Professor Townsend, a stalwart socialist, pinned the blame for the widening social gap firmly on Thatcherite policies. The government, he said, had masterminded a blatant shift of resources from poor to rich, motivated by a belief that the poor have had it too good, and that working people need discipline. The Conservative vision, he argued, was a future resting with ‘an elite bunch of computer-aware people’, making do with fewer productive workers, and managing the rest as cheaply as possible. He bitterly regretted the passing of consensus, of Butskellism. ‘Even patrician despots then extended at least minimal benevolence towards the poor. Today, there is a kind of vindictiveness towards the poor, on whom blame is fastened,’ he said. The mood, he argued, had been caught by the previously generous-spirited middle classes. In thirty years ‘there has been a divide of immense magnitude. It is hard to credit that attitudes could change so radically in one generation. Gone are the collective values, the fair shares and the queuing. The philosophy now is that we need inequality to give incentives.’
Professor Townsend argued that ‘we fooled ourselves as to the extent to which the welfare state has moderated inequalities’. The welfare state in Britain is now ‘pitiful’ compared to many others, but, because it was one of the first, we take great pride in it. George Orwell suggested during the Second World War that getting rid of the public schools and the House of Lords might be a better use of socialist energies than nationalizing the railways. All the measurable indicators, such as disparities in health and wealth, show that the British class structure is still firmly in place. Professor Townsend claimed that his researches were beginning to show that deprived societies, like some in inner London, where unemployment among men was fifty per cent, were becoming so ravaged that the capacity to respond to each other’s problems was being destroyed. People have, he said, sunk into abject depression. There has been ‘a disintegration of social values and such a generalized impoverishment that people have been driven into themselves, like snails into shells. They close their doors and don’t go out, becoming isolated individuals no longer dependent on one another.’ He broke off this grim catalogue of inner-city deprivation with a sudden outburst. He remembered that a friend had phoned him from Haslemere in Surrey to say she was starting to teach adult literacy classes – ‘Illiteracy! in Haslemere! for God’s sake!’
A man of very different political stamp to Professor Townsend, Sir John Hoskyns, director-general of the Institute of Directors and once head of Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street ‘think tank’ (though he had fallen out with the good lady subsequently), told me that if a man from outer space had wanted to fix British society to ensure that nothing fundamental would change, and that there would be no dynamic, he could not have made a better job of it than had been done by the British people themselves. Britain had had an admirable system for the rich to hold on to what they had, and an almost useless one for enabling new people to become rich. When we met over a splendid lunch in Sir John’s Pall Mall office, another Britain was outside in force. It was the day of the Wembley football match between England and Scotland, and thousands of Scots were swarming over London, singing, climbing statues, waving flags and throwing up. Attentive retainers served us melon, salmon and fresh fruit salad. ‘We are not,’ said Sir John, ‘a homogeneous population genetically programmed for failure. We may all be equal in the sight of God, but it is intellectually dishonest to suggest that special people don’t make things happen. If they don’t perform, we die. The best way for capitalism to care is for it to succeed.’ Sir John dished it out with equal fervour to Whitehall, Westminster, Oxbridge – elites who have never taken a greater risk than crossing the street – and to the trade unions. ‘When I get an abusive letter from a left-wing activist, I write back that I created a company that now has a turnover of sixty million pounds and employs 1,600 people; that the taxes it generates help keep the hospitals going; and ask, what have you done except moan and groan that the capitalist system is a disaster?’
I was converted to the virtues of what has become known as ‘an enterprise culture’, not by Mrs Thatcher’s hectoring, but by the example of what I had seen in the United States. Nine million new jobs were created while I was there, almost entirely by small enterprises. In retrospect, it was shocking that my generation in Britain had been brought up with the sole presumption that we would work for someone else, no matter whether we left school virtually illiterate or emerged from university with a first-class degree. The only people who thought in business terms were those whose families had been in business, and the cultural pressures were on many of them to ‘improve’ themselves by joining the professional classes.
One of the first people I interviewed after my return was Robin Cole, to outward appearances a thoroughly English ‘chap’, wartime commission, Cambridge degree and all. He is also the kind of engineer and entrepreneur one encounters frequently in America – on domestic flights, in hotels – but here in Britain is a rare bird. In 1947, instead of hanging his hat on a pension, he and a partner rented a blacksmith’s forge near Winchester for twelve shillings and sixpence a week. When I met him, his company, the Conder Group, a worldwide construction company, had 1,300 employees and an annual turnover of £125 million. ‘We took on anything that came our way. All we had to do was keep our eyes open to opportunities.’ At one stage he was so strapped for cash that he had to sell a shepherd’s hut on wheels, which served as his office, for twenty-five pounds to raise capital. Forty years later a reproduction hut stood beside the Queen Anne house from which Mr Cole worked. In the entrance hall of each subsidiary company, there is the bust of a somewhat quizzical man – a Greek philosopher? – which bears the legend ‘The satisfied customer: the most important man in our business.’
Mr Cole accepted that it was perfectly valid to wish for a less competitive society, provided the corollary of less materialism was also accepted. ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘insist on TVs, cars and long holidays. It’s inconsistent.’ He said that ‘no-tariff barriers’ – the resistance to buying foreign products – were lower in Britain than anywhere else. ‘More than half the people who shout about compassion drive a foreign car, never take a pay curb or buy British. They don’t actually give a damn.’
It is the upper middle classes who buy most foreign cars and consumer goods. I suspect it is because few of them actually earn their livings making things. To them the connection between buying British and their own livelihoods is tenuous. Corelli Barnett is right to argue that much of our industrial inefficiency can be blamed on the public schools (and on the aspirations of those who send their sons there). Boys sent to public schools learn the habits and style of ‘gentlemen’, and ‘gentlemen’ naturally have nothing to do with wealth creation. So the chief educational resources in Britain have gone into generations of district officers, dons, civil servants, clergymen, school teachers (of the public school variety), service officers, and ‘real gentlemen’ (on whom the investment was more wasted than on all the others put together).
But there is a yet more baleful inheritance from these schools: an assumption that all human beings will abide by the rules of the Eton wall game or are, at least, amenable to benign coercion. The schools are tightly controlled structures, which, through selection, exclude poorly motivated pupils and virtually all those who are not brought up with certain common assumptions. In such an environment social engineering is quite feasible. The pressures to play according to the rules are enormous: the coercive force of the school, peer group conformity, and potentially furious, fee-paying parents. A dissenter could be (and is) expelled. This may be a workable method of controlling a closed society, but – at least since Australia stopped taking convicts – it is not a practical way to run the real world.
After five formative years in that system, it appears to most pupils to be an accurate microcosm of the real world. Ex-public school boys boast that after that they can survive anything – by which they mean prison or the armed forces. But survival in a hostile, tough environment
is not the same as understanding the forces at work in an open society. My sons go to an open school, ‘public’ in the literal sense, where the education is imperfect and where they sit alongside children who are totally anti-social, have no stake in the school or wider society, who are desperate to shake free of whatever limited authority the school can impose, and create mayhem on a wider stage. My children suffer disadvantages they would not have suffered in a private fee-paying school, but they are under few illusions about the range and nature of human behaviour.
The cosiness of an elite, segregated education reinforces the natural instinct of movers and shakers to club together. ‘Them’ and ‘us’ becomes a natural frame of mind. ‘Us’ seldom see ‘them’: ‘us’ rely on tiny scraps of first-hand information which travel from club to bar to office to dining table. Most of our decision-makers and commentators lurk far from the front line in the safety of Whitehall or ‘Fleet Street’, safely out of shelling distance, like First World War generals. Promotion inevitably means further distancing from the grass roots. The political correspondent dares not leave Westminster in case he is scooped; the education correspondent seldom gets inside a school, or the industrial correspondent inside a factory. Their beat is news, and ‘news’ is what the decision-makers, equally trapped inside this magic circle, create.
A serious newspaper will clear its feature pages (as it should) to bring a blow-by-blow account of the machinations behind the Westland affair or the Zircon spy satellite revelation – what the Attorney-General had for breakfast, and at what hour. It will be less enthusiastic about reporting the condition of Britain. People do like to know who’s in, who’s out, in London, and what policies are being fed into the machine, but what really concerns them is that they have a job, a decent school for their children, the right climate if they wish to start a business. It would be salutary for our leaders to remember from time to time that there are those who have no interest in what goes on in London: I once took regular holidays in isolated parts of Devon where locals scarcely knew the name of the prime minister.
Democracy in Britain is very remote: a few crosses against names for local and national office every four or five years does not leave much fine-tuning in the hands of the people. In the United States, tiny communities elect dog- catchers, judges and school boards; the House of Representatives is returned every two years. In Britain there is limited faith in the responsiveness of government – national or local. I was frequently told, as I researched this book, that it does not matter ‘which lot get in’. Whenever I write about a situation with which readers can personally identify, I receive not only a great number of letters, but also letters from people who have something to say and want to join in. They are tired of having the likes of Owen, Tebbit and Hattersley rammed down their throats; tired of slippery answers. They know more than their masters do of what it is like to have a child in a comprehensive school, or to be unemployed, to try to start a business. They are the reliable witnesses.
The British system produces elitist leadership. It is such a full-time task to reach the top that only professional politicians make it. By the time they get there, they are sincerely convinced they know best, and therefore have a duty to tell the rest of us how to manage our affairs. The American system produces ‘representative’ rather than ‘elitist’ leadership: members of the House of Representatives are cut from the same cloth as their constituents. The president is the people’s choice.
I went on a pulse-taking mission to an industrial area of Pennsylvania. In Britain such a region, with its redundant heavy industry, its high unemployment, its working-class or blue-collar culture (pool halls, ethnic clubs, determinedly masculine bars: Deerhunter country), would have returned a Labour MP regardless of the economic climate. This Pennsylvania district was represented by a young Republican congressman, and supported Reagan. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ answered a redundant steel-worker, ‘he’s a regular guy; he could be on the town bowling team.’ For all Reagan’s imperfections, he is the common man, trusted to understand the fears and aspirations of other common men. If you had said to those blue-collar workers that Reagan would be coming to supper, they would have been delighted, anticipating a memorable evening of baseball and Hollywood anecdotes. If you said to a British working-class family that Mrs Thatcher was coming to tea, they’d bolt the front door and flee over the garden fence for asylum elsewhere until the all-clear was sounded.
A government headed by a ‘regular guy’ is more likely to be trusted than one headed by someone who has clawed his way through a deeply partisan system. (This is a general rule, I hasten to add, frequently breached in the past twenty years by dishonest or incompetent US presidents.) The result is an acceptance, which appears to have been lost in Britain, of the general direction in which society is moving. In the United States, I encountered virulent public antagonism on only two subjects. One was abortion, about which moral and religious passions run deep; and the other was Northern Ireland, ‘imported’ whenever Mrs Thatcher or Prince Charles visited the country. In Britain, polarization intensified while I was away. People seem to hate those with whom they disagree, as evidenced by the miners’ strike and Wapping. I have had virulent letters from Observer readers who disagreed with something I wrote or someone I quoted. One person, on reading the comments of a wartime bomber pilot on the city of Winchester, its cathedral and mellow medieval buildings – ‘This is what people fought for, why they flew aeroplanes during the war. If it was worth flying, it was for this – the England worth preserving’ – wrote that he wished that Hitler’s bombs had flattened Winchester.
After an article about an unemployed man in the Midlands, who dared to confess that he had twice voted Conservative, I received a shoal of hostile letters, as well, it is fair to add, as highly supportive ones, some offering the family help. I had described the man as ‘one of the bulldog breed’. One correspondent wrote: ‘They’ve had it too good for too long, and it’s about time the bulldog suffered. Then maybe he’ll have more sympathy with the so-called underdogs who have never had a slice of the cake and never will.’ A second said: ‘What right have they to come whingeing to the British public over their troubles, when in my opinion they deserved everything they got.’ So much for our common humanity.
This declining tolerance has spilled over into everyday life. The British even drive more aggressively than they did. The once common British saw of ‘giving credit where credit’s due’ no longer seems to have any validity. The chief executive of a northern new town said: ‘A lot of people do want to get things back to where they ought to be. However, a lot don’t unless they get the kudos, so they set themselves against it. Some actually don’t want to see things improve: their role in life is to keep things festering. We are retreating into tribal divisions.’ That seemed a fair, if horrifying, summary of the Britain I found on my return.
Chapter 2
‘My Wife Would Never Leave Surrey’
I had been in Easington Colliery in the Durham coalfield only a few hours, talking to officials of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in their snug, creosoted hut at the pit gates. On one wall was a series of blown-up black and white pictures of the village. One of these showed tiny figures stooped on the beach scrabbling for coal. Slightly surprised, I asked whether much of this coal-gathering still went on. ‘Take a walk under the railway when you leave here,’ said a miner. So I did, past a gaggle of garages and allotment huts that looked like a squatters’ town, and past piles of filth and household rubbish. A second low, cavernous bridge was guarded by a barred steel barricade which would have stopped a small tank: it was, I learned, to prevent the coal-gatherers taking vehicles onto the beach, although they could drive on to it some miles to the south and make their way back to Easington Colliery at low tide. A squad of cleaners with high-pressure hoses and detergents was removing crude daubings from beneath this second tunnel. One way, a muddied track, led towards an overhead colliery conveyor belt, and the other, a well-made p
ath, nursed the cliff top.
From the edge I could see dozens of men bent on the task of retrieving the sea coal: a fire, around which those drying out their sodden clothes had gathered, burned beneath the conveyor, and, immediately below where I stood, two ancient lorries were backed into the waves, each surrounded by men armed with shovels, who dug energetically in the shallow water. Further out the fierce wind whipped up venomous, coal-stained waves, and a small fishing boat was pitching and tossing some distance from the shore. The beach was as black as a coal tip, which is literally what it was. Later I was amazed to see men angling in the murky waters: one would have imagined that such a spoiled sea would have destroyed all living creatures.
A middle-aged miner appeared at my shoulder, and was obviously amused by the impact upon a visitor of a daily routine which the village took for granted. He had with him a fine collie, which barked with frustration at his master’s stopping to talk to this stranger until silenced by being put on a lead. (Dogs and men are inseparable in the Durham coalfield, but few miners have such handsome pedigree animals as this collie: more typical is the tiny mutt I had seen peeping from beneath the denim jacket of a young miner waiting at a bus stop.) ‘You should see the lads in the summer when they strip down,’ said my companion, watching two young coal-gatherers crest the cliff top pushing a brakeless bike between them, ‘they’ve bodies like prize-fighters, lovely builds on them.’ He added, as if I might dispute it: ‘Work like a horse at two pounds a bag: they didn’t get that coal for nowt. Their lungs are bursting by the time they get back to the top of the cliff. A lot of the lads still owe money off the strike.’
The workforce, he said, was demoralized; had the stuffing knocked out of it by the strike, which had then been over for eighteen months. Men in their forties were selling out their jobs for £1,000 per year of service. What were they going to do now? ‘Nothing: there’s nothing to go to in the north-east. It’s like Germany after the war. We’ve got to start again. The government has got to pump money in to open a few factories. There’s no work for the youngsters: it’s bloody awful for them.’ And he laughed harshly at the memory of a Conservative MP who had recently attracted publicity by living on the dole for a week. ‘He ought to try it for a bloody year.’
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 5