When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  These were the symbolic irritations of coming from a capital city where events of real significance to the world took place, to one that had lost its power, but not all its delusions. In its obsession over the royal family, the nation seemed to have taken leave of its senses: ‘What’s it all in aid of?’ a character in John Osborne’s The Entertainer had asked nearly thirty years earlier. ‘Is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?’ The answer, it appeared, was an emphatic ‘Yes’.

  The other, countervailing, national obsession was, without doubt, ‘yobbism’. Inner-city districts had become ‘no go’ areas for milkmen, council workers, postmen, social workers, and (though they denied it) the police. The respectable poor trapped in these horrific zones lived nightmare lives, locked indoors after dark, mugged on their way to buy food, with drug addicts on their landings and human excrement on their stairways. The yobs themselves emerged into public view when they travelled from one ghetto to another to support soccer teams. They were vicious, ignorant, cruel, unemployable, drunk, criminal, uncaring, anti-social, beyond the pale.

  The questions, as Britain struggled to come to terms with this monstrous alienation, were who was responsible and what had gone wrong? The denim-clad yobbo, with his narrow horizons and anti-social activities, was the ugly symbol of a society that had failed to fulfil its benign aspirations. The right wing, led by Tebbit, blamed the permissive sixties: the left-wing blamed the hopelessness of the yobs’ stunted lives under Thatcherism. The middle classes had begun to build American-style ghettos: a friend had just bought a flat in a ‘safe’ area behind electronic gates – symbolically within view of the Chelsea Football Club ‘shed’, a yob citadel. The only native industry with boom potential, said one wit, was burglar alarms. Surprising though it seemed to friends reared on stories of American crime and violence, where we had lived in Washington we had seldom locked our car doors at night, and neighbours went on short holidays leaving their front door unlocked.

  A wise temporary expatriate might take the precaution of living with the implications of pending return to his native land throughout his years abroad, taking them out of mental storage occasionally, and pondering upon them. I didn’t. The new life in the United States drove out the old. I had had time for only the occasional glance over my shoulder at Britain. Of course, I missed family and friends, and the easy familiarity of being with people with whom one can take up after years as if one had simply left the room to put on the kettle. But the regret I anticipated at the loss of small pleasures – cricket, English beer, the countryside – faded swiftly before the impact of new preoccupations. (I never dreamed that baseball could take the place of cricket, but eventually it did.) Living abroad, even in an English-speaking country, was akin to plunging into a foreign language and allowing one’s own, perforce, to grow rusty. Coming home, one had to learn again the native idiom.

  I knew the aspects of American life I was going to miss – the optimism, the classlessness. It is a canard, put about by apologists for the British class system, that the United States is a class-ridden society, with snobberies undreamed of even by the English. There are small pockets of virulent class, money and ‘who-do-you-know?’ consciousness, but they mean nothing to most Americans – the wide variety of the country, the feeling, renewed almost every morning, that anything is possible means that for 70 per cent of Americans equality of opportunity is a reality: they are launched into life with enormously positive impulses. Virtually every child stays in school until he is eighteen: to leave sooner is to be branded a ‘drop-out’. An English schoolteacher, who had worked for many years in the States, wrote to me that in American schools one factor was common, ‘that was a desire to learn, to get ahead (not always perhaps in a manner of which you and I might approve), but the drive was there. And of course class distinction – still nauseously rife throughout Britain – was non-existent.’ In our Washington neighbourhood, packed with successful migrants from every corner of the States, educational and ‘class’ differences not only did not matter, but also were all but invisible.

  Michael Davie, an Observer colleague, researching his book on the Titanic, interviewed descendants of the survivors of the two working-class groups on board the liner – the steerage emigrants from Italy, Russia and Ireland and the British crew. Seventy years on, the grandchildren of the first group were to be found in law practices, corporate management, doctors’ offices across the United States; the stokers’ grandchildren were still living in terraced houses on the back streets of Southampton and Liverpool – only now there are no ships left to stoke. Britain was still a nation of village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons.

  I was, of course, aware of the harsh realities at the bottom of American society. Under Ronald Reagan, as under Mrs Thatcher, poverty and genuine destitution have grown sharply. As a child I had often wondered what it would have been like to be a Victorian, when the gap between rich and poor was so great. By the time I left America, in some part at least I knew. Other American ‘immigrants’ – those brought in slave ships from Africa – had not fared as well as the Titantic survivors. Inner-city and rural black people are not among the 70 per cent of equal citizens. A ‘southern’ city like Washington is still effectively segregated in many ways. Fellow workers go home at six o’clock to different parts of the town. A study carried out shortly before I left found that a distinctive black argot was becoming more common in urban ghettos. Many black children have not spoken with a white person by the time they go to school. Homeless kids go hungry, and grimy vagrants roam the streets of major cities, cheek by jowl with some of the most affluent people in the world. Many black people are wealthy, but the majority – except those blessed with supreme sporting talents – are still locked out of the American Dream.

  In Washington, I had toyed with the idea of starting a business, which in retrospect was little more than a jeu d’esprit. However, I mentioned it to my accountant while he was doing my dreary (and to him piffling) tax returns. Immediately he came alive, thrusting the tax bumph to one side. Where were the premises? What was the pedestrian ‘traffic’? ‘How much capital could I raise?’ I said I had a modest London suburban home. ‘Good, sell it.’ He called another client in the same line of business to organize a meeting. My problem, he was telling me within twenty minutes, was going to be keeping my eye on the ball once the business was up and running. One had to be careful of managers. That night, at a party, I told the story to a man I knew slightly – mainly through having children at the same school. He was in the head-hunting business, but apparently also had access to venture capital. How much would I need to get launched? My best guess was $100,000. ‘I could raise you $200,000 within seven days.’ ‘On what basis?’ ‘Because I know you.’ If I had told my English accountant that I was thinking of starting a business, he would probably have called for men in white coats. But, at the very least, like a detective warning me of my rights, he would have pointed out that I had no experience of that or of any other sort of business; that four out of five new businesses go bust within two years; that by selling my home, I would ensure not only that I would be bankrupt, but that my family would be homeless.

  The American bond is the pursuit of success. Reagan could state without being howled down: ‘What I want to see above all else is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. That’s the thing we have, and that must be preserved.’ What he meant was not just the log-cabin-to-mansion American Dream of writers such as Horatio Alger, but something like the pioneer concept of the right to bear arms. Individual wealth in the American mind is a defence against tyranny. Reagan would probably replace ‘the pursuit of happiness’ in the American Constitution with ‘the pursuit of riches’.

  I knew that whatever Thatcherism might have achieved in bringing greater efficiency to British industry, it could not in so short a time have changed the fundamental nature of a deeply cautious and anti-entrepreneurial people. In simple terms, an American, w
atching a Cadillac drive by, is likely to say to himself, ‘In ten years I’ll have one of those’; a Briton, seeing a Rolls-Royce, will spit and say, ‘Bloody capitalist’. (He’d probably be wrong: it was no doubt bought with inherited money, still the largest source of wealth in a country in which, when it was last counted, 1 per cent owned 21 per cent of the wealth, and 50 per cent owned 93 per cent of the national goodies, which doesn’t leave a great deal for the rest.) A Washingtonian in a full-time job – on Capitol Hill, in an attorney’s office, as a journalist – may well have a part-time commercial interest, a share perhaps in a restaurant, or be expanding his options, like one White House reporter I knew who was taking a business course. A British middle-manager will sit tight in his job and carry on commuting, unlikely to do anything bold unless his hand is forced, as it increasingly has been, by impending redundancy. ‘Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension,’ wrote Louis MacNeice, and it is ever so.

  I knew all this, and the Gatwick journey had reminded me, if I needed it, that I was returning to an overcrowded, dirty, sluggish corner of Europe. ‘Isn’t everything small?’ my children said when they returned. The road at the bottom of our street is designated the ‘South Circular’, and bears all the through traffic from south London to the west (and back again): it is an ordinary shopping street, two carriageways wide, narrower than one of the suburban roads we had lived on in Washington. The London ‘supermarket’ seemed Lilliputian, with inadequate space between the aisles, and a pathetic square foot on which to heap intended purchases. Washington garages were bigger than London living rooms.

  Britain had obviously been changed by the often dramatic events of the previous four years. One assumption that I had been raised on – that no government would long survive if unemployment rose above one million – was dead and buried. Weren’t you surprised, several leftish acquaintances asked, not to find Britain in flames? No, I could answer in all honesty. We may have begun to hate with a frightening intensity those with whom we disagree, but we will endure real privations with bovine patience. Orwell had watched the poor coping with the Great Depression: ‘Instead of raging against their destiny, they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.’

  But what I was not ready for was the deterioration in the daily quality of life, in people’s tolerance for each other. The national cohesion that had been built so painstakingly in the post-war years was fragmenting fast. People were harder, more selfish, less caring, less ‘wet’. The hard right had captured not just the political high ground, but also the ‘intellectual’ and moral high ground. Whatever the economic gains of Thatcherism, they appeared to carry a high human price tag. To be poor was to have failed: pensioners and the unemployed, drawing their money from the Post Office, were a legitimate object of scorn, even hatred, to the stamp-buying classes who read Auberon Waugh. Comfortable Britain did not wish to know of the privations of these failures. Waugh himself wrote that ‘those of us who live in happier circumstances would prefer to forget, or at any rate shelve [society’s backwaters], just as we tend to forget or shelve the daily horrors of life in Chile or the Soviet Union’.

  There had been stirring events while we were gone. The Falklands War had been fought and won – an enterprise for which I had little stomach but for which I nonetheless found myself congratulated in America. (I was also congratulated, even less logically, on the birth of Prince William. Strangers in lifts, hearing my English accent, would grip me by the hand or slap my shoulder. It seemed churlish to say that I had nothing to do with either triumph.) Mrs Thatcher, who did enter my life from time to time when she came to lecture Ronnie (on one occasion at Camp David it was reliably reported that she spoke for forty minutes without the Great Communicator getting a word in), had been re-elected with a wondrous majority. Miners had staged their futile strike against the forces of history, bringing the worst out of themselves and out of Mrs Thatcher. Teachers, reflecting the sour spirit of the times, had withdrawn their enthusiasm, which, in many cases, appeared likely to remain withdrawn. And the political leaders of Liverpool and certain London boroughs had retracted their consent to be governed, plunging their communities into anarchy and destitution.

  All this I had seen through foreign eyes, taking my news from the American papers, which had treated the Falklands like a Gilbert and Sullivan revival. The American superpower cheered itself hoarse at the sight of British fighting men sailing halfway round the world to defend the sovereignty of inhospitable rocks. (Not for them the cynicism of Jorge Luis Borges: ‘It’s like two bald men fighting over a comb.’) Lord Carrington – much admired in the States for his aristocratic sang-froid – actually resigned, an acceptance of responsibility almost unknown in Washington. Maggie’s war was like a clarion call from another age.

  American journalists headed for the British pub, where they found all manner of wondrous British dramatis personae who knew what was wanted of them. ‘When I was a lad, England was a large, powerful country,’ analysed a factory inspector, ‘now we’re not.’ The report continued: ‘He spoke, caressing a pint of beer. Then he looked up sharply, “If Churchill was still in the government, there’d have been some trouble,” he said with conviction.’ There had been a certain amount of trouble even without Churchill. A reporter on The New York Times travelled to Cornwall, where he found Heather Crosbie: ‘white-haired and pink-cheeked, who put down her glasses and said she was “shattered.” Sitting in her little whitewashed Cornish inn, with a swan floating silently past on the creek outside, she told a visitor that she and her friends had “never thought it would come to this, in our day, over something so very far away.”’ Little old ladies, lovable cockneys, who chided the Yanks for being late once again, stout-hearted yeomen who wouldn’t take an Argie invasion lying down: this was the Britain of Pinewood Studios, of the tourist posters. An expatriate would have to be abroad for a lifetime to swallow that lot.

  But once the bunting had been taken down, and the United States had staged its own little island triumph with the invasion of Grenada, the American media returned to another image. ‘BRITAIN IN THE 1980S: PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY IN DECLINE’ ran the headline over a long analysis in The New York Times. I began to notice that the word ‘decline’ was seldom far from the word ‘Britain’ in headlines. The articles were built with common materials – union bloody-mindedness, wooden-headed management, idle, unmotivated workers, antiquated technology, loss of empire, loss of pride, ridiculous class barriers. The aristocracy were no longer quaint: Britain had become impoverished and backward, the industrialized community’s first candidate for Third World status. Mrs Thatcher was depicted as right-minded and tough, but overwhelmed or betrayed by the frailties and intransigence of her people.

  By the time I returned, the focus had become sharper, ‘A DIVIDED SOCIETY’ had become the new headline over stories which drew comparisons between north and south, between private and public, between rich and poor. ‘The contrasts’, wrote one journalist, beneath the headline ‘LUXURY AND BLEAKNESS IN BRITAIN’, ‘are stark in Britain today … wealth pouring into central London fuels a real estate boom to rival anything in New York or Boston. Estate agents talk of family houses, nothing special, going for the pound equivalent of $1 million and up. The shops have never seemed so full of luxuries. But in the north of England, only 150 miles from London, the unemployed loiter in bleak streets.’

  Britain was being painted as a country that had not just lost its way, but had also lost its charms. Transatlantic television audiences were horrified by the nightly violence and hatred of the miners’ strike. Institutions that liberal Americans admired, like the health service and universities, were reported to be cracking up. This decline, said the writer quoted above, ‘has led middle-class people increasingly to seek private substitutes’. The Heysel Stadium disaster, when Liverpool football fans ran amok and dozens were killed, added a further unpalatable dimension. British youth had become violent and antisocial. Dan Rather, the anchorman for CBS News, a
rgued in an emotional (and self-righteous) broadcast that Americans should no longer look to Britain for leadership in civilized values.

  Only seven years earlier, another American journalist, Bud Nossiter, had concluded a posting to London with a book with the title of Britain: A Future That Works. In 1978 Nossiter thought we had it right – first into the industrial revolution and first out. Such priorities had seemed sane then: better to fish on a Saturday morning than to bust a gut earning overtime payments. That was the theory that had been cosily adopted since the discovery that the inefficient manufacturing industries of Britain could not compete internationally. Perhaps we would not have as many television sets as the Japanese, cars as the Germans, or such fine homes as the Americans, but we would muddle through, feeling superior to those regimented foreign workers. Services – they were the answer – pop music, fashion and banking. Something would come along.

  My generation – I was born during the Second World War – had subscribed to the Nossiter thesis. It did seem possible to live well without unseemly effort. There was a further assumption: Britain was moving, even though more slowly than most would have wished, towards certain shared goals. An unparalleled spirit of common purpose had been created by war and austerity – we, the British people, were, at last, all in it together. This time, unlike the twenties – ‘homes fit for heroes’, and all that – we would not squander our chances. The welfare state and the mixed economy underpinned fundamental expectations. Everything was going to get better. The ‘something’ that Edward VIII when Prince of Wales had so quixotically wanted was at last being done: slum dwellers were moved to live amongst green fields; children were liberated from satanic secondary-modern schools; working-class families swapped Blackpool for the Costa del Sol; cars all but replaced trains and buses. Full employment for those who wished to work and the abolition of poverty were taken for granted. We may, as the historian Corelli Barnett has argued, have been putting the cart before the horse, creating Utopia before we had created the means to pay for it, but we had a great deal of collective sin to expiate – child labour, sweat shops, slums, the Great Depression – and we wished to get on with it.