There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  We sit in a drawing room decorated with Harry’s sketches and reliefs. Harry’s wife, Lorna, a gentle woman quite a few years his junior, comes in to introduce herself. She is scrambling eggs and smoked salmon in the kitchen, she says. Would we like some? I look at her, then look back at Harry. He is clearly healthy and prospering. This is a middle-class home, complete with dried flower arrangements and scented candles. This was not what I had in mind when I asked Brian to introduce me to people who had been affected by Thatcher’s policies. I think of asking Brian to introduce me to someone who is suffering a bit more conspicuously, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want to sound like the infamous Fleet Street journalist who hopped off the plane in the Congo and bellowed, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

  Harry always had a knack for drawing, apparently. He practiced on his father’s back as a child, because there was no paper in the house. When the pits closed, he found himself sketching scenes from the mines, over and over. Unemployed, at loose ends, he submitted one of those drawings to a local competition and won first prize. His first exhibition was in a Pontefract pizza parlor. His second was in the Royal Festival Hall in London. His paintings are now prized by collectors and sold for thousands of pounds. All that talent was sitting at the bottom of a coal mine. No one noticed it. No one would have, had Scargill had his way.

  Lorna brings us tea. We sit in Harry’s living room, talking about his memories of the strike. “It were a glorious summer for me,” he says. “It were one of the best years I had.”

  “Really? Why?”

  He looks at me as if this is quite a stupid question—and I suppose it is. “It were marvelous to do no bloody work!” He sips his tea, then asks me if I’ve ever been down a coal mine. I tell him that I haven’t. “Well. You’re talking a shit job. It’s the worst of the worst.”

  “What was your feeling about Scargill’s declaration that there should be ‘loss without limit’?” I asked Harry.

  “I suppose we were talking ludicrous economics, I thought.”

  “You thought so then?”

  “Oh, I thought so then. You could see where they were spending money on mines; we spent a million pounds on the canteen at Fryston pit. Fryston were a reasonable-sized pit, but it weren’t a big one. The canteen, you couldn’t get a bloody Kit-Kat once they upgraded it . . . So they’re spending money on a thing because you got national control of it, and if this is going on on that scale’round the country, then obviously it’s going belly-up, as it were.”

  I wasn’t expecting to hear this. I wasn’t expecting what he said about the miners’ enthusiasm for strike action, either: “We’re talking here that people would strike over lots of bloody things. We’re talking about pits here that would strike regular . . . There’d be strikes ’cause of conditions, there would be strikes over pay, there would be strikes just ’cause they felt it were a lovely day and wanted to go home. Sunshine pits.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “You know, stick it up your ass where—”

  I nodded.

  “There were a lot of hard workers,” Harry adds, “but also a lot of bloody idle workers. Now, I knew a lot of guys who were influenced by pubs.”

  “By what?” I ask.

  “Drink. The miners tend to be that sort of men, usually. They come from a background of hard workers, hard drinkers. So much of ’em spent a lot of time in the pubs. To the extent that in the’70s, I knew guys that weren’t hardly working three days a week . . . There were one guy in particular, he were sacked on fifteen occasions, and the union reinstated him. Basically, you’re going to do a job, and you’ve no bloody help, because everybody’s buggered off home . . . You’re struggling, because no one will do any bloody work. I’m not saying that—you know, you’ve a thousand blokes here, and out of that were a reasonable percentage, and most of them would be at the coal face, as it were. But you’re basically forgetting that the whole purpose of a bloody coal mine were to get coal out. And without that, you’re going nowhere.”

  Thatcher would have perfectly agreed.

  “What do you think your life would be like if you’d won the strike?” I ask.

  “Well, that’s the crux o’ the matter as well, that’s something that—I look back with mixed blessings, I suppose, really. I’d still be back at the pit, and most likely still be married to the first wife. There’s no way I woulda met Lorna. My life has changed considerably since finishing the pit. Changed a lot. And whether I’d still be walking is another kettle of fish. Whether my health would still be—certainly I’m a different guy than I was twenty years since. In some respects I feel a lot better than I did in my thirties.”

  Harry obviously understands the logic of Thatcher’s policies and benefited from them. He nonetheless maintains that they were wrong. “You’re closing people’s lives down,” he says, “people’s culture down, almost. You know, it’s almost like you’d go to a country and wipe out their culture. You wouldn’t dream of it, would you, nowadays.”

  I ask, “But do you think that if an industry isn’t economical, it’s the government that has a responsibility to keep it alive and preserve the culture around it?”

  “There’s more things than economics comes into it. There’s more things than how much does the coal cost, how much can we sell it for. Because once you close the mines down, you’re closing a way of life down, that basically people depended on. And how much money did they spend after the strike, keeping communities together? How much money will you spend on welfare, whatever, after the strike because people’s whole way of life had gone belly-up, as it were?”

  “Do you see it as abnormal that certain industries would cease to be profitable and be replaced by other industries?” I ask.

  “That’s the way of life, in some respects,” says Harry.

  “That’s bound to happen,” Brian agrees.

  I ask Harry, “So, if you’d been in power at the time, if you’d been prime minister, and you’re looking at a progressively less economical industry, how would you have handled the pit closures?”

  “That’s a good question,” Harry says. “And I’ve never been in that situation.”

  “What other options were realistically open to Thatcher?”

  “The option that she wanted, it weren’t about closing the mines down, for me, it were about taking power away from the unions. That were the prime target, the prime objective. Basically, emancipating the bloody unions.”

  I suspect he has misspoken—I believe he meant to say “emasculating” the unions. But I can’t be sure. Thatcher maintained that she was emancipating the unions, in the sense that she believed she was freeing the worker from the tyranny of the closed shop and insisting the union leadership adhere to democratic procedures. “Emancipating” is the word Harry uses, but “emasculating” is the word his voice and the context convey.

  A feeling of emasculation, whether or not that is what he meant, is obviously something Thatcher aroused in many men. The fact that they were defeated by a woman, I would have thought, must have made the insult of losing their jobs particularly hard for these men to bear.

  If Brian and Harry are willing to concede that the economics of nationalized coal made no sense, I ask, why do they continue to maintain that Thatcher’s policies were misguided?

  Brian suggests that I am looking at it the wrong way: I am prioritizing economic efficiency, a typical American failing. “What I’m saying is,” he says, “where Thatcher goes wrong, she sees it in solely economic terms. If the market is all, and the workers are unprotected—there’s a feeling about protecting your poor, which you feel fundamentally in the writings of Jefferson, you feel fundamentally in the writings of Thomas Paine, even more, and the inspiration of America, which you don’t feel now. You know. So, and Thatcher is of that ilk, I think.”

  We digress for a while, arguing (in a good-natured way, they are both good sports) about American history and the American trade union movement. Then I s
teer the discussion back to the impact of Thatcher’s policies. “Some of the questions can’t be answered,” says Brian, “because in one sense, the world is moving on very rapidly. But I don’t think she was a long-term planner at all. She was good for a scrap in the Falklands, right? Yeah.”

  “Yeah. There ain’t any bloody planners. I mean, we were good for a scrap in bloody Iraq!” adds Harry.

  “We were!” Brian agrees.

  “But we’re not good at fuckin’ ‘What do we do after that?’” says Harry. “No exit strategy at all there! If you go down to Airedale now, there’s still a similar educational standard to what when I were goin’ to the pit, as it were. But there’s no bloody pits now, are there? . . . If me father came back and saw that, he wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe what had come here before it, and now it were gone, as it were. I’m just wondering, if there’s this big change in my generation, how big a change is there going to be in the next generation? Is it gonna be a lot better? You know, it’s all right saying there’s wealth and prosperity. There’s a lot of kids down there that are wealthy and prosperous. You need to be. But there’s a lot of kids down there that are stuck, almost like bloody Victorian kids with their faces pressed up against the window. ’Cause they ain’t got the bloody money to use it, anyway. But it looks nice. So yeah, if you go down, like I said, down there, there’s a lot more crime, corruption, thieving. It woulda been almost unheard of, in my early life. Drug problems. Drink problems.”

  “To what do you attribute the rise in crime, thieving, drugs, drink?” I ask.

  “Lack of work. Lack of vision. Lack of some aim in life.”

  “Why is there no aim in life?”

  “Because aspirations aren’t there. It’s all right if you’re born in a middle-class family that’s got aspirations. Education is a thing you get directed at. Education for its own benefit, to start with. But then towards your own future in life. When you’re born to a miner that’s never worked for the last twenty years, what’s your aspiration there? What’s your incentive? Where do you get your lead from, as it were? The only place you get it is from outside.”

  “If the mines were still there, would there be any aspiration other than to work as a miner?”

  “Um—there’d a been some. There’d a been some. Not all miners produce miners’ sons. A lot of miners advocated, ‘You’ll work anywhere but in here.’”

  “So why isn’t that still the case?” I ask. “I’m not convinced yet that this has anything to do with the pit closures. You’re talking about lack of aspiration, you’re talking about alcoholism. And I can see the alcoholism just getting off at the train station—”

  “Yeah, but you’re comin’ from a direction with no bloody knowledge of such things, I should think.”

  “Which direction is that?” I ask.

  “Well, you’re a middle-class, educated person.”

  In Britain, this line is used as a conversation-stopper. As one British woman from a working-class background put it to me, when it comes to political debate, being from the working classes functions like a Get Out of Jail Free card. The card does not work well on Americans who are indifferent to the British class structure, however, and more to the point, if I were coming from a direction with a lot of bloody knowledge of these things, why would I bother to come all the way to Yorkshire to ask his opinion about them? “That’s why I’m asking you to explain it to me,” I say.

  To his credit, Harry laughs. “You got—not just a family, not just an extended family. You got a village, a town, an area that’s grown up with a certain aspect in life, a certain thing that is almost set in bloody stone. That’s what you do. And all of a sudden it’s not. It’s not what you do. But the education system . . . it’s the same quality, I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am. There’s nobody from Airedale school going to college. There’s certainly none going to bloody university. There’s no drive towards getting ’em there. There’s no drive to getting anything further than sixteen. You come out of school at sixteen, and you’re either looking for a low-skilled, low-wage job somewhere, or you’re going nowhere, because your father’s not worked for twenty years. He may not have worked for ten years, he may not have worked for five years. But certainly the direction that you’re getting from your family would be little.”

  “How do you fix that?”

  “How do you fix that? It’s going to take bloody time. And education.”

  “But how do you get education, if no one in your family is telling you, ‘Get an education’?”

  “It’s true. It’s a bloody hard point, is that.”

  I am sympathetic to the point he is making. Middle-class people tend to value education. But the arrow of causality goes in two directions. People who value education tend to become middle-class.

  I don’t know what the solution is. No one does, if they are honest. I certainly can see this issue from his side. The men whose fathers and grandfathers powered the industrial revolution in Britain—men who spent their lives crouched in those filthy mines—were told that they were no longer needed or valued. Many of them were close to retirement age, well past the age when people naturally learn new skills, take new risks, become entrepreneurs. They were given incomprehensible speeches about monetarism and market economics. They weren’t asking, in their view, for something unreasonable—just for the right to earn a living by their own labor in the only way they knew how.

  Which image is more repugnant? Is it that of a middle-aged man, his body wrecked from a life of hard labor, being told that he must now find a new job, a new city, a new way of life far from his friends and from everything he and his family have ever known?

  Or is it the image of Harry, at the bottom of a coal mine, tracing images in dust on the wall with his finger?

  It has been a pleasant morning, and I have greatly enjoyed speaking to Brian and Harry. But finally I say it: Harry’s life hardly seems to me an irrefragable argument against Thatcherism. They have been telling me that Thatcher’s policies were a disaster. If they want me fully to appreciate what they mean, I need to meet someone who isn’t doing so well.

  They decide to introduce me to Johnny. Johnny, Harry explains, was a ripper. The ripper is a ripper of rock. “Basically, you’re blowing that rock face, charging it with explosives, you’re blowing it down, and you’re shifting it with a gang of five, usually, shifting that with shovels. Johnny were a guy with a shovel that shifted this bloody rock every day. Hated it with a vengeance. You know, the conditions were the thing that bothered him up. The dust. The water. And the heat, the temperature were . . . tropics with dust, muck. So not very good conditions.”

  “No,” I agree.

  “So he hated that with a vengeance. And I’ll allus remember when the pits closed, ’cause he were one that would say, ‘I wish they’d blow this bloody pit up.’ And I bet within six months of’em closing the pit, the next conversation I had with him: ‘If they were openin’ Fryston tomorra, I’d dig it out with a bloody teaspoon.’”

  Thus did we set out to find Johnny the Ripper in his garden allotment in the Yorkshire countryside.

  Johnny, I had to concede after meeting him, is not doing well.

  Yorkshire, Middle o’ Nowhere:CB: Johnny, can I ask you, how old are you?

  Johnny: Sixty-five this year.

  CB: And so where were you during the miners’ strike?

  Johnny: Erm, Nottingham, flyin’ picketin’.

  CB: You were a flying picket?

  Johnny: Yeah, we did Orgreave . . . ’Ave you ’eard anything about it?

  CB: I’ve heard a lot about it. You’re a legend.

  Johnny: Oh, well.

  CB: So were you a miner your whole life?

  Johnny: Yeah. Twenty . . . thirty-one years at it.

  [Rooster crows in background]

  CB: When you think of the strike, what’s the first word that comes to mind?

  Harry: Poor.

  Johnny: It weren’t you know, like, I would
n’t a missed it, it were, you know, like, I saw more o’ ta country in that twelve months ’tan I seen in all me life, you know—you know what I mean, I mean, everywhere were different, I mean, we went inta Nottingham, I’ve never been in Nottingham before—I mean, you know, it’s only sixty mile away, innit, you know—

  CB: So how did you come to be a flying picket? Who approached you?

  Johnny: Well, I were union, you know . . .

  CB: Right. And they said, “We need flying pickets. Would you like to be one?”

  Johnny: And we went to union meeting, all go’d, all volunteered. Most o’ the people went.

  CB: And so were you paid to—

  Johnny: A pound.

  Brian: A pound per day.

  CB: And did they pay your expenses, too?

  Johnny: Uh, the person that ’ad the car, got the petrol money.187

  CB: Right. And how long in advance did they tell you where you needed to be?

  Johnny: Uh, the mornin’.

  CB: In the morning they’d say, “We need you to go to—”

  Johnny: Yeah. Because our place and our phones were bugged and everything, yeah.

  CB: So you were at Orgreave.

  Johnny: Yeah, I were at Orgreave, yeah.

  CB: Tell me how you remember that. When did you realize—

  Johnny: It were ’airy! You know, it were really, you know—

  CB: Were you expecting it to be?

  Johnny: Well, we were just, you know, our police, you know they were all tappin’ their shields like Zulus, you know?

  CB: Like what?

  Johnny, Harry: Like Zulus!

  Johnny: You know that film, Zulu—you know when all those Zulus were all tappin’ their shields?

  Brian: Their truncheons against their shields—

  CB : Right.

  Harry: And the police were goin’ bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, ba-bom—

  Johnny: bom, bom, bom, bom, bom!