Crime is a major problem. Burglary victims do not in the main live in middle-class suburbs but in places like Skelmersdale, where there were burglar alarms on the £10,000 homes of the unemployed. The police were not greatly respected. Mr McKenna had recently issued a press release reporting on a residents’ meeting, which had been told that ‘between 8.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. there were only four policemen on beat patrol throughout the town’. Residents reported that police cars drove off when stoned by youths, and that officers responding to a complaint did nothing when their own car was violently rocked by the troublemakers. ‘What astonished one most was that none of the residents was at all surprised by these revelations. All the residents’ associations seem disillusioned with the town’s police force’, Mr McKenna wrote.
A young man, who had once considered enrolling as a special constable, was walking home in the early hours of the morning a few hours after the birth of his first child. He had drunk lager with friends – less than a can each, he said – and in his hand he carried a plastic bag containing disposable nappies. He was two hundred yards from his front door, when a police van screeched (‘American-movie style’) to a halt beside him. He claimed he was pushed around – he felt in an effort to provoke him – and finally thrown in the van, charged with being drunk and disorderly, and locked in a cell. He was convicted – his word against three policemen’s – and has lost much of his former faith in the police.
A close observer of the town’s police said: ‘The police have given up on Skem, which festers like a bad boil – particularly vandalism. The force is under strength, and the easy way out is to drive around in a panda. People want to bring back the bobby on the beat: fifty yards into one of the housing estates is a difficult environment for the police. There is cynicism on both sides. The police have limited faith in the people of Skem as honest British citizens: they are conditioned to believe that vandalism and hatred of the police are the norm. The people then don’t have much faith in the police.’ While I was there, a senior policeman issued a statement to the local paper, complaining that the force received very little public cooperation. ‘On many occasions people are witnesses to offences, but for one reason or another seem very loath to give information to the police. We have been told by people that they know who is involved, but will not tell us about it.’
I sought an interview with the town’s superintendent, but after several calls was asked to submit my request in writing, together with a questionnaire, asking such things as ‘Are there particular difficulties in policing a new town?’ I could visualize the minimal return for the time involved, and desisted. The superintendent was the only person in either Liverpool or Skelmersdale who declined to see me.
The town’s politics are complicated. As I have described, it is essentially a one-class community, of semi-skilled Labour-voting Liverpudlians. The ‘missionary’ professionals live in the centre of the community, and a few other professionals – like some of the town’s Indian doctors – live on a small estate of Californian-style housing. A white-collar semi-professional, who bought a new town house when Mrs Thatcher’s sale of council houses policy took effect, stayed only two years. ‘It wasn’t a place to come home to after a hard day’s work. You could feel the depression and the poverty. There was nowhere to turn to.’ He estimated that seven of the first fifty buyers had been white-collar workers, but that very few of them had stayed. The town therefore always returns a fistful of Labour councillors, but they remain a minority on a Conservative district council which is largely elected by rural voters and Merseyside commuters who live in the surrounding countryside. If the town had grown to its projected 80,000 population, the people of Skem – and therefore Labour – would have become the majority, and the boot would have been firmly on the other foot.
It was a microcosm of the national political picture: a Conservative administration ruling over hard-core socialists. But in Skelmersdale there was mutual tolerance, respect and understanding of a quality that has been absent from the national dialogue for a generation. Even Frank McKenna, a committed Labour supporter, conceded that the town’s Conservative masters – about whom he had previously heard nothing but ill – were prepared to listen. It was also refreshing that no one beat about the bush. Out of politeness and deference to residents’ sensibilities, I had approached the town’s problems somewhat crabwise, but very soon my interlocutors would be talking about ‘unmitigated disaster’ or ‘the most unsuccessful new town in Britain.’
The council leader was an avuncular, white-haired, retired educationalist, named Robert Hodge, who had been a member of the Development Corporation. Skelmersdale was first thrust upon his council in 1974 – he felt largely because neighbouring authorities didn’t want it. ‘I’m not sure that the new town concept was ever achievable. I doubt it. I don’t think you can just pick people up and dump them in a new environment and expect them to grow into a satisfactory community. It was probably doomed to failure,’ he said. He sympathized with Labour’s resentment at being controlled by people not only not of their party, but also not from the town. ‘We accepted we had a duty to understand their problems, which encouraged us to listen to the councillors from Skelmersdale on issues like housing. They are the voice of the area. Our people listen with a degree of acceptance, more than would be usual. Skelmersdale has different problems from those we are used to.’ I tried to run those sentiments through my head in Mrs Thatcher’s voice, and failed.
He had to persuade his colleagues that Skelmersdale needed help over matters that people in settled communities took for granted. Village halls, for example, run themselves: Skem required a Frank McKenna to get community associations into being. Mr Hodge had been to bat for Skem against central government, arguing in vain that it should retain its urban priority status, worth an annual £250,000. The money had been spent on smartening up amenity areas and putting right some of the worst eyesores. ‘It might sound peripheral, but I don’t think it is. The government argued that urban aid was being spread too thinly. Something that looks thinly spread from Whitehall or Westminster doesn’t look so thinly spread from our end,’ he said, adding that a community like Skelmersdale might not have as many projects or people in need of help as Bristol or Birmingham, but it could still have the same depth of problems. Mr Hodge told me that the council had refurbished one clapped-out estate, replacing factory-built walls with traditional brick, tearing down vandalized garages, and blocking up basement areas where rubbish was dumped. Problem families, who used to be concentrated in this one area, were spread around other estates. The result had been a considerable improvement in the morale and physical appearance of the estate. It was thoroughly ‘wet’ talk.
In the days when Skem was an urban authority in its own right, it had, I was told, pioneered the ‘loony left’. A council leader had protested against a royal visit by sitting prominently on the town hall steps chewing a chip butty while the royal personage passed by. The current leadership of the group belonged, I was further told, to the ‘cuddly or Kinnock’ left. The four leaders I met were anxious to convince me that Skem’s reputation for bolshy workers was a slander on the town. They handed me a report – ‘Skem: The Broken Promise’ – to which David Sheppard, the Bishop of Liverpool, had written a sombre introduction:
Once claiming to offer its people a new and better way of life, [Skelmersdale] now embodies the human results of the collapse of manufacturing employment, the regional and local concentration of economic decline, and the wholesale redundancy of manual and unskilled workers …
Skelmersdale is special in being in the travel-to-work area with the highest unemployment rate in the north-west and in having its own story of promises broken and hopes dashed.
The report refuted a national press claim in the seventies that ‘the town’s troubles were the result of militant trade unionism … and the mud of that campaign has apparently stuck’. It cited findings by the then Development Corporation that in Skelmersdale ‘the loss of industrial worki
ng time was only one third of the national average figure’.
Almost everyone in Skelmersdale contended that companies had abused the regional grant system that had lured them to the town. Incoming firms received 22 per cent of their capital costs. The allegation was that as soon as a company had been in the town long enough not to have to repay the money, it engineered a reason to get out and shipped its machinery elsewhere. I was told that plant removed from Skem factories was in full production not just in south-east England, but also in Sweden and Portugal. Councillors had grown cynical about businessmen riding into town with a fistful of promises. They told of one man who was going to employ 1,200 people manufacturing buses and lorries. ‘What that company was going to do for Skem and the razzmatazz were nobody’s business: everyone was talking in the pubs and clubs. The Job Centre was inundated with requests for job applications: in the event, the company didn’t even put in a light bulb,’ said one of the councillors. (The vehicles were to have been for Nigeria, and the potential deal collapsed along with the oil price, after which the firm could no longer get an export credit guarantee.) ‘It’s wrong to lift people’s hopes up. We take it now tongue-in-cheek. We tell them “We’re with you buddy, let’s go.” Three weeks later they often have gone – straight down the M6 to London!’
The councillors, after some hesitation, did acknowledge that Skelmersdale’s lack of skills was a problem. Entrepreneurs researching the town found that it lacked the necessary skill base. But, said the councillors, capitalists only have themselves to blame, because they ‘refuse to take responsibility to train the kids up’. The result, as they admitted with the candour that I had come to recognize, was that Skelmersdale had a ‘social security culture. A vast amount of the money that circulates in the town is from Giro cheques and pensions. We are not in a position where we can take off.’ That speaker was Councillor Frank Riley, an unemployed librarian, who had been working on another of the reports on Skelmersdale – ‘People in Need of a Future’. He said: ‘The days of Thorn and Courtaulds have gone. Skem was the creature of central government: they owe Skem.’
The Revd Deryk Evans, superintendent Methodist minister, who wore a large silver cross over a blue smock, gave me some gritty figures about the sort of problems he encounters. Although Skelmersdale comprises only one third of the West Lancashire district, it has 55 per cent of the mentally ill and half the referrals to child psychologists. We met in his comfortable, cluttered study – pipe racks, squash rackets against the wall, the Guardian on the floor. Mr Evans came into the ministry from industry, and had been three and a half years in Skem after thirteen years in Swindon. He found the contrast between the affluent, naturally expanding Thames Valley and the artificial north-western new town overwhelming. On a visit to Swindon a few days earlier he had ‘broken down and cried’ in a shopping centre that ‘was bigger and wealthier than the whole of Skem put together.’ He looked at the fine things and prosperous people, and remembered ‘cheapy Skem shops with stuff that won’t last three months.’ He began our conversation with the usual dose of brutal honesty: ‘Skem was badly conceived and badly planned; an inner-city population dumped fifteen miles away on a community that did not want it, and have gone on not wanting it and hating it.’ Even the existing churches rejected the newcomers, he said. ‘The essential planning problem was aggravated because hardly had the town begun to grow when every kind of tragedy happened … Soon we shall have a ghost town populated by ghost people.’
The phone rang. It was a parishioner in some anguish, and Mr Evans counselled in jocular, broad-brush terms – ‘God does not promise pastures ever new. He says: “There’s a stony path – get on up it” … stop taking your spiritual temperature all the time.’ The caller, he told me, had a dilemma. He was intellectually frustrated through lack of education. Now in middle age he had an opportunity to take a degree; but this would mean his family suffering yet more financial hardship. What should he do? If he gave up the degree he would not become the sort of person he ought to be. It was a question of ‘wholeness’. ‘In Skem,’ said Mr Evans, ‘there was very little chance of people being whole.’
He listed some of ‘Doletown’s’ more obvious afflictions. The single-parent family: ‘no fun living in a terraced house with mum and dad out of work and rowing. “Sod this,” they say, “I’m off.” In Skem they can get a flat and £800 to furnish it – a small fortune to them.’ The workforce, thirty thousand Scousers: ‘semi-skilled, because that’s the only thing Liverpool has offered in the past hundred years – stevedore work. Where in the technological, microchip world do they fit in?’ Depression: ‘Valium is part of the barter economy – six for a pound.’ Unemployment: ‘We do have a rush hour – seven minutes at four o’clock.’ He told of visiting a woman, who excused herself at the sound of a car engine outside and went to the window, peeping through the net curtains. When she returned, she explained that she liked to watch the only employed man in her street leaving for work. Mr Evans was preparing an ‘I love Skem’ campaign with leaflets and stickers. He professed to love it himself: ‘I’m glad I’m here. I laugh all the time – I’ve never beaten a Scouser verbally yet; never put one over. And I’ve tried very hard.’ But he added that if he had not got colleagues, he would face ‘burn-out’. Trying to improve things is to beat your head against several brick walls at the same time. ‘Only BFs come to work in Skem, and thank God for them.’ He spent an hour every week watching people’s faces in the Concourse. ‘Resources are needed to enable them to become full human beings and not just highly frightened people.’
A young man, who had been unemployed virtually since he left school, told me his routine. ‘If I got up at the normal time, I had everything done by 11.30. So I was getting up later and later, usually about lunchtime.’ He went to the Job Centre, then to the library – ‘a different four walls’ – then bought the ingredients for the tea he would make his wife when she got home from work. The greeting in Skelmersdale, he said, was not ‘How are you?’ but ‘Got a job yet?’ He had married at twenty, which at first had given him a great boost, but he later had difficulty paying bills, and had nearly been evicted. Skem had thousands like him.
The town’s public assets are the responsibility of the Commission for New Towns (CNT), and – unlikely though it might have seemed – ‘Doletown’ was being ‘privatized’, by selling factories and houses to tenants; 26 per cent of the houses had already been sold. What hope there was for the future lay in these developments, and people were beginning to assert pride in their properties. Some industrialists showed their faith by putting their money where their factories were, proving they had no intention of crating their machinery and flitting from town. The CNT, charged with disposing of the town as quickly as possible, was pouring money into the rehabilitation of the shopping areas in order to make them saleable.
There were other hopeful signs. A small number of people – some, in their own words, driven by ‘necessity’ – were starting businesses, though there was a shortage of suitable factory units for them to grow into. Mark Sheeran was twenty-five. He had trained as a welder, but had not worked since a brief first job, though he had earned seventy pounds a week for a year as a twice-weekly ‘resident’ disc jockey at a club – which was more than most of the available Job Centre vacancies paid. Two of his aunts had married Chinese men, and the family came together for Chinese banquets. With time on his hands, he himself began cooking, experimenting with spices. He would go into Liverpool to get his ingredients, and Skem friends started to give him orders – perhaps £200 worth on one trip.
‘I thought, “Hello, hello, hello. There might be market for it,”’ he said. That was two years before I met him, and he had spent the intervening time preparing himself to go into business buying and selling Chinese ingredients. He had been on a course, caught up on a maths deficiency from his school days (‘came maths Friday afternoons, I always had a headache,’ he said), and prepared a business plan. Raising money had been difficult and time-consumi
ng. Enterprise schemes would say, ‘We’ll give you “x” so long as you first get “y” elsewhere.’ With no experience and living in rented accommodation, he was starting from an unpropitious base. He had wanted a shop, hoping to be able to offer employment to others, but had been disappointed. ‘Waiting for suitable premises, with no money coming in, I was beginning to feel it would never get off the ground,’ he said. However, after market research and trial runs testing the market – he had put advertising leaflets through doors – he was convinced that Skem and the surrounding district could support a business operated out of his home. He would also sell equipment such as woks.
One of the grants he did finally get was from a fund under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and he had met Prince Charles and Princess Diana when they visited Skem. The day before I met him he had got his first chequebook, and was a few weeks away from his official launch. ‘It’s a great boost to be able to hold your head up. I had never a wink of sleep last night, I was so excited,’ he said. He had bought an answerphone, and was about to get an estate car to make his deliveries. Skem might not have seemed a natural market for his ‘Spice and Things’, but his business plan had obviously been impressive, and a local enterprise trust had put its faith in him.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 29