discover, at the ‘serious’ end of public affairs. I woke on my first morning to a sycophantic radio interview with a complacent junior minister, bound to his interlocutor by a cosy conspiracy of first-name terms. Apart from Mrs Thatcher herself, there appeared then to be only three figures in British public life whose opinions were worth airing – Roy Hattersley, Norman Tebbit and (most over-exposed of all) David Owen – who were interviewed on every topic that arose, appeared, often together, on every discussion show, wrote leader-page articles, and between them set the national agenda. There was only one man of greater national consequence, Terry Wogan, the apotheosis of the prevailing national infatuation with glitz. (I am writing this eighteen months later, and the national appetite for inconsequential distraction remains insatiable. The Star, the most woeful of all our papers, yesterday ‘splashed’ with a massive picture of Princess Diana meeting the cast of ‘EastEnders’ – the ultimate ‘pop paper’ story.)
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 2
