When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘does Slough prosper, while much of the industrial north languishes without work or much hope?’ ‘Some of the reasons,’ replied Sir Nigel, ‘are subjective and have little to do with rigorous cost analysis.’ Executives like living in the Thames Valley or Buckinghamshire. But the main reasons are practical: the town has always had first or second generation, upbeat industries – even in the thirties the St Helen’s Rubber Company moved its operation, including its workforce, south, to get away from Merseyside and to be near the expanding radio business which required rubber cables. There has been little union influence and few demarcation rules, which has allowed enterprise to flourish. Shortages of labour encouraged its efficient use. Competition for workers meant high wages, eliminating ‘the bloody-mindedness generated by low pay.’ Workers feel secure, because usually they ‘can go round the corner and pick up an equivalent job.’ Junior and middle management are confident of finding promotion without having to move house. Sir Nigel told of one firm that decided it would be attractive to move from Slough to north Devon. They made two mistakes. They did not realize that summer seasonal employment would strip away their workforce; and they did not foresee that their managers would find the professional isolation intolerable. The managers resigned almost en bloc to return to Slough where they would once again be surrounded by opportunity.

  Even before Heathrow and the M4 were built, communications out of London were best to the west. Americans, looking for industrial sites before the Second World War, found the north cheerless and inhospitable, with few decent hotels and without what they would think of as ‘executive housing’ for managers who came to Britain to work. ‘American company presidents wanted a degree of comfort. There were few northern hotels with bathrooms,’ said Sir Nigel. The poor quality of northern hotels in the early thirties is confirmed by J.B. Priestley’s continuous grousing in his English Journey. To my own cost, I know most of them are not much better today.

  Sir Nigel said that northern employers often have themselves to blame for poor labour relations. One of the few Slough firms that had severe labour difficulties was managed from the north, and, quite exceptionally, did not enrol its workers in the occupational health scheme. ‘A small thing,’ said Sir Nigel, ‘but possibly an indication that they did not cherish their workers.’ What about the town’s left-wing politics? ‘Did they not frighten capitalist business people?’ I asked. If anything, Sir Nigel appeared to favour a Labour council. The extreme left, he said, tended to be more vociferous than effective, and were mainly not involved in planning or other areas where they might be harmful to business. There were also good council officers. ‘Why, given such a rosy picture of Slough’s economy, should anyone be out of work?’ I asked Sir Nigel. ‘There are not many seriously looking for work who could hold a job down,’ replied the chairman, a view widely endorsed by other Slough businessmen, who state with great assurance that the town has a thriving black economy.

  To be a trade unionist in such an environment is to farm stony ground. In the ten years that Dixie Dean has been district secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW), local membership has collapsed from nine thousand to six thousand. Mr Dean is one of the old school. He served twice in the RAF, first in the war and then he re-enlisted; he had been a miner in Nottinghamshire for a short period. During our conversation he rose to produce his campaign medals from a filing cabinet. He is the sort of man with whom Harold Wilson used to have beer and sandwiches at Number 10. But he was truly indignant about what he considered to be a new industrial callousness. ‘In the wonderful world of Thatcher things shock me to the core.’ One well-known multinational, he said, had sent a routine warning letter to a woman suffering from cancer, telling her she would be sacked if she didn’t improve her attendance. Another company gave a man an hour’s notice of redundancy, after he had worked for them for nearly thirty-two years. A girl who suffered a nervous breakdown was sacked because her speeds had slowed. ‘If this lot,’ he said, referring to the Conservative government shortly before it was re-elected in 1987, ‘go on another five years, no doubt we’ll survive, but employers’ attitudes are so ruthless that I don’t know what will happen.’ I wasn’t sure that he spoke with much heart. With his malapropisms and his bons mots – on privatization, ‘if we all become bloody millionaires, who’s going to deliver the post?’ – Mr Dean is among the last of an endangered species. When Britain still had its post-war map, men like him were as familiar and reassuring as signposts at country crossroads.

  Ironically, Mr Dean’s image of the affluent society without postal deliveries is a real enough threat in Slough. So acute is the shortage of postal staff that in winter second-class mail is sometimes taken to south coast resort towns, where it is sorted by seasonally unemployed people, and then returned for delivery; and letters have been put on trains to south Wales for Welsh workers to sort as the train shuttles back and forth. In 1986 – when officially there were 4,500 people out of work in a town with a population of 97,000, 313 postal workers had quit by the end of October out of a complement of 1,050. Nearby, Maidenhead is always fifteen or sixteen workers short out of a total establishment of one hundred. It is not unusual for five or six workers to resign in a week. Postal staff get paid according to national wage scales – special payments are restricted to London – which are uncompetitive and inadequate in Slough. It is possible to earn a decent living as an ‘overtime baron’, but only with extraordinary hours on a split-shift basis that leave no time for social or family life. An Indian supervisor told me that he used to get up at 4.00 a.m. six days a week, work till noon, and then go back from 4.30 till 8.00 in the evening when the heavy sorting was done. ‘You never go out for a blooming drink or anything. It gets a bit monotonous. The first couple of years are bad.’ He sounded like a lifer discussing how to get through his sentence. The Post Office locally spends more on advertising vacancies than would be needed to match the London weighting allowance, but efforts by successive postmasters have failed to budge the powers that be. ‘We are told,’ said the supervisor, ‘that the line has got to be drawn somewhere.’ Postmen who leave Slough for another part of the country, expecting an immediate job, are shocked to find a waiting list.

  Sharon Richmond, an Oxford graduate, wanted to be a journalist but couldn’t find a job. She had been running the Slough unemployment centre for eighteen months when I met her. She was a thin, articulate girl, with a flowing shirt outside her jeans, and a scarf tied through her short brown hair. The centre was founded in 1982, after unemployment had tripled in three years to the then unheard of figure of four thousand. (Unemployment had been 0.8 per cent in 1973, 2 per cent in 1979, and by 1986 was between 8 and 9 per cent.) The rise was caused by recession in certain industries – like car manufacturing – for which components were made in Slough, and by new technology. Mars, for example, was producing more chocolate than ever in 1986, yet employed 1,500 fewer workers than fifteen years previously. Less skilled people inevitably lose their jobs to machines, and each year Slough’s corpus of employed semi-skilled dwindles, throwing people with marginal abilities or resolution on the dole. Very few of them will get back. New firms will be yet more automated than existing ones, requiring highly skilled workers, whom they’ll either have to poach locally or recruit from outside the town, bringing more highly paid people to Slough and forcing house prices yet higher.

  The outlook for those who fall off the bottom is just as bleak in the south as in the north – and often more lonely. Miss Richmond told me of middle-aged men who had been job-hunting for years in vain: a 45-year-old electrician with a twenty-year work record who had been filling out applications for a year; a ‘progress chaser’ in his late thirties who had been out of work since 1980. She estimated there were almost six people out of work for each vacancy. But the unemployed were, of course, the wrong people for the jobs. ‘The ads in the papers are aimed at those already in work,’ she said.

  The consequence of this process is tha
t the two Britains of the haves and have-nots increasingly live side-by-side. It isn’t just the north and the inner cities that cannot provide work for the unskilled or the less well motivated, but towns like Slough and Winchester – discovered by a team from Newcastle University to be the most affluent community in Britain – where half a generation ago everyone with a pair of hands had a job. As the majority become more affluent, the poor become relatively more deprived. A simple illustration is that bus services will inevitably decline once most people have cars: the poor and the old are left almost immobile, while roads we can no longer afford to maintain become chronically overcrowded. A Slough journalist said some of the housing conditions on Slough council estates were sordid and unhealthy, reflecting both the poverty and the demoralization of the tenants.

  There is no point in getting ‘on yer bike’ unless you have something to offer when you arrive, as illustrated by teenagers from the provinces who are workless and homeless in central London. In Winchester I met people, not much more than a literal stone’s throw from the cathedral and college, who were as isolated from the affluent existence of their neighbours as if they had lived in a derelict pit village. I went one sunny spring afternoon with a young and radical local clergyman, Rick Thomas, to the Highcliffe estate. There we met Charlie Bicknell, a 25-year-old married man with two small children. It was an effort for him to remember when he had last worked, finally settling for ‘three or four years ago.’ Brought up as a farm labourer, his last job had been as a cleaner. His supplementary benefit, he said, was inadequate, and had it not been for the Church his family would not even have had a cooker. Indoor lavatories and baths had only been installed on this estate two years before, progress that was nearly twenty years behind the colliery houses of Easington. Nearby, a child played outside a house with broken, boarded windows. Mr Bicknell’s children rampaged behind drawn curtains. ‘It’s not easy bringing a family up on the “social”,’ said Mr Bicknell, adding that he couldn’t see anyone starting a business in town that would offer him a job. ‘All those antique shops, they’re only making things better for themselves.’ Across the River Itchen, outside the Bishop’s Palace, prep-school boys were climbing out of a minibus ready for a game of hockey and, in a bookshop next to the house in which Jane Austen died, a tweedy schoolmaster was ordering Latin texts. Here, indeed, one might hit several bishops’ nieces by hurling a brick. Rick Thomas commented: ‘It is hard for those who haven’t experienced poverty to imagine the numbing powerlessness of the very poor.’ His stories of hardship had shocked local councillors.

  An unemployment centre had just been closed, and its organizer sacked because of lack of funds. It was a battered and barren place compared to those I have seen in the north, with such graffiti on the walls as ‘Smash the State’ and a drawing of Mrs Thatcher with horns. But a Conservative councillor lamented its passing: ‘It was pretty horrifying that we couldn’t get across to intelligent people what good was being done by comparatively small sums. One person was saved from suicide. That was enough to justify the money.’ Those in humbler jobs are not much better off than the unemployed: I met a male nurse in a geriatric hospital who took home sixty pounds a week. At the Job Centre I heard that, when some employers are told they are offering impossibly low rates, they reply: ‘But we’ve been paying that for the past ten years.’

  The pressures that keep northerners out of the south-east also drive native sons and daughters away. Bernard Goodyear, chief executive of the South Bucks and East Berks Chamber of Commerce – the organization that is sponsoring the Peterlee trainees – spoke of educated, first-rate, ambitious young people leaving Slough when they get married because they cannot afford even the ‘starter homes’. ‘Our seed corn is drying up,’ he said. School rolls are falling fast, and the over-65 population growing by 10 per cent a year. Vacant building land within the town boundary can be listed on a mere three sheets of paper. ‘We are,’ said Councillor Denis James, chairman of the planning committee, ‘a walled city’. Mr Goodyear’s remedy would be to expand the town into the green belt between Slough and Uxbridge; land which he said was of no agricultural or recreational use, blighted and desolate, occupied only by didicois. He is a cheerful cynic, putting good race relations in the town down to the fact that most people work too hard to make mischief: ‘The trick is for everyone to have two cars in the drive, preferably not paid for, and a huge mortgage.’ Mr Goodyear believes the local unemployment figures are highly misleading. He told of one local ‘Restart’ course that was attended by only eleven people. At the coffee break someone asked if it were true that they would lose their benefits if they weren’t there. He was told no, and when the course resumed there were only three people left – all married women seeking to get back into jobs after bringing up children. ‘The others were all back on their window-cleaning rounds,’ said Mr Goodyear. ‘It was a farce. There’s plenty of work. It’s impossible to get things done.’

  But Mr Goodyear is deadly serious about the lack of suitably skilled people, not just in Slough but throughout Britain. In Japan, he said, an engineer doesn’t start work until he’s twenty-one, here it’s sixteen: young people should not be chasing a job at any price, but getting their A levels and training. He estimated that six companies in the Thames Valley could employ three-quarters of the national graduate output of electronic engineers for each of the next five years. When there is a recession, no one invests in training for the future: when work picks up, shortages are so great that firms won’t release people. He concluded: ‘If we don’t get a trained and educated workforce, we’ll be in the third league of banana republics. It will take twenty years even if we start now.’ Outside the City of London that has become an increasingly familiar cry.

  Every Slough employer looking for staff to do more than twist pieces of wire was desperate: an architect couldn’t find another to join his small practice and was also in the market for two technicians (the existing partners were working every weekend to keep clients happy). Arden Bhattacharya, the town clerk and first Indian chief executive of a British town, reported great difficulty in filling some major posts – even though the council offered six months’ temporary accommodation to allow time to look for a house.

  An executive with a specialist engineering firm reported ‘mega, mega problems’ in recruiting and holding technical sales staff: he told of one man in his mid-twenties whom they had been paying £12,500 a year plus a car, who left to join another company for £15,000 and a better car, but was snapped up by a third company as he was about to move, with an offer of £17,500, plus a yet better car. Even to get YTS youngsters, such firms have to pay bonuses above the government rate. The Chamber of Commerce, as a YTS managing agent, could have filled another hundred vacancies in 1986 if they had had the young people, which is why they were so eager to cooperate with placing the Peterlee ten. Nearby Heathrow is an employment honey pot – Slough managers grumble that between them they have trained much of Heathrow’s workforce – when Terminal Four was being built, the town suffered more acutely than normal. ‘It’s very frustrating: young people are chasing money,’ complained the executive. His firm has thirty-five salespeople instead of the forty-two it needs. They brought four young people to Slough to be trained, found them accommodation and gave them transport, but none of them stayed. ‘Missed mother’s cooking, that sort of thing. The attitude is that you have a birthright to a job on the doorstep,’ said a foreign-born colleague somewhat sourly.

  A major engineering company said it took from two weeks to nine months to fill vacancies. National recruiting drives had proved fruitless. Advertisements in the Sun had produced just one worker from Manchester, while an intensive drive in Sheffield, where twenty-two were interviewed, failed to lure a single person south. ‘Maybe we jump to the conclusion that people desperate for jobs will naturally take them. But we’re not able to offer sufficient financial incentives to offset the cost of uprooting and leaving friends and family.’ The lack of skilled sales staff and labour
shortages had cost the firm dearly in lost orders and delayed deliveries.

  No one could argue that it is sensible to crowd our productive industry increasingly into one corner of the country. Yet government direction to compel it elsewhere has seldom worked. The car industry was inefficiently dispersed from its home in the Midlands to places like Linwood in Scotland and Halewood on Merseyside. Foreign investors will not come to Britain if they are directed to parts of the country where they do not wish to be. Mrs Thatcher’s government hoped that continuous growth would force companies to break out of the southern industrial redoubt. But ‘overspill’ factories are always the first to be closed when times get tough. The argument against moving north tends to be circular. What is the point of training people – largely inadequately on government schemes – for work that doesn’t exist? Yet who will open a major plant where at best the workers are rusty and demoralized?

  The answer lies in restoring confidence in the north, and creating in towns like Peterlee the energetic atmosphere of Slough. When potential investors feel the buzz on the Peterlee industrial estates that I felt that night in Slough, then they will start renting factory space. But, like confidence in comprehensive schools, it requires a few people to take the plunge. When you tell northerners that southern company bosses distrust the northern industrial environment and believe that the militant stance of Derek Hatton and Arthur Scargill is representative of political and trade union attitudes north of the Trent, they get very angry. They point to the Japanese firms that have chosen the north. But the Japanese build from the bottom up, employing almost exclusively school-leavers and graduates. There is, I believe, promise in small-scale enterprise, but in terms of numbers, relying on the Japanese and one-man enterprises is like trying to drain the North Sea with a bucket. It is hard to escape some pretty bleak conclusions.