When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  People would become healthier, better educated, more cultured; class divisions would erode, creating a modern, technocratic, meritocratic society, softened by retaining the best of our traditions. It was unwise to take it too far – unwise to take anything too far: look at the Swedes with their high suicide rate – but forty years after the war there would be in Britain a new society as close to an earthly paradise as flawed humanity could achieve. As people became healthier, the cost of the National Health Service (the NHS) would diminish; as schools improved, there would cease to be a market for fee-paying education. Owning the means of production would instil diligence and pride into the working man. Britain would never again be a world power, but we could show the rest of the world the middle way between the materialism of the United States and the dismal, totalitarian equality of the Soviet Union. Equality of opportunity would be a reality – scholarship boys like playwright Dennis Potter and television presenter Brian Walden had broken from their under-privileged redoubts to the commanding heights; now every girl and boy of ability would pour through the breach.

  It was taken on trust that British institutions, the British political system and the consensus that underpinned them could deliver the society desired by British people. But the fractured, disagreeable seventies disabused people. Consensus was buried; the British people had lost their way and lived in a Britain without maps. Mrs Thatcher was elected in the hope that a determined woman who knew her mind could restore the certainties we, the British people, had mislaid. With varying degrees of enthusiasm we came to terms with a new realism. Managing directors could no longer seal chronically unproductive agreements with their workforces before lunch, and then head for the golf course. Workers could no longer expect a measurable rise in living standards each year, and start washing an hour before the bell rang. Fishing on Saturday mornings after all bore a heavy price tag. While I was in Washington DC, Britain for the first time began to import more manufactured goods than she exported. In the autumn of 1985, a House of Lords committee forecast the collapse of manufacturing, which, it said, would be followed – once North Sea oil is exhausted – by virtual national bankruptcy, bringing with it social and political turmoil.

  However, although by the time I returned very little was any longer being manufactured in Britain that you could eat off, sit on, drive, watch or listen to, money was being made in some mysterious way. Nightly, in between the City scandals, financial reporters told of fresh Stock Exchange records. The old folk who used to live on our street had mainly been replaced by yuppies. There were Mercedes, BMWs, Audis outside many homes (most of them are company perks); it was hard to park at night; neighbourhood car pools swept children away to fee-paying academies; quite modest homes changed hands for sums that a decade earlier would have made someone very rich. Such wealth seemed unreal: what was being done to justify it? Had Britain become overnight a nation of risk-takers and wealth creators? Was I surrounded by entrepreneurs? It seemed unlikely. They did not seem men of the stamp I had known in the States: this had to be some form of North Sea Bubble. There had been a lack of financial reality about Washington DC, with lobbyists and lawyers creaming millions of dollars off the federal government and off their clients, but in 1981, when we went there, at least the country was rich and productive enough to afford them.

  I presumed that it was this new ostentation that had provoked Roy Hattersley into threats to soak the stinking rich, of which I had read in America. The figure he chose at which to start the soaking was £25,000 a year, which was roughly what a city bus-driver in Washington earned at the prevailing exchange rates. The main problem seemed not that some were too rich – though with the continued concentration of Britain’s wealth in so comparatively few hands, and the exorbitant salaries on offer in the City, some undoubtedly were – but that most were too poor. A decent income for all is the cornerstone of democracy. It emboldens the plumber to look the stockbroker in the eye and tell him what he thinks; it liberates citizens to demand the best and to refuse to be fobbed off with the tacky. It is certainly the foundation of the United States, where the term ‘middle class’ says what it means, and embraces the broad mass of the people, blue-collar and white-collar. In Britain the middle classes are as ‘middle’ as the public schools are ‘public’.

  These were some of my thoughts as we began the serious business of ‘re-entry’. An American academic has calculated that it takes the returning native one month of reintegration for each year spent abroad: a calculation I found to be impressively accurate. (She also said that if you are abroad more than nine years, complete reassimilation becomes impossible.) A few days after our return, riots broke out in Tottenham, north London, and Birmingham, in which several people, including a policeman, were killed. But these, as we unpacked and put up our pictures, were distant, background noises. What had most impact on me was a series of everyday encounters with social disorder.

  The first was on the London Northern Line at six o’clock one workday evening. A gang of young people, dressed casually smart – at first glance I took them for art students – burst into our carriage. They were all drinking, gripping beer cans or bottles of wine, and most were smoking. They were noisy, drunk, obnoxious, threatening, and swiftly cleared one section of the carriage, while the rest of us, like New York subway riders, tried to look as if we weren’t there or buried our heads in our newspapers. A man I took to be a senior civil servant boarded, carrying a black briefcase embossed with a coat of arms. Either unaware of what was going on, or braver than the rest of us, he challenged the rowdies to stop smoking. With an oath, one young man hurled a lager can towards the commuter’s head: it crashed against the shatter-proof partition, and fell fizzing to the floor. The rest of us didn’t stir, burying our heads yet more deeply behind our Standards. Shortly after, the gang swaggered out, disappearing noisily down the platform, and a collective sigh of relief went round the carriage.

  One incident no more makes a national mood than one swallow makes a summer, but to me, anxious as any foreigner to catch a clue about the sort of society I was rejoining, that brutish encounter was both an omen and part of a sad pattern. (Aggressive drinking in public appeared ubiquitous: the beer can in the fist was as much part of the macho image as the studded leather jacket had once been.) Two days earlier, my thirteen-year-old son and a friend were set upon by a group of girls in a park, who assaulted them and wrested Thomas’s prized baseball bat from him. Later my second son was held up by some boys a couple of years older than him, who threatened to ‘smash your face in’ if he didn’t surrender his American dirt bike to them. Both these incidents were within a few hundred yards of our home in one of the leafier and gentler of London’s suburbs.

  I had taken the boys to a soccer match on their first Saturday home. They were in considerable trepidation, having watched the American coverage of the Heysel Stadium riot, awestruck at the picture it presented of the English sports fan. (Professional sports events in the States are family occasions: I do not remember one incident of sports hooliganism while we were there.) I told them not to worry: we were only going to Fulham, a gentle, eccentric club by the Thames supported if by anyone, I said, by spectators no more aggressive than a convention of bank clerks – most of them probably were bank clerks. Outside the underground station there was a detachment of mounted police and a control van equipped with a television camera: there were policemen every few yards to the ground. By the time we reached the game, the boys were thoroughly intimidated, and too terrified to support either side in case they were set upon.

  Essential services were deteriorating fast. Half the trains I went for were cancelled ‘because of staff shortages’. The ticket office at our local station was often shut during the day, leading to time-consuming and ignominious queuing the other end at ‘excess fare’ windows. I accompanied a woman who was in considerable distress to the casualty department of a London teaching hospital: she carried a letter from her GP saying she should be dealt with as a matter of priority
. After three hours, considerable fobbing off and a row with a doctor, she left untreated, and booked into a private hospital in the morning. Two other elderly women, who had been brought by ambulance that morning for routine treatment which in the event they hadn’t had, had been waiting five hours for transport home. A woman whose husband had been admitted in a coma, but who could find out nothing about where or how he was, wept from time to time. An obviously very ill man, wrapped in a blanket, shivered for more than an hour while his wife battled with the bureaucracy.

  I also was later referred to hospital. I went four times before abandoning the effort to get treatment. On the first occasion after the obligatory 45-minute wait beyond the appointed time, I was shown into an empty consulting room. A young doctor entered by a side door, walked round me without saying a word, sat down avoiding my eyes, and finally asked: ‘How old are you?’ Maybe that has become an obligatory NHS greeting in these days of harsh priorities to discover whether a patient is worth treating. I was told I would be summoned in due course for an in-patient examination. Sometime later I was again asked to attend out-patients – the lists, I was told, were being reviewed. After X-rays and a fourth appointment, I quit the process when I was kept waiting nearly two hours on a busy day. The patient may not have been cured, but the list had been shortened, which – in bureaucratic terms – comes to the same thing. (I read at that time of a woman who received a letter from her local hospital, asking her whether she wished to remain on the waiting list. She had died seven years earlier.)

  Less essential services than the NHS and transport seemed in an equally dismal state: outwardly bright young shop assistants produced calculators to add simple sums – ‘six plus six’ in a chemist’s shop on one occasion. The supermarket made me want to scream: there have been electronic check-outs in the States for ten years, but here in Britain we still depend on Doreen bellowing to Fred to check the price of baked beans from which the price tag has fallen. The American ‘Have a nice day’ may be a little glib, but it is better than being totally ignored, which is my common experience with British check-out assistants. But what is worse than the service is that we, the consumers, are so terribly deferential.

  We positively cringe in the presence of professionals like doctors: we are not much braver with shop assistants or ticket collectors. People apologize when they return shoddy goods: they mutter inaudibly if the train is cancelled. In Hong Kong passengers rioted over what they considered to be an unjustified fare increase and sank a ferry. I have seen an American Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) march into a school and demand the dismissal of an inadequate teacher: she was out at the end of term. Try that here, and the local education authority – and possibly the national system – would be brought to a halt. It was said devastatingly of the British Army in the First World War that they were ‘lions led by donkeys’. My fear was that I was returning to a nation of ‘donkeys led by sharks’. When Ernest Bevin criticized the British for the ‘poverty of their own desires’, he was not, as a socialist in an unmaterialist age, advocating fridges or Spanish holidays for all, but rather that we should occasionally lift up our eyes from the pavement whereon we walk and focus on the distant hills. A Liverpool social worker, with years of experience of people at the receiving end, said to me: ‘We are certainly brought up to know our place.’

  When I reported my initial homecoming experiences and some of these reflections in the Observer, I received a great many letters from people who had not been away, but nonetheless perceived similar ills. Most rejected populist answers, such as those on offer from hangers and floggers and Norman Tebbit. They were troubled, as I was, by the depth and complexity of the national malaise. Trivial, daily, anti-social disorders were the short change of the arson, looting and murder of inner-city riots. A significant number of British people have such a small stake in society – usually because they lack a marketable skill that would give them minimal value or dignity – that they are restrained from riot or mayhem only by a very thin veneer of social control. F.F. Ridley, the Professor of Politics at Liverpool University, said to me: ‘Our ruling classes fail to realize just how far outside the society they know many young people are. The potential for violence is enormous: it only needs the inhibiting factors removed for an instant. The idea that the mass of Scousers, for example, are loyal to the United Kingdom and law and order is very far-fetched.’

  This, it seems to me, writing eighteen months after returning to Britain, is where the real cleavage in British society lies: it is between the majority – identified by David Sheppard, the Bishop of Liverpool, as ‘comfortable Britain’, and an increasingly disconnected minority. Whatever Thatcherism has done to make British industry more efficient and competitive, its legacy may prove to be the creation of a permanent sub-class, trapped like the children of the Victorian destitute on the pavements outside, staring through the window at the goodies. A politician in a democracy can rule with a majority at the ballot box, but without the necessary consent or participation of the minority, sooner or later some sort of compulsion will be needed to keep everyone ‘in line’. The history of Northern Ireland makes that point starkly. The Unionists’ ‘majority’ did not legitimize the systematic discrimination against the Nationalists: its abuse in the end has made the province essentially ungovernable.

  The British ‘ruling classes’, as Professor Ridley describes them, have long been complacent. They create models which, if everyone were reasonable and well motivated, ought to work. One, then, has only to isolate and deal with troublemakers – a task which will obviously be supported by the right-minded majority – and everything will fall into place. Such models of human behaviour are (or at least were) created in the public schools, which ultimately operate beneath a benign, but despotic, authority. The real world is messier, and by the time our rulers are old enough and have reached a position to make decisions that affect the rest of society, they are yet more isolated by their social and domestic experiences. Professor Peter Townsend, of Bristol University, pointed out that decision-makers increasingly live in a different environment – perhaps, in the case of Eurocrats, in a different country – from the people they administer. They may know little of lives led on inner-city streets a few miles from their comfortable suburban homes.

  The motives of most members of these ‘ruling classes’ were entirely decent. They believed in the Beveridge Report, the 1944 Education Act, indoor lavatories, the NHS, and public libraries, which would inevitably lead to ‘them’ becoming more like ‘us’. The corpus of reasonable, well-motivated, adequately educated citizens would grow. Decent middle-class virtues – tolerance, culture, ‘taste’, education – would trickle down like wealth under supply-side economics. These were expectations I shared as a child of the ‘liberal’ professional classes, though I had been appalled by the snobbery, ignorance and philistinism of many I had encountered at close quarters at a public school and at Oxford. However, nearly a quarter of a century later, Britons live in a society that is too frequently bitter and confrontational, which the optimists of my generation would have found hard to imagine. The ‘bourgeois’ middle-class traits are in the ascendancy, creating an enclosed, intolerant, selfish tier of privilege.

  Expectations about working-class progress have been largely confounded. Without sufficient help from the other side, the gap in the end has been too wide for most to cross. Royce Logan, a lecturer at Warwick University, surveying his students in 1986, wrote in the Guardian: ‘What is most striking is the inordinately different levels of wealth, and of opportunity; the inordinately different starting-points in life. It has never been clearer to me than now just how much some people have to struggle against all kinds of adversity – financial, social, against disrespect accorded to certain regional accents – while others are handed opportunities on a plate.’ The consequence was that those ‘trapped’ on the wrong side of the divide either gave up or became alienated and embittered. (Snobbery, however, is a two-way street: the son of a friend was fired as
a City messenger because he had two A levels. He had been acceptable, he was told, as a holiday relief, but the firm wanted the permanent position filled by a ‘real’ messenger.)

  A character in a play by Ron Hutchinson, a Coventry playwright, said of ‘Cov’: ‘It became a graceless town. It seemed that if you gave the working man one and a half times as much money as he had had before, all he would demand would be bigger pubs, brighter clubs, somewhere to shop on Saturday and somewhere to park his car.’

  From this proletarian culture grew proletarian politics, in which social class, in a sterile Marxist sense, was all. It was narrow, introverted, hostile. Dennis Skinner, MP, could boast that he did not possess a passport: even a holiday in Torremolinos was suspect as a ‘bourgeois’ activity. Politics became vitriolic. A friend of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former Labour MP who quit a Merseyside constituency after a running battle with supporters of Labour’s Militant tendency, said: ‘I don’t think people actually realize what it is like under the “yobbocracy” of Militant in Liverpool. You find you are dealing with people who live by abuse and venom and by poison.’ A union elected its general secretary on the grounds that he had never accepted promotion, and had therefore never ‘sold out’; that he ate in pubs, while his rival for office favoured restaurants; that he refused a taxi in a downpour, a gesture that caused a supporter to enthuse: ‘It’s a return to grass roots; John is one of the lads.’ An American worker is two and a half times better off than his British counterpart: his union leaders drive large Buicks.