There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  It was the end of the mining industry in Britain. The pits had permanently lost their customers, who sought to acquire fuel sources that would not be held hostage to the manic caprices of Arthur Scargill.

  It was the end of the era of widespread strikes in Britain. Six months after the end of the miners’ strike, railway workers threatened to strike over the introduction of new trains that could be operated with fewer men. Union leaders put the motion to a ballot. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to Scargill. Members voted against it. Of course they did; they had seen what happened to the miners. In 1979, 29.5 million work days were lost in Britain due to strikes. Five years later, that number had plummeted a hundredfold, to 278,000. Britain now has the most efficient labor market in Europe.

  It was the end of revolutionary socialism in Britain. Shortly thereafter, Kinnock triumphed over and marginalized the Trotskyite wing of the Labour Party, transforming the party into one in which men who proclaimed that they were all Thatcherites now could and did rise to the top.

  With the miners permanently neutered as a political force, the government accelerated the closure of loss-making pits. The coal industry was entirely privatized in 1994. The Nottinghamshire miners had expected their cooperation would ensure the security of their jobs, but most of their pits closed, too. When the Labour Party came back into power, in 1997, it made no attempt whatsoever to revive the coal industry. By 2005, only eight major deep mines, employing fewer than 3,000 men, remained.

  Scargill had always claimed that the government intended to destroy the coal industry. He says now that he has been vindicated. But the industry was dying anyway. The strike was the coup de grace, and the strike was Scargill’s fault.

  It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain kneeling all the while—they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the ceiling—and you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means . . . And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier. There is the heat—it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating—and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor . . . Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is . . . 184

  The rattle of the conveyor has been silenced now. The slag heaps have disappeared from the British countryside, overgrown by hills and meadow dotted with cow parsley and buttercups, smooth-stalked grass and Yorkshire fog.

  Good riddance.

  8

  Miners Is Miners

  “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Discuss.

  —FINAL EXAM IN GENERAL HISTORY,

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY

  The General History exam at Oxford is just what it sounds like: a test of the student’s general knowledge of history. It’s a crapshoot. Are the grounds for religious persecution always the same? Why have some societies been more susceptible than others to belief in magic? One theme does come up reliably, however, year after year: Is it all about great men?

  It is now the fashion among historians to reject the great man theory of history and study what is termed people’s history—the history of mass movements, outsiders, ordinary men and women. The essence of history, by these lights, is not the story of Thatcher and the powerful men around her. It is the story of the ordinary men and women who lived through the Thatcher years.

  The student is implicitly invited to compare the two approaches to studying history and offer a judgment. Which one is better? A strong opinion, one way or the other, is the key to impressing the examiners. People’s history, no contest. But in truth, they are both good ways of doing history.

  With that in mind, I set out to speak to the miners Thatcher crushed.

  My train arrives in Yorkshire on a Saturday evening, and although it is still light, everyone is already drunk. The street from the station to my hotel is lined with nightclubs, from which heavyset women in short skirts emerge, stumbling, displaying acres of goose-pimpled flesh, arguing loudly about who is shagging whom in the bog. Glassy-eyed young men travel up and down the street in menacing packs. Fast-food joints, surrounded by loiterers, pump hot, greasy-smelling air into the twilight.

  Some places seem at first impression like happy places. Obviously, Wakefield, Yorkshire, isn’t one of them.

  Wakefield is in the heart of a district of now-extinct coal mines. I am there to meet Brian Lewis, who is, as he terms himself, the people’s historian of Pontefract and Castleford, both towns slightly to the north of Wakefield. He has promised to introduce me to men whose lives were transformed by Thatcher’s policies.

  Brian picks me up at my hotel early the next morning. He is a courtly gentleman with rosy cheeks and a wild, white beard, which he grew, I later learn, in honor of William Morris, the English poet, artist, and devout socialist. The back seat of Brian’s battered Toyota is full of half-opened boxes of reports he has written for the local government about deprivation in the former mining communities and the results of various schemes he is supervising in the hopes of regenerating them.

  As we drive through the Yorkshire countryside, Brian points out the artifacts of the mining industry, the hills that once were slag heaps. In the decade after the strike, unemployment in many of these villages reached rates above 50 percent. Suicides rose significantly. In the late 1990s, the European Union declared this region the poorest in Britain and one of the poorest in Europe. Even now, with Britain’s economy performing at unprecedented levels, it is possible to find families here entering their third generation on the dole. Rates of teenage pregnancy are high. School performance is poor. Alcoholism is endemic.

  As we drive past villages left derelict after the strike, Brian points out their peculiar geography. They are in the middle of nowhere. They are where they are only because of the coal beneath the ground. When the mines closed, the local economies erected around them collapsed. The miners who lost their jobs after the strike could not simply wake up the next morning and look for another job in the village. Their whole lives had to be uprooted and re-created from scratch.

  But as Brian himself correctly points out, people around the world often do just that. “You know,” he said, “you go to India, and you go into a home, this bloke who was very kind to me, he and his wife are living in a room with a bed, a couch, and a computer—”

  I know where he is going with this. “And with that computer, he’s going to be taking customer-service calls from Ohio—”

  “That is right. That is right. And his daughter is working for an American company, and she’s scanning the Internet, and she has an economics degree, and she understands the computer policy of that company, and she’s phoning them back. Now, in the mining community, when they get computers, they play computer games. Right? They don’t even play Civilization, you know, games like that where you’re building.”

  This is Brian’s lament, the problem he has not figured out how to solve. The coal mines, he says, created a dependency culture. There is a profound lack of ambition in these former mining towns, an absence of initiative. The men have always been miners. They cannot imagine being anything else.

  Brian is not sure whether the closure of the mines was inevitable. He believes coal may yet stage a comeback in Britain. But if the mines had to be closed, he feels, the government had a responsibility to take care of the men and women in these towns, to find some way to cultivate in them the values—the industry, initiative, and ambition—that would prepare them to function in a different kind of economy.

  This is a fundamental ideological divide separating Thatcher from her critics on the Left. At the core of Thatcherism i
s the belief that the best way—the only way—for government to inculcate these values in the citizenry is to structure society so that these values are rewarded in the marketplace. The government cannot be in the business of instilling such qualities as initiative. Not only is that a utopian and impossible project, but schemes to do so—particularly if they involve taking money from those already possessed of industry and ambition and giving it to those who are not—are guaranteed to have precisely the opposite effect.

  To someone like Brian, it is a cruel and ludicrous fantasy to imagine that free markets are a more powerful social force than generations’ worth of local culture and tradition. “Her moral standings were about self-help, but she didn’t understand self-help. I understand bloody self-help, you know? If you pull on your bootstraps, your body doesn’t fly up into the air, but it does if you’re married to a millionaire! So in one sense, she was supported, always, by her wealth. But her morality came from a culture which said, ‘You can improve.’ I believe in that, I believe in self-improvement. I write on aspiration. I am an entrepreneur, right? But she was—she was a political lady who had listened to her father on how to run a grocer’s shop. And you can’t run a country like a grocer’s shop.”

  In fact, quite a bit of government assistance was available to these communities during the Thatcher era. In the years following the strike, Brian tells me, the government backed some twenty-odd separate schemes to regenerate the region. “People spent their whole lives applying for government money.” Later, the European Union put up money in similar programs designed to assist areas suffering from the demise of a staple industry. “The weakness,” Brian says, “was there weren’t enough people who were entrepreneurially minded, so they got the money, but they were thinking, ‘Whoa! We got a lot of money! And we’re getting the money next year!’ But they were seven-year schemes. And very few of them set up sustainable elements to retain any community after the money from Europe and after the money from the regional development agency had folded.”

  I don’t wish to misrepresent Brian’s views: He is a champion of these schemes and believes many of them to have been successful. The transformation of a culture and an economy is a slow process, he argues; it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. I sympathize with this argument and don’t at all think it specious. But I think we can all read between the lines of the phrase very few of them set up sustainable elements . . .

  This is just the outcome a Thatcherite would expect. Thatcher believed it was not the government’s role to set prices and wages; it was not the government’s role to invest in industries or manage them; it was not the government’s role to generate or regenerate anything. It was particularly not the government’s role to create make-work projects. The proper role of the government was to create the conditions in which self-sufficient people might thrive. If some people failed to thrive, so be it—that is a natural fact of life. Not everyone is born of equal character and talent.

  Regeneration schemes, argued Thatcher, served only “to create artificial jobs. We can do training—and we’ve got the biggest training scheme ever. We do community jobs, and try to get people back into the habit of work. But in the end the creation of wealth has to come from the private sector.”185

  If there were no more jobs in Yorkshire, the government’s proper role was to make it easier for people to start new businesses by lowering their taxes, protecting the value of their currency, and removing distortions in the housing markets so that people might move more readily to places where their talents and labor were desired. But the government certainly couldn’t create new jobs. “Ministers and all our excellent civil servants can’t pour out of Whitehall one day,” she said, “with bowler and brollies, and say now we are going to start sixty new businesses in every new town. We wouldn’t know what to do! We are administrators. It is for us to create the right conditions for enterprise to thrive.”186 Government-funded regeneration schemes that injected money into these communities masked critical information: namely, that there was no consumer demand here for the goods and services that people were trying to sell. End of story, as far as Thatcher was concerned.

  The problem is this: If Thatcher is right to note that schemes to generate industry by pumping taxpayer money into idle communities tend to fail, Brian is right to argue that here, at least, the unfettered market has also failed. Left to their own devices and liberated from the dead hand of government intervention, the miners and their families—with a few notable exceptions—did not prosper and thrive. Five minutes in Wakefield is more than enough to establish this.

  It cannot be said that this is because the miners were inherently lazy. No one who has ever read a description of life in a coal mine would accept this.

  So why is there a problem? No one is sure.

  What is the solution? No one knows.

  It is possible, I suspect, that there simply isn’t one.

  Brian’s own story, by the way, is one of self-improvement and self-help. He has been by turns a foundry worker, a teacher, a van driver, a painter, and the first poet laureate of Birmingham. “I’ve got several degrees,” he said, “but I didn’t get one until I was in my thirties. There was no chance for me. My class knew nothing about education. I didn’t know what a university was. Yeah? I’m talking about the early ’50s. I was brought up in a small industrial town in the Midlands and started work in a foundry. Before I went to night school I washed under a tap outside the molding shed. All week I packed sand which was reinforced with glucose around a hundred wooden patterns. On Saturday we poured molten iron, and on Monday, when the casting was cold, we kicked the dry sand away and started again. So, sometimes you thought, ‘There must be a better bloody world than this.’ Now that will turn you on to ideas. Yeah?”

  The ideas that turned him on were those of Karl Marx. “Scargill is partly in that same tradition,” he explains. “He’s closer to organized communism than I am—I’m just reading me old Karl Marx and you know, doing that bit, but I’m not in a party or anything. I’m just recognized as a bloke who will follow socialist, internationalist ideas.”

  Brian is now flourishing—he receives “one book commission after another”—and his daughter is applying to study at Cambridge. Brian is not married to a millionaire. He pulled on his bootstraps, and his body flew into the air.

  You would not know that this lush and gentle countryside was once covered in grey mountains of slag and sulphur. “That was the Newmarket Pit,” says Brian as we drive, gesturing in the direction of a hill. “Ackton Hall. Gone” . . . “Allerton Bywater. Gone” . . . “Prince of Wales. Gone” . . . “Whitwood Mere. Gone” . . . “Methley Junction. Gone” . . . “Fryston Main. Gone” . . .

  We drive down a long lane with a cemetery on one side and a row of bleak brick houses on the other. These were pit houses, says Brian. You can recognize the ones that were purchased by their residents, thanks to Thatcher’s determination to sell off government housing. They are the ones that have been renovated.

  We are en route to meet Harry. Brian tells me that Harry was a miner who became a painter after the closure of the mines. As we drive to Harry’s house, Brian tries to explain the politics of the miners’ union to me, the regional factionalism, why the working classes didn’t support their own kind. “They are a federation. Take American politics. Oklahoma isn’t gonna be the same as New York, right? Seattle isn’t gonna be the same as Colorado—”

  “Right, right.”

  “And if you got Utah in the center, bloody hell—”

  “Right.”

  “But that’s what it’s like. It’s a patchwork of unions, all with various attitudes. Right? And that’s absolutely significant in the strike. Because in the big strike, what alienates, where the big problem comes from, is the Left, the far Left in Scargill, and some of the ambitious people—the guys who were very angry, the young braves—they invade Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire! Nottinghamshire in particular. And they say, ‘Come out, come out, on General Str
ike with Yorkshire!’ And Nottinghamshire says, ‘Up yours, mate! We’re not coming out with you bloody—’ That’s where the conflict is. And sometimes the conflict will be so complicated because the leadership in Nottingham might be going with Scargill, but the rank-and-file are not. They’re saying, ‘Those bastards came down and they picketed our pit.’ ‘Bloody Yorkshire, we’re not going in with that lot!’ Primitive!”

  “So would you say that in the end, clan solidarity proved more powerful than class solidarity?”

  “It did in the early stages, but then it became an attack on the working class. Right? And a lot of people would come in. I mean, I went to a meeting in Wakefield, and a young comrade got up, and he said, ‘We were just peacefully picketing, and this bloke grabbed me, this copper grabbed me, and he threw me into the back of a Black Mariah, and he beat me up.’ And then he said, ‘T’ain’t right.’ He suddenly saw that. Thatcher had built it up so that the police were seen as absolutely alien to the—you know, he was beaten up in the back of a van! This was a lad who was politicized by brutalism. And he used those words: ‘T’ain’t right!’”

  We pull up at Harry’s house, a picturesque brick cottage in the countryside. When Brian said that Harry had been down the mines for twenty years before the strike, I imagined a stooped emphysemic with blue veins in his nose. When he told me Harry had become a painter, I thought he meant a house painter. But a youthful, pink-cheeked man welcomes us at the door and ushers us past walls decorated with his paintings—mostly acrylics on canvas. They are painted in a style that might be described as post-Impressionist Socialist Realism. There are sculptures, too, and glazed charcoal-and-crayon sketches. They depict men in the mines, rippling with muscles, drenched in sweat, coated in soot, wearing lamps and helmets. Even the color paintings suggest overwhelming grayness. Every image evokes the horrors George Orwell described.