Those few miles along the A road take you, if you’ll allow some poetic licence, from the Holy Land through the Emerald Isle to the Levant. Soon after Maida Vale, in appropriate temperatures, I reached the bustle and sizzle and scents of the lower Edgware Road, it’s sudden exoticism a thrill. Three hundred years ago, it provided refuge for Huguenots fleeing persecution under Louis XV. Later it became a destination for successive waves of Middle Eastern immigrants. New trade with the Ottomans brought an influx though the late nineteenth century.
In the 1950s, many Egyptians moved to the area to establish businesses, but it was conflict and unrest that drove or drew people here from the seventies onwards; the Lebanese Civil War, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran–Iraq War, violence in Algeria, the Gulf Wars. Some call it Little Cairo or Little Beirut. Less charmingly, a Spectator piece I read as I dallied over a thick Syrian coffee called it ‘The Arab Street’.
Quite a few of those refugees had held skilled professional posts in their home countries such as teachers, programmers or doctors. But denied the same opportunities here, many went into catering or started businesses in the food industry. This may have been a tribulation to them but, from a selfish point of view, for me it has made the Edgware Road the best place to eat in the whole of London. The food of a whole diverse but connected swathe of the world is here from the Dardanelles to the Khyber Pass – Damascene cuisine, Kurdish cuisine, Afghan cuisine, shawarma, Arabic dates, labnah yogurt cheese, tangy zaatar bread, oozing baklava. But I have mentioned food enough and I had a pressing date (not that kind). Tracy Brabin, the MP who had so kindly agreed to meet me at the Commons, had a debate in the afternoon and so I had promised to be there by noon. Damp with sweat and steeling myself against the sizzling and incense of ‘Arab Street’, I pounded down the Edgware Road until the familiar shape of Marble Arch swam before my eyes.
Technically, Marble Arch was the end. The end of mine and the marchers’ journey. They arrived here in teeming rain to be met by large crowds and the assembled press. The harmonica band played some of the tunes that had kept them going over the last three-and-a-half weeks; ‘The Long, Long Trail’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘Annie Laurie’. I arrived to the sound of a passing boy racer playing grime and some construction work, took a selfie and grabbed a black cab by the swanky hotels of Park Lane. In my time, I’ve been to these scores of times for various awards do’s. I wouldn’t be dropping in this morning I didn’t think, in my battered walking trainers, flat cap and gigantic rucksack. I was going to look odd enough in the palace of Westminster.
The Jarrow marchers carried a petition of 10,000 signatures from the north east in a wooden box the 300 miles from their home town to London. Each night it would be placed under lock and key in the council offices and drill halls of Ripon or Mansfield, Darlington or Bedford. The petition asked very politely for a new steelworks to be built in their town; for anything to alleviate their dire, workless situation. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to see them. Later they trudged in their sodden capes to the Houses of Parliament to see the king in a Royal Procession to Parliament. Because of the rain though, the procession was cancelled and the marchers, standing four deep in the downpour, watched him swish by in his chauffeured car into the House. The mood of the capital’s elites is brilliantly captured in a painting by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale, titled ‘The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London’, in which a young woman with a cigarette holder eyes the Crusaders languidly from a salon window whilst her foppish male companion looks elsewhere. I had no petition, no request, no axe to grind or whet on my ‘politics of envy’. But I had decided not long after setting off that I should try to do what the marchers failed to do. Get inside the House of Parliament and speak to a Member of Parliament.
Tony Benn, one of the great Parliamentarians whatever one thinks of his politics, said of the last stage of his life that it was being lived ‘in a blaze of autumn sunshine’. It’s a lovely phrase, something to hope for and it was very literally what had brought hundreds to Westminster that lunchtime. There are always crowds at the Houses of Parliament but there were more than usual that morning; smiling groups from Tokyo and Tampa having their pictures taken beneath the huge cliffs and crenulations of the palace and the imperious gaze of Big Ben. Again, whatever your politics, it’s hard not to feel a little shiver of pride at moments like these. We do palaver well, and the Houses of Parliament are pure palaver, writ large in gilt and honey-coloured Rutland limestone.
It takes an age to get in, even with George, Tracy’s assistant, at my side. There are security checks and re-checks to be queued for, but who could baulk at that after the events of Batley this summer. George is a lovely young man about a foot taller than me, as is customary amongst the youth of today. It’s his first day in this job and I am his first official duty. He and I both pale a little when I realise I have a Swiss Army knife in my pocket, essential for my march but less welcome here. But we sort this out with the guards just as the new MP for Batley and Spen comes down the hall to meet us, beaming, blonde and sunny in a bright red tunic.
‘Well, day five in the Big Brother house,’ she laughs ‘and all is going well.’ It’s Tracy’s first week and I wonder whether, to try another analogy, it’s like first term at big school. ‘It’s pretty full on. I’ve sharpened a lot of pencils, and I do keep getting lost which is what happens when you go to a new school, isn’t it? But no one’s flushed my head down the toilet yet …’
She was born in Batley, West Yorkshire, in the constituency she now represents, and educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School. She studied drama and then did a Master of Arts degree in screenwriting. She had a long-running nineties role in Coronation Street, also appearing in Holby, EastEnders and Emmerdale. She’s a writer too, and has written episodes for Heartbeat, Family Affairs, Crossroads, Tracy Beaker, Hollyoaks and Shameless. But in parallel with this she has long been politically active.
‘There’ll be people thinking, oh, you’re just some actor off the telly, but I’ve been a campaigner and activist for 30 years, initially for the Writers Guild and Equity. I spoke at the European Parliament about gender, I’ve campaigned for refugee rights. I’ve done a lot of stuff which people wouldn’t know about, but they do know about Coronation Street, which is fine. Nobody wanted this obviously. I wouldn’t have wanted to be here under these circumstances. But I’m from the area and Jo was a friend and I campaigned with her over closures of libraries and the like. So when the Labour Party asked me to do it, to stand as MP, I thought I can’t say no, I have to step up.’
We sit beneath a bush in the lobby and famous faces pass by, politicians, journalists, TV presenters. If the Jarrow march arrived today, would they be interested? Would anyone be clamouring for a soundbite from Ellen or Marshal Riley? A quick woof from Paddy the dog? Apart from the crowds in Trafalgar Square and the press, Westminster itself was cool and awkward toward the Jarrow men. Some thought it ‘a bolshie show’ but others surely knew that these 200 sodden men from the north were a painfully visible sign of their own failure. I ask Tracy what that word Jarrow means to her.
‘It means working-class protest. It may have been in the end just a gesture but it was a gesture that says together we’re stronger. But it’s about poverty too. Batley food bank has given out 8,000 meals and that’s not going to get any better. Are we not on the verge of a Jarrow again, with the poor literally having to choose between heating and food?’
I liked Tracy a lot. She is bright, brave and passionate and I could have stayed a lot longer. But to be honest, my journey was over now and after the long miles and the procession of towns and cities and days, I felt slightly overwhelmed in the vast lobby with its busy chatter. Staying around to eat cake at Westminster felt like prolonging the inevitable, which was turning around, making my way to Euston and heading back north, home. Tracy was going to be busy this afternoon too. ‘The Orgreave debate is today, we’ll get some kind of conclusion.’
Orgreave is a place like Jarrow that c
asts a long shadow and tolls like a bell in the political history of Britain, in particular the story of the English industrial working class. In the summer of 1984, at the combustible height of the national miners’ strike, members of the National Union of Mineworkers picketed a coking plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire. When they tried to persuade lorries not to leave or enter, a force of around 6,000 policemen turned on them savagely. A former officer present that day, who asked to be anonymous, told the BBC that the police were told to use ‘as much force as possible’ against the miners and that the police ‘were anticipating trouble and in some ways relishing it’.
After Hillsborough, Orgreave was seen as another open wound in the British, or at least northern psyche. The behaviour of the police and the role of government in the attacks on the miners is something many still want proper answers about and satisfactory explanations for. South Yorkshire Police had told the BBC they would ‘fully participate’ in any enquiry. The day that I arrived in London, Amber Rudd, the Conservative Home Secretary, was to announce whether there would be a public enquiry or not. There was a definite feeling in the air that, with the truth about Hillsborough slowly emerging, the other great symbolic attack on the working class, Orgreave would be next to be opened up to the light of scrutiny and the fresh air of honesty. We would know in a matter of hours.
I walked back into central London via the House of Commons souvenir shop to pick up some postcards as souvenirs. As I walked past the Cenotaph I bumped into another Labour MP, Alison McGovern who I recognised from her Twitter picture. She too was rushing back for the Orgreave verdict but she’d been following my progress and we had a congratulatory hug and picture (‘I wouldn’t normally do this with no make-up on, you know’) before she dashed away back to Westminster. Around Leicester Square, the heat and tiredness finally became too much and I flagged down a black cab to take me the last few miles of London’s clogged streets to Euston.
‘You look done in, mate,’ said the cabbie cheerily into his rear view mirror, surveying my slumped figure. ‘You come far?’
‘Jarrow,’ I said, eyes closed.
‘Jarrow? As in the march? From Newcastle?!’
‘That’s right.’
‘Bloody ’ell, mate. No wonder you’re knackered. What was all that actually about then? Was it something to do with the general strike, or later? I seen pictures and you hear the name. But what was the protest? What did they want? Were they miners? Who were they?’
I pause. It’s a good question. But I can’t summon either the energy or expertise to answer it fully or properly.
‘They were just some bloody left wingers coming down here to make trouble.’
The driver gives me a long, amused look in the mirror, trying to work out if I’m serious or not. He’s wondering what response to give when I suddenly ask him to turn the radio up, as there’s breaking news crackling through and a familiar name. Orgreave.
The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has just told the house that there will not be a public enquiry into the Orgreave clashes between police and miners during the 1984 miners’ strike. The announcement will come as a bitter disappointment to campaigners. She said, ‘This has been a difficult decision to make, and one which I have thought about very carefully. But I have now concluded that there is no case for either a statutory inquiry or an independent review.’ Ms Rudd added that ‘policing is very different’ now to what it was 30 years ago.
It was a perfectly proper, fitting and bitter end to the trip. On arrival in London 80 years ago, the crowds were large and warm. Even Rothermere’s right wing mouthpiece newspapers gave ‘Three Cheers for Jarrow’. The harmonica band were offered a recording contract. But Parliament largely ignored them. As Ellen Wilkinson reported, despite many MPs being bombarded with requests for support for Jarrow from their constituencies, ‘A few questions were asked … and the house moved on to consideration of other things.’
Sir John Jarvis MP did announce, however, that he was negotiating for a new steel tubes mill on the Palmer’s site. But this was largely a ruse. Jarvis paid for a boat trip for the men on the Thames, ostensibly as a reward for their efforts, but actually to avoid any ugly scenes in the House. When they returned, they were told by the Special Branch that the petition they had carried 300 miles had been ‘presented in their absence’. They were sickened. No one knows where this piece of people’s history is: lost, burned, discarded, perhaps at the bottom of a cupboard in New Scotland Yard.
No new steelworks was ever built in Jarrow. The tube works opened a year later and the brief, fleeting hope that it sparked in the men is sad and touching. When Ellen Wilkinson walked through the site when the men were laying the concrete foundations of the rolling mill, she was greeted with, ‘This is what we marched to get.’ But the pathos and irony was not lost on her. She commented: ‘The grim reality is that the workers have no share in these mills. When the works are built they will still be subject to the toll of profit, the exigencies of a system where they can be closed at the will of people far away to suit a financial policy.’ In any event, the tube mill, dreamed up primarily as a face-saving ruse by Runciman, employed only 200 men and then only briefly.
When the money from their various collections was totted up that day, there was a profit of £100. It was decided to buy all the men a new suit with this since, if it were given in cash, the Unemployment Assistance Board would probably take it out of their benefits. As well as the suit, there was enough for each for a train ticket home. Otherwise who knows? Maybe they’d have been expected to walk back too.
My train was leaving in eight minutes. I gave the cabbie a handful of pound coins and, on a whim, a postcard of the Mother of Parliaments, floodlit and grand against an indigo night. Then I hauled my pack onto the escalator and thought about what the marchers Billy McShane and Con Whalen, the last surviving marcher, had said many decades on. ‘When we were turned down at the House of Commons … that was it, you knew you were finished. It was a waste of time … but I enjoyed every step.’
The youngest marcher never came back. John Farndale stayed in London to work as a baker’s assistant. But the harmonica band didn’t get that record deal. They went back to Jarrow and waited for the call from London that never came, and then quietly broke up.
POSTSCRIPT
October’s a blink of the eye, the apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree’s leaves are yellow and thinning … the days are unexpectedly mild … but the nights are cool to cold …
Ali Smith Autumn
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours … sinking as the light wind lives or dies …
… And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
John Keats ‘Ode to Autumn’
October 2016 seems a long time ago. St Albans seems a long time ago; Bedford, Luton, Market Harborough, Ripon, Ferryhill, Jarrow, all of them, long ago and miles away. Autumn froze and hardened into winter, and with each passing season, the unthinkable became the norm.
Do the Chinese really have a curse that goes ‘may you live in interesting times’? It might well be one of those fictitious pub ‘facts’ like the Great Wall of China being the only man-made structure visible from space. (It isn’t. You can see lots of stuff from the moon, from Bedouin campfires to power stations to football stadia.) But the few months since I retraced the march have been about as interesting as we could bear, interesting to the point of fevered insanity.
Nothing felt quite as seismic and surreal as Trump’s astonishing and frightening elevation to the White House. Trump won the US election, though not the popular vote, and within days, mad and unprincipled executive orders were fired off from the White House where our Prime Minister scurried to curtsey and hold his hand. He appointed several far-right demagogues and white supremacists into his closest circle of advisers. One of his friends and supporters in the media called Alex Jones has a radio/TV show Info Wars that Trump often appears on. Jones said that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were literal
ly demons from hell who wreaked of sulphur and who were haloed with a ring of flies indoors at all times of year. David Icke, wearing a turquoise tracksuit, used to say these kinds of things on the Terry Wogan show in the 1980s and we would chortle, perhaps uncharitably, at how the exgoalkeeper and Nationwide presenter had gone so demonstrably and spectacularly nuts. Now such people are in the spheres of influence of the most powerful man on earth. As of early 2017, Icke is mildly resurgent with a quarter of a million subscribers to his YouTube channel. He has wisely toned down the stuff about Blair and Bush being pan-dimensional lizard overlords in favour of much raging about, naturally, ‘the mainstream media’.
One of the things I like about the mainstream media, for all its undoubted faults, is that it uncovers, say, the Watergate scandal – which is why Trump fears and loathes it – rather than disseminating some juvenile garbage about the Queen being a super intelligent reptile in a rubber mask. But that kind of abject nonsense is thriving like a poisonous mushroom in the dampest, darkest corners of the Net. Technology and politics writer John Naughton says that the rise of the new angry populism, of Trump and to a degree Farage, is perhaps because ‘once upon a time people angry about globalisation, cultural change, immigration or whatever had to fume impotently in small local circles, but now can crowd-source their indignation’.
Just as in 1936, the world seems to have fallen in thrall to ‘strong men’ again, all promising action as an end in itself however rash or backward. For Franco, Mussolini and Hitler read Trump, Erdogan and Putin. The far right in France is in the ascendant again. The engineer of this has been a young thinker called Florian Phillipot. He has had the ear of Front Nationale leader Marine Le Pen for several years now and his two main strategies, both successful, have been to move the far-right party away from taints of racism and antisemitism (to the extent of expelling Marine’s father Jean Marie Le Pen) and making it a populist party appealing to the ignored and discounted working class of the northern French rust belt. Its English collorary, the post-industrial north and Midlands, similarly abandoned by liberals and globalists, is exactly the heartland Labour have lost and must regain if they are ever to become electable again. This is less an opinion than simple psephological truth, however unpalatable it might be to the north London caucus. Unpalatable, that is, if you are of the opinion that Corbyn and Momentum actually want to win elections. This is a serious point; I suspect that there are some now at the ideological helm of Labour who find the purity of permanent opposition far more attractive than the messy, difficult compromised business of government.
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