The View From the Train (7 page)

Sheerness, from
Robinson in Space
(1997)

The main port of the Medway is Sheerness, which is the largest vehicle-handling port in the UK, with imports by Volkswagen-Audi, two-way traffic by Peugeot-Citroën and exports from General Motors' UK plants, among others. Like other modern UK ports, it is a somewhat
out-of-the-way
place. Opposite the dock gates is the plant of Co-Steel Sheerness, which recycles scrap into steel rod and bar. Co-Steel, a Canadian company, is the protagonist of what it calls ‘total team culture', in which all employees are salaried, overtime is unpaid, and union members fear identification. In June 1996, the International Labour Organisation called on the UK government to investigate Co-Steel's anti-union practices. On the other side of the Isle of Sheppey, at Ridham Dock (a ‘hitherto little-known port' which featured in the Scott enquiry,
⁹
from which Royal Ordnance military explosives were shipped to Iran), there is
another KNAUF automated plasterboard plant, which the 1995 Medway Ports'
Handbook and Directory
describes as ‘the fastest running production line in Europe'. Opposite Sheerness, on the end of the Isle of Grain, is the automated container terminal of Thamesport, to which ACL's ships were diverted from Liverpool. In the Medway Ports'
Handbook
, Thamesport is described as the UK's most sophisticated container terminal, ‘where driverless computerised cranes move boxes around a regimented stacking area with precision and speed'. Thamesport's managing director insists nonetheless: ‘This is a people industry. The calibre and commitment of people is absolutely critical.' When Thamesport recruited its 200 staff, ‘I did not want anyone with experience of ports because this is not a port – it's an automated warehouse that just happens not to have a lid on it.'

In England, only 1.1 per cent of employees work in agriculture, but the UK grows far more food than it did a hundred years ago, when the agricultural workforce was still large. In 1995, unemployment in Liverpool was 14 per cent. On Teesside, which is arguably ‘the UK's biggest
single
port', are British Steel's plant at Redcar, and Wilton, the huge chemical plant now shared by ICI with Union Carbide, BASF, and DuPont. British Steel is now the world's third-largest steel producer, with substantial exports, and the chemical industry is one of the UK's most successful, with an export surplus of £4 billion. Nearby is the new Samsung plant at Wynyard Park. Despite this concentration of successful manufacturing industry and the port, unemployment in Middlesborough, on Teesside, is 17 per cent: the highest in the country. Wages in some parts of the UK are apparently now lower than in South Korea.

In the 1980s there were attempts to assert that the future of the UK's economy lay in services, and that the imbalance in imports of manufactured goods that characterised the Thatcher years could be sustained through increased exports of services (particularly ‘financial services'). In fact, because of the virtual disappearance of the merchant shipping fleet, the service sector's share of exports has actually declined since 1960, and imports of cars, electronics and other
visible
items (there are few toys, for instance, not now marked
‘made in China') are balanced by exports not of services but of other manufactured items, in particular intermediate products (for example, chemicals) and capital goods (power stations, airports). These strengths seem to match the financial sector's cultural preferences: chemical plants are capital-intensive, but do not involve the risks and ephemerality of product design; exports of capital goods are, by definition, financed by other people's capital. The UK is good at low-investment, craft-based high technology, but not at high-investment mass-production high technology, unless it is owned and financed elsewhere (the United States, Japan, South Korea or Germany). The UK's most extensive indigenous high-technology industry is weaponry, in which investment is supported by the state. It appears that the decline in manufacturing industry that has been so widely lamented, typically by design-conscious pro-Europeans who grew up in the 1960s (like myself), has been a partial phenomenon.

The UK's production of
desirable
artefacts is certainly lamentable (and confirms the stereotype of a nation run by Philistines with unattractive attitudes to sexuality), but any perception of the demise of manufacturing industry based on its failure to produce technologically sophisticated, attractive consumer goods is bound to be overstated. Most UK manufacturing is unglamorous – intermediate products and capital goods are not branded items visible in the shops. Intermediate products, in particular, are often produced in out-of-the-way places like Sheerness or Immingham – places at the ends of roads. The UK's domestically owned manufacturing sector is now small, but its most successful concerns are efficient, highly automated, and employ only a few people, many of whom are highly specialised technicians. The UK's
foreign-owned
manufacturing sector employs larger numbers of people in the production of cars, electronic products or components and other visible, but internationally branded, items: many General Motors cars built in the UK are badged as Opels, Ford now produces Mazdas (Ford owns 25 per cent of Mazda) at Dagenham, and the UK now has export surpluses in televisions and computers. The big export earners in manufacturing, like the ports, have a tendency to be invisible.

The juxtaposition of successful industry and urban decay in the UK's landscape is certainly not confined to the north of the country. A town like Reading, with some of the fastest growth in the country (Microsoft, US Robotics, Digital, British Gas, Prudential Assurance) offers, albeit to a lesser degree, exactly the same contrasts between corporate wealth and urban deprivation: the UK does not look anything like as wealthy as it really is. The dilapidated
appearance
of the visible landscape, especially the urban landscape, masks its prosperity. It has been argued that in eighteen years of Conservative government the UK has slipped in a ranking of the world's most prosperous economies in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head, but it is equally likely that the position has remained unchanged, and in any case this is a ranking among nations all of which are becoming increasingly wealthy. If the UK has slipped in this table, it has not slipped anything like as much as, say, Australia or Sweden, or even the Netherlands. The UK's GDP is the fifth-largest in the world, after the United States, Japan, Germany and France. What has changed is the distribution of wealth.

In the UK, wealth is not confined to a Conservative
nomenklatura
, but the condition of, say, public transport or state-sector secondary schools indicates that the governing class does not have a great deal of use for them. People whose everyday experience is of decayed surroundings, pollution, cash-starved public services, job insecurity, part-time employment or freelancing tend to forget about the UK's wealth. We have been inclined to think that we are living at a time of economic decline, to regret the loss of the visible manufacturing economy, and to lower our expectations. We dismiss the government's claims that the UK is ‘the most successful enterprise economy in Europe', but are more inclined to accept that there might be less money for schools and hospitals, if only because of the cost of financing mass unemployment.

There is something Orwellian about this effect of dilapidated everyday surroundings, especially when it is juxtaposed with the possibility of immediate virtual or imminent actual presence elsewhere, through telecommunications and cheap travel. Gradually,
one comes to see dilapidation not only as an indication of poverty but also as damage inflicted by the increased centralisation of media and political control in the last two decades.

In the rural landscape, meanwhile, the built structures, at least, are more obviously modern, but the atmosphere is disconcerting. The windowless sheds of the logistics industry, recent and continuing road construction, spiky mobile phone aerials, a proliferation of new fencing of various types, security guards, police helicopters and cameras, new prisons, agribusiness (BSE, genetic engineering, organophosphates, declining wildlife), UK and US military bases (microwaves, radioactivity), mysterious research and training centres, ‘independent' schools, eerie commuter villages, rural poverty, and the country houses of rich and powerful men of unrestrained habits are visible features of a landscape in which the suggestion of
cruelty
is never very far away.

In their book
Too Close to Call
, Sarah Hogg and Jonathan Hill describe the strategy behind the 1992 Conservative election campaign:

In the subsequent period the Conservatives were seen as even less efficient and even more cruel. The shackling of women prisoners during labour, and its defence by Ann Widdecombe, the Home Office minister, was the most outrageous example of this, but the campaign to legitimise child-beating was perhaps more shocking because it was so widespread. The sexuality of Conservatism is
certainly very strange. While there are always a few straightforward libertines among prominent Tories, and Thatcher apparently tolerated homosexuals when it suited her, repression and S&M haunt the Conservatives in a way that cannot be put down simply to the influence of the public schools. Like repression, deregulation inflicts pain and suffering. Unemployment, increased inequality, low wages and longer working hours all lead to depression, ill health and shorter life expectancy. In May 1996 Maurice Saatchi launched another pre-election campaign with the slogan: ‘Yes it hurt. Yes it worked.'

This gothic notion evokes the famous passage in Burke's
Philosophical Inquiry
: ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible … is a source of the
sublime
.'
¹¹
Alistair, Lord McAlpine of West Green, the Thatcher confidant who was party treasurer during her leadership, lived for most of these years as a tenant of the National Trust at West Green House in Hampshire. The house, which was badly damaged by fire during McAlpine's tenancy, and was bombed by the IRA after he had left, was built for General Henry ‘Hangman' Hawley, who commanded the cavalry at Culloden; and over the door in the facade facing the garden is the inscription ‘Fay ce que vouldras' (‘Do what you will'), the quotation from Rabelais which was the motto of the Hell Fire Club.
¹²

It takes a long time for a political and economic regime to change the character of a landscape. As I write in the last months of 1996, the regime is changing: in May 1996 Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley and former chief forecaster for the US Federal Reserve, announced that the doctrine of cost-cutting and real wage compression (‘downsizing') of which he had been the most influential proponent for more than a decade, was wrong.
¹³
Companies would now have to hire more workers, pay them better and treat them better. In the UK, despite recovery in the housing market, whether or not Labour wins the forthcoming election, the attitudes of most leading UK companies to European social legislation and the single currency seem certain to eclipse the Tory right. The first services through the Channel Tunnel after the
fire in November 1996 were international freight trains, the second of which was carrying car components from one Ford plant in the UK to another in Spain. The UK really is now (almost) a part of mainland Europe.

With the Conservatives and their obsessions removed, the new industrial landscape of the UK begins to resemble the computerised, automated, leisured future predicted in the 1960s. Instead of leisure, we have unemployment, a lot of low-paid service sector jobs, and a large number of people who are ‘economically inactive', including ‘voluntary' carers and people who have been
downsized
into a more or less comfortable early retirement, many of whom once worked for privatised utilities. The enormous irony of the Tory twilight is that their protestations that the UK is a prosperous
country
are largely true. There are even a few signs of a revival in the manufacture of indigenously financed high-technology consumer goods. The United Kingdom is a rich country in which live a large number of poor people and a similar number of reasonably welloff people who
say
they are willing to pay for renewal of the public realm. There
seems
to be no reason why the UK cannot afford a minimum wage, increased expenditure on welfare and education, incentives for industrial investment, environmental improvements, re-empowered local government, and other attributes of a progressive industrial democracy.

Where I live, there seem to be two kinds of space. There is
new space
, in which none of the buildings are more than about ten years old, and there is
old space
, in which most of the buildings are at least twenty years old, a lot of them over ninety years old, and all are more or less dilapidated. Most of the
old space
is residential, but there are also small shops, banks, cafés, public houses, a health centre, a library, a social security office, schools, and so on. Most of the
new space
is occupied by large corporations of one sort or another, a few of them international in scope, and it is not urban in the conventional sense. It includes retail sheds; supermarkets; fast food restaurants; a Travel Inn; a business park; distribution warehouses; tyre, exhaust and windscreen service centres, and so on. Most of these places have large car parks and security cameras. There is a lot of new space under construction, it goes up fast, and more is proposed. Buildings in
new space
do not have to last very long. In some of the older
new space
the original buildings have already been replaced by new ones.