In Wolverhampton, the marchers stopped for a service in the splendid red sandstone church of St Peter. There the Bishop of Wolverhampton – joined, a bit incongruously, by Derek Robinson, the former Bishop of British Leyland – told them they were making ‘the dream of a community come true’. The service ended with a passionate rendition of ‘Jerusalem’, much to the delight of another visiting celebrity, Tony Benn. For Benn, the obvious parallel was with the Jarrow Crusade of 1936, when hundreds of jobless marchers had tried to capture the imagination of a society in the grip of the Great Depression. And as the People’s March wound its way south, its supporters regularly invoked the spirit of 1936.
In Staffordshire, they were joined by 66-year-old Leslie Jones, a retired teacher who had seen the Jarrow marchers as a schoolboy. The People’s March, he said, was ‘Britain, the real Britain … a true community helping each other’. Later, in Hemel Hempstead, they were greeted by 83-year-old Mabel Jones, who remembered handing out soup to the Jarrow marchers half a century earlier. Now she was on sandwich-dispensing duty in a crowded parish hall, reminiscing with reporters as she patted a bemused punk on the head and pressed an orange into his hand. ‘I truly never thought I’d see this happen again,’ she said sadly. By a striking coincidence, it transpired that one of the unemployed marchers billeted in her hall, a 26-year-old man from Liverpool, was the grandson of a Jarrow Crusader. He knew little about his grandfather, but Mrs Jones claimed to remember him perfectly. ‘He died on the march to London, you know,’ she added. ‘He’d be proud of you.’2
Yet the Jarrow parallel was not without controversy. When the People’s March reached Stoke, the local paper thought it merely ‘a shadow of its famous forerunner … a carnival with more razzmatazz than heart’. In a letter to the Church Times, a local vicar condemned it as ‘trivial’, ‘pointless’ and ‘almost childishly meaningless’, while the Daily Express’s reliably ferocious George Gale insisted that the marchers were a ‘stage managed army’ of ‘Communists, Socialist Workers’ Party revolutionaries, Militant Tendency, Trotskyists and the like’. They were ‘not like the men who marched from Jarrow. They do not express the outrage of a nation; they will not stir the conscious [sic] of the country.’
In particular, Gale was displeased by their evening pleasures (‘At night the marchers go to pubs and discos’) and by their choice of anthems (‘anti-war and anti-nuclear bomb and feminist slogans’). All this, he thought, reflected a wider picture: ‘The eighties are not the thirties. There is no hunger now, no tattered clothes and barefoot children.’ But to the Mirror, which vigorously supported the People’s March, this kind of talk was a disgrace. ‘Of course today’s marchers are different from their grandfathers,’ thundered an editorial. ‘They are well-dressed, not tattered … But they are still out of work.’3
In the meantime, the marchers trudged on through the rain. As the Jarrow furore suggested, their reception was not always as positive as the organizers had hoped. In the mock-Tudor suburbs of one Lancashire town, a reporter saw people glaring from ‘behind their net curtains’, clearly displeased by their songs about ‘jobs and Tories’. One man, ‘manicuring his lawn’, asked what it was all about. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, as the marchers explained. ‘I’ve heard something about this. Well, it is not such a nice day for it.’ Then he turned and went inside.
Yet at every stop from Warrington to Wembley, supporters waited with tea and sandwiches. In Birmingham, where the rain poured remorselessly down, Louis Heren saw Sikh elders with collecting boxes, men waving from the windows of a ‘garishly painted West Indian hotel’, church groups, social workers and brass bands. In Redbourn, Hertfordshire, the marchers were shocked to see a ‘No Marchers’ sign on the door of the Bull Inn, but delighted when they reached the village hall to find ‘large sandwiches of crusty French bread and ham, daintily wrapped in paper napkins’, as well as chocolate, mince pies and gallons of tea. In one corner, a local woman tended the marchers’ blistered feet; in another, two old ladies comforted a young woman from Yorkshire, crying from tiredness after days on the road. ‘Nonsense,’ one of them said when she told them not to bother. ‘I am going to take you home and put you to bed.’ So much, Heren thought, for the stereotype of cold, unfeeling southerners.4
By the time the marchers reached London, having walked for more than 260 miles in dreadful weather, most were wet, footsore and utterly exhausted. Waiting for them was progressive Britain in all its pomp: punks and stilt-walkers, Liberals and Communists, families with young children and shop stewards with their banners, some 100,000 people united in their loathing of Mrs Thatcher. Once again the rain hammered down, but as the marchers approached Trafalgar Square the sun came out at last, and when the green anoraks came into view the crowd roared their support. To their sympathizers, the marchers’ very presence was proof of their moral victory over the economic forces that sought to deny their humanity. Labour spokesmen even told the press that it had been ‘their greatest propaganda success since Mrs Thatcher took office’. It was ‘not a Jarrow crusade or a peasants’ revolt’, thought the Mirror, ‘but it WAS a march into history’.5
On the next day, 1 June, a marchers’ delegation visited Westminster to see the Employment Secretary, Jim Prior. Mass unemployment was terribly sad, he said, but the government was doing all it could to put the economy back on a solid footing and provide real jobs for Britain’s people. The marchers, not surprisingly, described it as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. And then it was all over. By the time the sun dipped beneath the London skyline, the politicians had disappeared, the banners had been rolled up, the supporters had gone home, and the marchers were reluctantly turning their minds to the desolation of their working lives. Outside the Commons, some of them had told Tony Benn of their fear that ‘when the march is over they will just be unemployed people again’. The tragedy, of course, was that they were right.6
The scene is a factory in Coventry, shortly after the turn of the 1980s. ‘It was Thursday morning, and it’s pay day, and everybody is excited,’ the works convener later told the journalist Beatrix Campbell. He was a young man for a convener, still in his mid-thirties, but he had been there since leaving school, making lights for the car and electrical industries. At lunchtime, the wages clerk came to see him. ‘There’s something going on,’ she said worriedly, ‘they’ve just rung for six taxis.’ ‘Bloody hell!’ the convener thought. Half an hour later, he felt a tap on his shoulder.
‘In my office – now,’ said the boss. I said, ‘What for?’ but they wouldn’t tell me on the shop floor. In his office he said, ‘Get all your members to switch off their machines and get them into the fitting bay. I’ve got something to tell them.’ So he came out. ‘I’ve got a statement to make and it’s not very nice. We’ve just had a word with the bank, they’ve pulled the plug. You’ve got an hour’s notice to get out.’ It took him about thirty seconds. He said, ‘Don’t worry about the money, the government will pay.’
The convener was in shock. He tried to interest his comrades in occupying the plant, but ‘everybody was running about all over the place to get their stuff out, all they wanted was out’. It was another two years before they got their redundancy money, but they had to go to an industrial tribunal first. They were awarded thirteen weeks’ pay, which was immediately claimed by the Department of Health and Social Security against their interim social security payments. ‘I got £1,324.96,’ the convener said. ‘Not much for eighteen years of your life, eh!’7
By the spring of 1981, stories like this had become so familiar that many people had stopped listening. Unemployment might be a ‘human tragedy’, to borrow Mrs Thatcher’s words, but it had become part of the daily soundtrack, a constant low-level hum of job losses and factory closures. When the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins visited Coventry in February, he awoke to ‘the news of the monthly unemployment figures’:
The familiar reassuring voice of Jim Prior tells us it’s going to get worse before it gets better. For the United Kingdom the average
is now 10 per cent. In the West Midlands it is 11.3, in Birmingham 12 and in Coventry 13 per cent. Coventry, the proverbial Klondike of the post-war affluent society – the idea of 13 per cent unemployment takes some getting used to.8
But people were getting used to it. They had no choice: it was on the front pages of the newspapers, day after day after day. Official figures showed that more than a million jobs had disappeared in 1980, the worst year since the war. Yet everyone knew this was a vast underestimate, because only two out of three workers who had lost their jobs bothered to register as unemployed. Even after seasonal adjustment, the jobless rate was almost exactly 10 per cent, a figure unimaginable only a few years before. In no other major Western economy were so many people on the dole. And never before in British history, not even during the slump of the 1930s, had so many people been out of work.9
As in the 1930s, though, the picture was more complicated than the headlines suggested. If you worked in a service industry in the affluent south-east, you were far less likely to lose your job than if you worked in a steel mill in the Black Country. In booming East Anglia, manufacturing employment did not drop at all between 1979 and 1987, yet in the West Midlands it fell by almost 30 per cent, in the North by 37 per cent, in Scotland by 35 per cent and in Wales by 34 per cent. The image of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain as two nations, irreparably divided between North and South, is a bit of a cliché. Yet the fact remains that, during the worst months of the recession, seven out of ten redundancies came in the old industrial heartlands of the North, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales. ‘You are insulated down there,’ one man remarked when, during the People’s March for Jobs, Louis Heren ducked into a Manchester pub. ‘You don’t know what life’s like … You have no idea of what unemployment is like.’ Heren explained that he had come to Manchester to find out. ‘What’s the use,’ the man said wearily. ‘You can’t understand what it is like living in the North.’10
If there was one place that became synonymous with unemployment, it was Liverpool. Stranded at the edge of England, long over-reliant on its declining port, Liverpool was always likely to struggle when the downturn came. Even so, the sense of hopelessness was simply breathtaking. Liverpool was a ‘time bomb’, a ‘disaster zone’, a ‘dying city’, wrote an anguished Professor Fred Ridley, who taught politics at the local university, in January 1981. For although the picture was nowhere near as bad as it had been in Jarrow in the 1930s, it was bad enough. On some inner-city estates the unemployment rate was as high as 40 per cent, and this was only counting those who bothered to register. In Speke, formerly the home of the Bryant & May and Triumph factories, an estimated 45 per cent of the adult population had become dependent on the state. As Ridley wrote, there were large swathes of Merseyside where ‘unemployment has become as normal as work’. In many of these areas, the atmosphere was ‘depressing beyond belief’, the shops boarded up, the houses vandalized, the people stripped of hope. ‘We have survived two world wars, the blitz and the depression of the 1930s,’ one local businessman told a Chamber of Commerce survey. ‘I wonder whether we will last out the next twelve months?’11
Although Liverpool attracted most attention, it was far from alone. In Flint, North Wales, which was heavily dependent on two struggling firms – British Steel and the textile giant Courtaulds – adult male unemployment reached 32 per cent in the summer of 1980. Across the engineering heartland of the West Midlands, the jobless rate tripled in four years, reaching 18 per cent in Walsall, 17 per cent in Birmingham and 16 per cent in Coventry. And in the dying fishing ports and seaside towns, where few journalists came, the mood was perhaps saddest of all. Walking along Hull’s Albert Dock in the spring of 1982, once alive with trawlers and fishermen, Jonathan Raban encountered only silence, the atmosphere bleak enough ‘to make one sob for want of company’. The fishermen he had met on his last visit eighteen years earlier now worked in the oil business if they were lucky. If not, they were on the dole. Yet Hull, like Liverpool, was a reminder that the problem of unemployment went deeper than the policies of one government. ‘History’s not been very kind to Hull,’ explained Jimmy Johnstone, who had been Hull West’s Labour MP for almost twenty years. ‘You can’t blame it on Mrs Thatcher.’12
At the turn of the 1970s, Grimsby had boasted a deep-sea fishing fleet of some 122 ships. Now, thanks to Britain’s capitulation in the Cod Wars with Iceland, there were just eleven. Among the casualties was 59-year-old John Keetley, a boatswain who by the autumn of 1980 had not been to sea for almost two years. He had started in the boats before the Second World War, and had survived being washed overboard three times. But now his working life seemed over. ‘I am a skilled man but nobody wants my skill or my experience any more,’ Mr Keetley told The Times. He was willing to ‘go anywhere and do anything’, he said. If somebody rang him at three in the morning asking him to put to sea as a deckhand, ‘I would go like a shot.’
But they never did. He had used up his savings travelling the country looking for work at sea, but there was nothing. He hated the thought of social security; he did not understand the forms and found it humiliating to ask for help. Every morning he got up at 5.30: it was the ‘habit of a lifetime’ and to give it up ‘would be like surrendering’. But he had nothing to do. Sometimes he took some local pensioners out for a drive, ‘just for the company … anything is better than sitting at home’. So the time went by, one day after another, week after week. At last, swallowing his pride, he applied for a job as a road-sweeper. But he heard nothing back.13
For men like Mr Keetley, unemployment seemed a tunnel without end. Even when opportunities did surface, the competition was so intense that disappointment was far more likely than success. By the spring of 1981, there were ten jobless people for every vacancy in the country. In Liverpool, where 48,000 people were chasing just 1,000 jobs, there were typically hundreds or even thousands of applicants for a single post. Applications for visas to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were all up; even army recruitment numbers were at their highest level for two decades. The Guardian offered some sensationally patronizing tips for long-term job seekers, who were assumed to be men. ‘Cut your hair, wear a sporty-styled one-coloured shirt and tie, and trousers and a jacket,’ advised the ‘Workface’ column. ‘That will make them think you’re full of energy and enthusiasm, willing to learn, a young man going places but knowing his place.’14
But what if you were an older man, ground down by chance and circumstance, your experience disregarded, your skills unwanted? Understandably enough, the press and the government talked endlessly about the plight of the young. ‘Our first priority is centred on the young where the problem is at its worst,’ Norman Tebbit told the Commons in November 1981. Indeed, the government spent more money on special measures to address youth unemployment – £400 million on the under-18s by the Manpower Services Commission alone in 1981 – than on any other demographic group. But of the million people who, by the second half of 1982, had been out of work for more than a year, many were far from young. For them there were virtually no special measures at all.
By now almost half of unemployment claimants over 60, and a third of those in their late fifties, had been out of work for more than a year. These were often men who had left school in their teens, had never been trained and had few obvious skills; often they were also men with children, living in homes where nobody worked. Not surprisingly, unemployment took a punishing toll. ‘Many have reached a state of depression, apathy and acceptance of the state of unemployment,’ concluded a leaked Manpower Services Commission report. It was all very well to imply that they should get on their bikes, but where would they live? What would happen to their families? Above all, where on earth should they go – and why should they imagine there would be jobs for them when they got there?15
Unemployment was extremely expensive. The Treasury estimated that one man out of work cost the government almost £3,500 a year in social security payments and lost tax revenues, the equivalent of at
least £20,000 today. But this may have been an underestimate: later, the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested that the true cost was more like £4,500 a year. As a result, the Treasury was desperate to keep costs down. So January 1980 brought the first cuts in state benefits since the Depression, with average cash benefits for the unemployed, the sick and pregnant mothers falling from £38.82 a week to just £34.65 a week, while married couples saw a reduction from £51.07 to £47.40.
That might not sound like much. But to people at the bottom, £4 a week was a lot of money. Indeed, by the end of 1981 Britain’s army of unemployed were taking home less, in real terms, than at any time since 1971. Yet thanks to the recession, government spending on employment and training programmes actually went up, in real terms, by 50 per cent in the first half of the decade. Even more striking is the fact that social security spending, too, kept rising, up by 4 per cent as a proportion of the total and by a staggering 32 per cent in real terms. Given that Mrs Thatcher’s critics loved to paint her as the hammer of the poor, there is a grim irony in the fact that no Prime Minister had ever spent so much money on social security. But as her critics argued, she was only doing so because of the consequences of her own policies.16
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