Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By the time Mrs Thatcher came to power, Jeremy Seabrook had been writing about the erosion of working-class culture for more than a decade. As far back as 1971 he had visited Blackburn to find a world of ‘derelict streets and decayed mills’, where older residents, confused and alienated by the changes brought by economic growth and social mobility, directed their frustrations at their Pakistani neighbours. A few years later, he was shocked by the ‘abbreviated terraces and derelict sites’ of Wigan, while he found parts of Bradford virtually abandoned, ‘as though the people had deserted the worn-out housing and exhausted landscape and gone elsewhere’. And as he watched people parking outside their new suburban houses, queuing for takeaways and swarming through the new shopping arcades, he seethed with anger that they had been encouraged, as he saw it, to abandon the ‘working-class past’ as ‘something ugly and shaming’.14

  Seabrook did not blame ‘the desolation of ruined communities’ on unemployment and poverty. He blamed them on affluence and individualism, trends that had brought Mrs Thatcher to power rather than ones she had called into being. It was affluence, he thought, which had inculcated a fatal ‘dependence on commodities’ in place of the ‘capacity for caring, the wisdom won through pain and struggle in adversity; the stoicism and pride’ that had supposedly characterized working-class life before the advent of the washing machine. Indeed, for Seabrook, even the grinding poverty of Orwell’s Wigan had been better than the relative comforts of working-class life in the 1980s, because it was more authentic, more real. ‘Even the food was different – the stew with its neck of lamb and three penn’orth of pot-herbs was not the same as the Colonel Sanders chicken in its red cardboard box and the saffron gravy in the tinfoil from the takeaway,’ he wrote. ‘The open fire was a living comfort, the old boots warming in the hearth and the lore and pictures in the flames had a consoling influence which the underfloor heating which cannot be regulated does not.’15

  The open fire, the old-fashioned cooking, the boots in the hearth: all this was pure Orwell. And like Orwell – an Old Etonian who had been taught as a boy that working-class people smelled – Seabrook, a Northampton grammar-school boy who had gone to Cambridge, wrote about working-class Britain with a strong sense of his own guilt. In January 1982 he published a bitterly self-flagellating article in the Guardian, lambasting his generation, who had risen by their own efforts into ‘teaching, social work, the media, administration’, for betraying their working-class roots. By abandoning their elders in the debris of the industrial landscape, he wrote, they had contributed to ‘the spoliation of the working class [and the] loss of continuity’.

  In a particularly telling passage, he pictured his meritocratic peers returning to see ‘those old people, our parents’ and listening to their endless ‘monologues of loss’:

  In desperation, you pick up a copy of the local newspaper – the Sunderland Echo, the Wolverhampton [Express and] Star – and on the front page there is a story of the closing down of one of those factories you were never supposed to go into. And then there is a report of violence or a mugging, which only gives rise to another cascade of oblique reproach, and they will tell you that it isn’t safe to go out even in the daytime now, let alone at night, and that once upon a time you could leave your doors open day and night without fear of anyone stealing from you.

  The obvious rejoinder, he knew, was that most people were richer than ever. And yet, he wrote, ‘there has been a sustained and one-sided insistence on this single aspect of their lives, while a great silence has lain over all those felt losses’. When elderly people turned on the television, they heard people saying how lucky they were to live at a time of such comforts. Yet things they cared about just as much – the integrity of their families, the survival of their communities, respect for their traditions, a sense of purpose and belonging – had been brushed aside as trivial. ‘We thought we were keeping faith,’ Seabrook wrote, ‘and all the time we were taking something away.’16

  But there was, of course, another Britain: not broken, brooding, abandoned or alienated, but conservative, aspirational, prosperous and contented. This was the Britain of Terry and June, Bergerac and the Antiques Roadshow: microwave oven Britain, home computer Britain, Marks & Spencer’s Britain. It was the Britain of sleepy suburbs and market towns: Watford, where unemployment never rose above 5 per cent; Taunton, with its booming light industrial estates, huge new ITT factory and gargantuan new Asda; Daventry, with its prosperous housing estates and busy distribution centres, where in the summer of 1981 the local Job Centre had so many vacancies that adverts carried the heading ‘Urgently Needed’.

  Nobody ever wrote a song about Redditch, which saw its population surge by 63 per cent in just ten years. No pop group immortalized Tamworth, where the population grew by almost two-thirds, or Basingstoke, a ‘conglomeration of offices, factories and housing estates, characterised by a monotony and lack of inspiration that is probably unsurpassed anywhere in Britain’, according to the journalist John Young. Yet although Young hated the Hampshire town’s roundabouts and office blocks, Basingstoke had superb transport links, miles of new roads and a shiny new shopping centre. Even more strikingly, it had no unemployment to speak of, even though its population had trebled in less than thirty years. Nobody ever romanticized Basingstoke. But Basingstoke was a success story. Basingstoke was the future.17

  Was there a formula for success? The most important thing was geography. ‘I don’t think we are doing anything right,’ said Berkshire’s county planning officer. ‘It’s just because of where we are.’ The towns along the M4 corridor – Newbury, Reading, Bracknell, Wokingham – did not receive a penny in regional aid. They did not need to. They were close to London, close to Heathrow and close to the government research centres into weapons, aircraft, nuclear fusion, atomic energy, transport and meteorology. Many former government scientists had set up their own laboratories, attracting firms such as Ferranti, Racal and Hewlett-Packard to move in too, as well as bright, ambitious young men and women from the declining North and Midlands. ‘It’s an incestuous kind of thing,’ explained Newbury’s chief planning officer. ‘They head-hunt each other, work and socialise together … Tonight’s good idea means two more jobs on the lab bench tomorrow.’

  Here, declared the Guardian, Mrs Thatcher’s dream of a hi-tech Britain had become a reality: ‘In the wake of the computer industry come the service industries, the precision engineering shops, the banks and insurance services.’ No planner had earmarked Newbury as a pharmaceuticals centre, yet in the middle of 1982 the German giant Bayer was building a massive new complex that would be its British base for the next three decades. Across the county, in fact, business was booming. Half of all Berkshire’s firms told a council survey that they were planning to take on more staff; barely one in ten expected to lay anybody off.18

  It is telling, though, that few observers had kind words for places like Newbury and Reading. Imaginatively, most commentators were still Victorians at heart. Work was something done by men in a factory, not women in an office. Streets should be lined with brick back-to-backs, not suburban bungalows. Town centres should be full of stone churches and Victorian town halls, not glass office blocks and concrete roundabouts. As a result, success stories were often treated like alien intruders in a landscape of decline. When Beryl Bainbridge went to Milton Keynes, she could barely contain her horror. ‘If I had to describe the area in one sentence,’ she wrote, ‘I would say it was a series of motorways circled by endless roundabouts, with the houses hidden behind clumps of earth.’19

  Yet Milton Keynes was the greatest urban achievement of the age. Since 1967, when the government had unveiled its plans for a New Town of some 250,000 people in the north Buckinghamshire countryside, its growth had been little short of sensational. Outsiders mocked the grid layout and concrete cows. But few could have looked at its growth figures, the best in the land, without feeling intensely jealous. In two decades, the area’s population had more than doubled, while th
e number of jobs had risen from just 18,000 to more than 50,000. Two-thirds of the new jobs were in services; three-quarters of the local workforce were professional, managerial or skilled workers; more than half were aged under 40. In March 1981, when much of industrial Britain was shivering in the recession, the Guardian profiled two small firms that had just moved to the area. The first, a two-man band making vacuum systems for research laboratories, was doing so well it had just taken on fourteen precision engineers to cope with the demand. The other firm made moulded kitchen and bathroom fixtures, the perfect product for a home-centred age. There was no better location in the country, the boss said, ‘for serving the country’s best markets. It’s simply a sensible place to be.’20

  But there was more to Milton Keynes than work. Contrary to what its critics claimed, it was not some suburban wasteland, devoid of culture or community, ‘all concrete and no soul’. The town’s £300,000 advertising campaign called it ‘Ambridge with all mod cons’, and new residents waxed lyrical about the wonderful leisure facilities, the friendly neighbours, the sense of camaraderie and common endeavour. For elderly people moving to the area, the council had organized a ‘good neighbour’ programme, with staff to help the newcomers settle in, organize their shopping trips and even take them to doctors’ appointments. For the youngest residents, there was a special pack containing a letter from the mayor, a badge, a certificate, a local quiz and a poster map of the area with stickers so they could mark off the different ‘attractions’. No doubt critics would have scoffed at that last word; yet as one local man told The Times, ‘I don’t know of another place this size with all our facilities.’

  He was not wrong. In March 1981, when the town was just 14 years old, the Guardian counted 104 football clubs, fifty-five pubs and bars, two rival English Civil War re-enactment groups, countless flower-arranging societies, toddlers’ groups and youth clubs, and even a Scrabble group. The Milton Keynes Bowl could seat at least 50,000 people; there were two large leisure centres; there were riding, canoeing, hang-gliding and kung fu clubs. Every weekend on the landscaped lakes, people went angling, sailing, windsurfing and water-skiing. And despite what outsiders claimed, Milton Keynes did have a history. Local archaeology enthusiasts had already uncovered two Roman villas, several farmsteads, two Iron Age enclosures and a demolished seventeenth-century manor house. ‘We watch the town grow’, said one retired woman, who loved her weekly pensioners’ club meetings, ‘and wonder why we lived in London for so long.’21

  Perhaps the most surprising success story, though, was just over an hour away on the other side of the M1. Here, in one of the most unglamorous corners of England it was possible to imagine, a reporter from The Times came across another outlandish vision of the future:

  You get the first impression that there is an unBritish air to the place as you approach it over the flat, black, fertile agricultural land: a mass of bright new factories, office blocks and housing is tucked amid a host of new trees and a modern road network. A new golf course has had hillocks piled up by bulldozers to relieve the flatness and a six-mile stretch of the River Nene has been declared a park, complete with an artificial steam railway. The image is Dutch, or Canadian.

  This was Peterborough, a sleepy East Anglian cathedral city that had been designated as a New Town in 1967. In just over a decade it had seen its population surge from 81,000 to 120,000 and had built 17,000 new houses, more than 5 million square feet of new factory space and more than 1 million square feet of new office space. It even had a £250,000 advertising campaign, trumpeting what the city planners called the ‘Peterborough Effect’.22

  Even at the time, the thought of a ‘Peterborough Effect’ seemed faintly comical, because places like Peterborough were supposed to be so preternaturally boring. But in some ways Peterborough was one of the most interesting places in Britain. It was an advertisement for the judicious use of public money: since the end of the 1960s, successive governments had invested an estimated £255 million in Peterborough, including £12,500 in housing and infrastructure for every new job created. In an era when many people were obsessed by the apparent decline of traditional communities, it was also an advertisement for social and geographical mobility. Peterborough was a city of migrants: by 1983, three out of four residents had been born elsewhere. Half came from London, the rest from the Midlands and the North. But there were also sizeable communities of people from overseas: some 2,000 Ugandan Asians, for example, as well as 5,000 Italians, hundreds of Eastern Europeans and even some 125 Vietnamese boat people. But there were virtually no racial tensions. At the local Asian centre, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs worshipped together perfectly happily, with scarcely a hint of inter-communal tension or hostility from their white neighbours. As the local bishop’s community relations chaplain confidently declared: ‘Race relations are not a problem in Peterborough.’23

  When visitors came to places like Peterborough and Milton Keynes, they often described them as ‘American’. They never meant it kindly. But to many of the newcomers, Peterborough’s supposed ‘Americanness’ – the sense of space, the clean air, the absence of industrial conflict, the transport links, dual carriageways and suburban houses – was its greatest asset. The drinks firm SodaStream had moved to Peterborough in 1975 and saw production grow from 60,000 units to 415,000 units in just four years. For the firm’s managing director, this was the Peterborough Effect in action:

  There’s an American style get-up-and-go atmosphere here, an inbuilt sense of optimism helped by the fact that we all know we are paying our own way … The houses are good, the roads are good, and great effort has gone on providing the amenities while the expansion programme has been under way and not afterwards, like so many other places. When people live in pleasant houses and have a lot of attractions around them they have a basic goodwill towards life in general and all the new firms here will tell you how high productivity is.

  In fact, a Guardian survey found that firms which had moved from London thought their productivity was 30 per cent higher in Peterborough, even though most had kept the same staff. The city was not immune from the recession: by 1983, the unemployment rate had reached double figures. But the authorities remained calmly optimistic. Given that they had already attracted some 200 new firms in just over a decade, they had good reason.24

  Above all, Peterborough promised young families that, if they moved to East Anglia, their everyday lives would be tangibly better than if they stayed in London or Birmingham. The park, golf course and boating lake were designed to attract white-collar workers with children, as was the £24 million Queensgate shopping centre, with its large new John Lewis, ‘better than anything short of North London’s Brent Cross’. In the leafy Bretton area, the council raised money for a social and recreation centre, the Cresset, boasting a concert hall, sports facilities, meeting rooms, play areas, restaurants and shops. Most importantly, people wanted somewhere to live, and the council duly provided. New houses, although traditional in style, were arranged in suburban townships, linked by what the Guardian called ‘parkways – fast American-style dual carriageway roads’. At the turn of the 1980s, there was so much housing that virtually everyone moving to Peterborough was guaranteed a home of their own, a potent lure for young couples stuck in rented London flats.

  And with the right to own your own home becoming one of the great political totems of the day, Peterborough was ahead of the pack. The city’s long-serving council leader, Charlie Swift, had pioneered an East Anglian version of the Right to Buy as far back as the 1960s. Interestingly, though, he was not persuaded by Mrs Thatcher’s version. It was not Westminster’s place, he thought, to tell local authorities what to do with their housing stock. Even more interestingly, he was a member of the Labour Party. But most of his new neighbours saw their political future rather differently. For decades, Peterborough had been a knife-edge marginal, but in 1979 the Conservatives took the seat with a majority of 5,000. In 1983, even after the recession had dented Peterborough’s momentum
, they doubled their majority to more than 10,000. Like Milton Keynes, this was Margaret Thatcher country now.25

  On the face of it, the contrast between places like Liverpool and places like Peterborough was the perfect illustration of the vast chasm between North and South. The facts told the story. Of the fifteen most prosperous towns in Britain in the mid-1980s, reported the Sunday Times’s economics editor, David Smith, all fifteen were in the South, the top five being Milton Keynes, Newbury, Didcot, Welwyn and Aldershot. Of the fifteen least prosperous, however, all fifteen were in Scotland, Wales or northern England, the bottom five being Cardigan, Pembroke, Barnsley, Mexborough and Holyhead. Death rates in the North, and particularly in Scotland, were higher than in the South. High blood pressure was more common in northern industrial towns than anywhere else, so heart disease and strokes were more common, too. Northerners were more likely to be smokers, and the Scots the most likely of all.

  People in Scotland, northern England and Wales spent a higher proportion of their income on alcohol than their southern counterparts. Rates of burglary, theft and criminal damage were much higher in the North and in Scotland than in southern England. Even morally there was a clear divide. Northerners tended to be more disapproving of drugs and adultery, although they claimed to have more sex; conversely, illegitimacy was much more common in the North. Nationally, about one in five babies was born out of wedlock. In the south-west, this fell to 17 per cent; in the north-west, it rose to 27 per cent. Little wonder that Beryl Bainbridge, who had moved from Liverpool to London, began her English Journey believing that ‘North and South had long since merged’, only to discover that ‘they were separate countries’.26

  This was nothing new, of course. As David Smith noted, the story of the North in the twentieth century had been one of apparently inexorable relative decline. Its public image seemed trapped in the era before the Second World War: hence the success of Coronation Street, an idealized, nostalgic community where everybody knows their neighbours. Indeed, the North–South divide was as much a frontier of the imagination as it was a border built of facts and figures. Of the suburban middle-class sitcoms that drew enormous audiences in the early 1980s, Terry and June was set near Croydon, Butterflies in Cheltenham and Ever Decreasing Circles in Surrey. By contrast, the most self-consciously northern of all sitcoms, Last of the Summer Wine, was about three old men in flat caps and tweed who might have been preserved in aspic from Orwell’s day. The decade’s most searing depiction of unemployment and poverty, Boys from the Blackstuff, was set in Liverpool. But its most unashamed celebration of wealth and aspiration, Howards’ Way, was filmed on the Hampshire coast, almost as far south as it is possible to go in mainland Britain.27