When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (15 page)

The outlook for those who fall off the bottom is just as bleak in the south as in the north – and often more lonely. Miss Richmond told me of middle-aged men who had been job-hunting for years in vain: a 45-year-old electrician with a twenty-year work record who had been filling out applications for a year; a ‘progress chaser' in his late thirties who had been out of work since 1980. She estimated there were almost six people out of work for each vacancy. But the unemployed were, of course, the wrong people for the jobs. ‘The ads in the papers are aimed at those already in work,' she said.

The consequence of this process is that the two Britains of the haves and have-nots increasingly live side-by-side. It isn't just the north and the inner cities that cannot provide work for the unskilled or the less well motivated, but towns like Slough and Winchester – discovered by a team from Newcastle University to be the most affluent community in Britain – where half a generation ago everyone with a pair of hands had a job. As the majority become more affluent, the poor become relatively more deprived. A simple illustration is that bus services will inevitably decline once most people have cars: the poor and the old are left almost immobile, while roads we can no longer afford to maintain become chronically overcrowded. A Slough journalist said some of the housing conditions on Slough council estates were sordid and unhealthy, reflecting both the poverty and the demoralization of the tenants.

There is no point in getting ‘on yer bike' unless you have something to offer when you arrive, as illustrated by teenagers from the provinces who are workless and homeless in central London. In Winchester I met people, not much more than a literal stone's throw from the cathedral and college, who were as isolated from the affluent existence of their neighbours as if they had lived in a derelict pit village. I went one sunny spring afternoon with a young and radical local clergyman, Rick Thomas, to the Highcliffe estate. There we met Charlie Bicknell, a 25-year-old married man with two small children. It was an effort for him to remember when he had last worked, finally settling for ‘three or four years ago.' Brought up as a farm labourer, his last job had been as a cleaner. His supplementary benefit, he said, was inadequate, and had it not been for the Church his family would not even have had a cooker. Indoor lavatories and baths had only been installed on this estate two years before, progress that was nearly twenty years behind the colliery houses of Easington. Nearby, a child played outside a house with broken, boarded windows. Mr Bicknell's children rampaged behind drawn curtains. ‘It's not easy bringing a family up on the “social”,' said Mr Bicknell, adding that he couldn't see anyone starting a business in town that would offer him a job. ‘All those antique shops, they're only making things better for themselves.' Across the River Itchen, outside the Bishop's Palace, prep-school boys were climbing out of a minibus ready for a game of hockey and, in a bookshop next to the house in which Jane Austen died, a tweedy schoolmaster was ordering Latin texts. Here, indeed, one might hit several bishops' nieces by hurling a brick. Rick Thomas commented: ‘It is hard for those who haven't experienced poverty to imagine the numbing powerlessness of the very poor.' His stories of hardship had shocked local councillors.

An unemployment centre had just been closed, and its organizer sacked because of lack of funds. It was a battered and barren place compared to those I have seen in the north, with such graffiti on the walls as ‘Smash the State' and a drawing of Mrs Thatcher with horns. But a Conservative councillor lamented its passing: ‘It was pretty horrifying that we couldn't get across to intelligent people what good was being done by comparatively small sums. One person was saved from suicide.
That
was enough to justify the money.' Those in humbler jobs are not much better off than the unemployed: I met a male nurse in a geriatric hospital who took home sixty pounds a week. At the Job Centre I heard that, when some employers are told they are offering impossibly low rates, they reply: ‘But we've been paying that for the past ten years.'

The pressures that keep northerners out of the south-east also drive native sons and daughters away. Bernard Goodyear, chief executive of the South Bucks and East Berks Chamber of Commerce – the organization that is sponsoring the Peterlee trainees – spoke of educated, first-rate, ambitious young people leaving Slough when they get married because they cannot afford even the ‘starter homes'. ‘Our seed corn is drying up,' he said. School rolls are falling fast, and the over-65 population growing by 10 per cent a year. Vacant building land within the town boundary can be listed on a mere three sheets of paper. ‘We are,' said Councillor Denis James, chairman of the planning committee, ‘a walled city'. Mr Goodyear's remedy would be to expand the town into the green belt between Slough and Uxbridge; land which he said was of no agricultural or recreational use, blighted and desolate, occupied only by didicois. He is a cheerful cynic, putting good race relations in the town down to the fact that most people work too hard to make mischief: ‘The trick is for everyone to have two cars in the drive, preferably not paid for, and a huge mortgage.' Mr Goodyear believes the local unemployment figures are highly misleading. He told of one local ‘Restart' course that was attended by only eleven people. At the coffee break someone asked if it were true that they would lose their benefits if they weren't there. He was told no, and when the course resumed there were only three people left – all married women seeking to get back into jobs after bringing up children. ‘The others were all back on their window-cleaning rounds,' said Mr Goodyear. ‘It was a farce. There's plenty of work. It's impossible to get things done.'

But Mr Goodyear is deadly serious about the lack of suitably skilled people, not just in Slough but throughout Britain. In Japan, he said, an engineer doesn't start work until he's twenty-one, here it's sixteen: young people should not be chasing a job at any price, but getting their A levels and training. He estimated that six companies in the Thames Valley could employ three-quarters of the national graduate output of electronic engineers for each of the next five years. When there is a recession, no one invests in training for the future: when work picks up, shortages are so great that firms won't release people. He concluded: ‘If we don't get a trained and educated workforce, we'll be in the third league of banana republics. It will take twenty years even if we start now.' Outside the City of London that has become an increasingly familiar cry.

Every Slough employer looking for staff to do more than twist pieces of wire was desperate: an architect couldn't find another to join his small practice and was also in the market for two technicians (the existing partners were working every weekend to keep clients happy). Arden Bhattacharya, the town clerk and first Indian chief executive of a British town, reported great difficulty in filling some major posts – even though the council offered six months' temporary accommodation to allow time to look for a house.

An executive with a specialist engineering firm reported ‘mega, mega problems' in recruiting and holding technical sales staff: he told of one man in his mid-twenties whom they had been paying £12,500 a year plus a car, who left to join another company for £15,000 and a better car, but was snapped up by a third company as he was about to move, with an offer of £17,500, plus a yet better car. Even to get YTS youngsters, such firms have to pay bonuses above the government rate. The Chamber of Commerce, as a YTS managing agent, could have filled another hundred vacancies in 1986 if they had had the young people, which is why they were so eager to cooperate with placing the Peterlee ten. Nearby Heathrow is an employment honey pot – Slough managers grumble that between them they have trained much of Heathrow's workforce – when Terminal Four was being built, the town suffered more acutely than normal. ‘It's very frustrating: young people are chasing money,' complained the executive. His firm has thirty-five salespeople instead of the forty-two it needs. They brought four young people to Slough to be trained, found them accommodation and gave them transport, but none of them stayed. ‘Missed mother's cooking, that sort of thing. The attitude is that you have a birthright to a job on the doorstep,' said a foreign-born colleague somewhat sourly.

A major engineering company said it took from two weeks to nine months to fill vacancies. National recruiting drives had proved fruitless. Advertisements in the
Sun
had produced just one worker from Manchester, while an intensive drive in Sheffield, where twenty-two were interviewed, failed to lure a single person south. ‘Maybe we jump to the conclusion that people desperate for jobs will naturally take them. But we're not able to offer sufficient financial incentives to offset the cost of uprooting and leaving friends and family.' The lack of skilled sales staff and labour shortages had cost the firm dearly in lost orders and delayed deliveries.

No one could argue that it is sensible to crowd our productive industry increasingly into one corner of the country. Yet government direction to compel it elsewhere has seldom worked. The car industry was inefficiently dispersed from its home in the Midlands to places like Linwood in Scotland and Halewood on Merseyside. Foreign investors will not come to Britain if they are directed to parts of the country where they do not wish to be. Mrs Thatcher's government hoped that continuous growth would force companies to break out of the southern industrial redoubt. But ‘overspill' factories are always the first to be closed when times get tough. The argument against moving north tends to be circular. What is the point of training people – largely inadequately on government schemes – for work that doesn't exist? Yet who will open a major plant where at best the workers are rusty and demoralized?

The answer lies in restoring confidence in the north, and creating in towns like Peterlee the energetic atmosphere of Slough. When potential investors feel the buzz on the Peterlee industrial estates that I felt that night in Slough, then they will start renting factory space. But, like confidence in comprehensive schools, it requires a few people to take the plunge. When you tell northerners that southern company bosses distrust the northern industrial environment and believe that the militant stance of Derek Hatton and Arthur Scargill is representative of political and trade union attitudes north of the Trent, they get very angry. They point to the Japanese firms that have chosen the north. But the Japanese build from the bottom up, employing almost exclusively school-leavers and graduates. There is, I believe, promise in small-scale enterprise, but in terms of numbers, relying on the Japanese and one-man enterprises is like trying to drain the North Sea with a bucket. It is hard to escape some pretty bleak conclusions.

Denis James, Slough's planning committee chairman, told me that people from Coventry had recently arrived in town to sell pictures made from silver paper door-to-door. From Coventry! The symbol of Britain's post-war resurgence, with its modern shopping precincts, its cathedral rising next to the ruins of the one that Hitler's bombers gutted, its once invincible car industry. That's where the unemployed of Durham moved in the thirties, the generation of the grandfathers of the boys who were now coming to Slough. Councillor James is just old enough to remember the pre-war unemployed, bringing their baked-bean tins, threaded with a piece of wire to serve as a handle, to the backdoor of his childhood home to beg for a cup of tea. The Coventrians with their silver paper pictures had transported him back to his childhood. The have-nots are once again at the backdoors of the haves. Harold Macmillan said very shortly before he died in December 1986 that when he was MP for Stockton in the twenties the unemployment rate was 29 per cent; when he returned as a nonagenarian in the mid-eighties for a reunion, the figure stood at 28 per cent. It made him, he said, ‘very sad'.

Mrs ‘Smith' hadn't been out after dark for five years unless accompanied by her son – and that only rarely, since he was almost as frightened as she of the long walkways with their dark hiding places and of the lounging teenagers. Five years ago, returning with four other women at ten o'clock at night from ‘a little bingo', Mrs Smith had been set upon a few yards from her front door by three ‘muggers'. The youths snatched their handbags and kicked the one woman who had hung on and resisted, severely injuring her wrist. Mrs Smith, then sixty-two, who had already twice been burgled, became a hermit, scuttling out when necessary during daylight hours, but for the most part living a claustrophobic life of siege in her small maisonette – ‘I have never been out at night since, never been to bingo,' she said. She gave up her work for the tenants' association, knocking on people's doors and delivering leaflets. ‘I wouldn't do it now.'

Her home is in the heart of one of Britain's ill-famed inner-city housing estates – those that have been dubbed ‘no go' in the popular press – the North Peckham estate in the London borough of Southwark. The milkman has long since given up his milk round, the police move hesitantly in pairs, and, from time to time, doctors, postmen, social workers, deliverymen, repairmen and taxi drivers decline to venture inside. When Mrs Smith's husband was dying from lung cancer, a taxi driver refused to bring them home from the hospital. The estate was built in the mid-seventies, home to six thousand people, its flats linked by mile upon mile of asphalt walkway, and connected by bridges to other estates of equally formidable reputation. From one office, staff administer eleven thousand of the least desirable homes in the country. Seven years after Mrs Thatcher had boosted the ideal of a property-owning democracy by compelling local authorities to offer council houses for sale, not a single one of those eleven thousand tenants had bought the roof over his head. Between them the residents owed the borough five million pounds in rent arrears. Well over three-quarters of them fervently wanted to go elsewhere, a wish that will be fulfilled for only a tiny minority.

On the ground floor many windows are permanently boarded, the occupants preferring life in a half-light to the near certainty of being burgled when they go out. There are people on the North Peckham estate who have been broken into a dozen times. Other flats are gutted and/or blackened by fire, too derelict even for the squatters who often seize an empty property within half an hour of tenants moving out. In the mornings the caretakers find the abandoned syringes, and the matches and tinfoil – the paraphernalia of ‘chasing the dragon' – which betray the widespread drug habit on the estate. Graffiti is ubiquitous, even some front doors are totally covered in daubings; there is dog mess every few yards. The council had recently contributed five thousand pounds for development work on a fortified milk float – which will look like a cross between an armoured personnel carrier and a bullion lorry. However, because of the faulty design of the estates, milk still cannot be delivered right to the door, and residents like Mrs Smith have to pluck up enough courage to leave their homes and descend to the roads beneath. To most Britons, North Peckham would be a glimpse of hell, one of those places that confirms the deep fissure in our society between ‘comfortable' Britain and the increasingly abandoned and feared world beyond. Even the none too scrupulous avoid the estate assiduously. In an Old Kent Road pub a man with a string of criminal convictions stated emphatically: ‘I wouldn't go near the place; it's like a foreign land.'

Mrs Smith was not a frail ‘little old lady' of popular imagination. She was still robust, keeping house for two people, and, when I called, was wearing a smart blue dress and had clearly just had her grey hair crisply permed. She lived with a series of comparisons in her head: life before North Peckham, life at the beginning of North Peckham, and life away from North Peckham. She had been brought up in Worcester, but had spent most of her married life in the intimate terraced streets of Bermondsey, ‘Cockney' territory, where many of the men made their then good living in the Surrey docks. For most elderly people in the inner city, life thirty years ago, whatever the privations and the reality, had become the ‘good old days'. Mrs Smith said: ‘We never seemed to get that sort of thing [meaning burglary or mugging] then. It was a friendly atmosphere.' Her forty-year-old divorced son, who had moved back with his twelve-year-old daughter to live with mum, as much because he was frightened of living alone as to protect her, added: ‘It was your own community. If you went away for the weekend, everyone kept an eye.' He had, he said, drunk coffee and listened to the jukebox with another Bermondsey lad, Tommy Steele, a memory which – since he must have been considerably younger than Mr Steele – may have been part of the myth.

But the early days in their new home had matched the Smiths' optimistic expectations. ‘We really liked it. It was more like a holiday camp. It was very, very good,' said Mrs Smith. And certainly the interiors of the North Peckham homes, with central heating and hot water and spacious kitchens, were, as residents said frequently, ‘little palaces' compared to the ancient terraced houses they had replaced. After a few years, said Mrs Smith and others, North Peckham ‘deteriorated', when ‘we got the class of person we have now' – a description which is in part, though not entirely, a code for ‘Afro-Caribbeans'. ‘I have,' she added hastily, although the subject had not been explicitly broached, ‘good coloured neighbours, who said to tell them if the music is too loud.' But the good years on the estate ended nearly a decade ago, and the comparison Mrs Smith now cherishes is the life led by her daughter in a small Sussex village near Brighton. Although Mrs Smith is fearful to go away in case her home is burgled, once with her daughter she is transported to near paradise. ‘It was amazing,' she said of a recent visit, ‘we went out for dinner on Saturday night with no fear or thought of anything. It seemed as if we were in a different world. There's no fear there at all. My daughter can go down to the village and not even lock her door.'

Back home, at least two of her friends no longer visit, refusing to enter an estate with a ‘no go' reputation. Her deceased husband's one surviving brother, now in his seventies, will visit only at Sunday lunchtime. ‘He likes to keep in touch, but he makes sure he leaves his wallet behind,' said Mrs Smith, who walks her granddaughter across the footbridge where a man had been murdered recently and through the neighbouring Camden estate each morning to put her on a bus for school, and waits anxiously at the bus stop each afternoon for her return. The girl was not allowed (nor wished) to go outside her front door alone. Mrs Smith is on sleeping tablets, and her son sleeps fitfully, conscious of the noises on the walkways. Twice in his own flat he had been surprised by intruders on his balcony in the middle of the night. On other nights there is worse noise from the all-night parties. The weekend before, it had gone on until a quarter to seven in the morning. Mrs Smith did not dare do anything about it – even call the council – for fear of reprisals. It was dangerous, she said, to draw attention to oneself, which is why she remains anonymous here. ‘The police say “don't be afraid to call us,” but they are short-winded in coming round,' she said. After her ‘mugging', the police did not bother to interview her. Her son discovered ‘bullet holes' in his bedroom window, but the police never came. They both thought the police had grown soft: her son remembered being frequently stopped and checked when he was a teenager roaming the streets with his friends. Now, he suggested, the police were too frightened, particularly of black youths.

Mrs Smith bitterly resented the squatters, and the non-payers of rent: ‘I pay half my pension in rent. I'm very proud of the fact that I have always held a clear rent book. A very small percentage round here can say that. I was brought up that even if you hadn't got a meal on the table, you always paid for the roof over your head.' Rents were about to go up, which simply meant, said Mrs Smith matter-of-factly, that arrears would go up. She blamed the general deterioration of the estate on ‘ignorance', people who didn't know how to keep themselves or their homes clean, didn't use the chutes for rubbish, and allowed their children to spray-paint the walls. On her walkway, the kids had been back within days of a major repainting operation – ‘Daryl wos 'ere' mocking the ‘wet paint' sign left by the contractors.

It was almost dark as I left Mrs Smith, and the walkways were deserted. At the next corner, a few yards from her front door, a beer can rattled into sight – kicked? thrown? blown? Who was lurking there? I nearly turned and walked the other way, but at the corner there was no one. I was crazily relieved, and glad that I hadn't made a fool of myself to myself by retreating. The fear locked behind the doors had seeped its way on to the empty passages. Why else would a rolling beer can make the heart race? I also left my wallet at home when visiting North Peckham.

‘Pattie' until recently had lived alone on the neighbouring Camden estate, a few yards across the footbridge from Mrs Smith. She was a schoolteacher, a rare case for these parts of someone who had ‘made good'. Walking in broad daylight with a friend, she had been grabbed from behind by a man, who appeared, she said, ‘to want a grope'. The friend seized a broom that was lying by and drove the man away. Each night when Pattie came home, she parked her car in the dark labyrinth beneath the flats, and waited to see if any shadowy figures lurked amongst the cars or on the steps she had to climb to her flat. Then she ran, phoning her mother as soon as she got through the door. Her mother would call her at 8.00 a.m. before Pattie left for work to make sure her daughter had survived the night. ‘At twenty-eight it was a bit off, wasn't it?' she said. She carried a mental map of where her friends' homes were, so she would know where to bolt if attacked. In the end it was the squatters who drove her away: one night a television came crashing on to her balcony at 3.00 a.m. They would knock in the early hours asking for a loaf of bread: the evidence of drug-taking was all around – ‘you knew what was going on, but you didn't ask any questions,' she said. ‘You just learn as a female that it's frightening.' After a while, she said, you even stop commiserating with people who have been burgled. Normality is changed when crime is so prevalent.

That had certainly been my experience in the United States. I had been surprised by how quickly I came to accept the American valuation of crimes that the British would consider to be quite horrific. Murders which, if committed in London, would have dominated the evening papers for days, were tucked away in the
Washington Post
‘Metro' section. One summer when I visited Detroit, murders in the city were running at four or five a night, and all teenagers had been curfewed. The first time that I wrote about handgun laws, I took a figure for the annual number of murders in America from a newspaper cutting – it was something like 24,000. I woke in the middle of the night, and did some mental arithmetic. That came out at 460 a week, which was more than the annual total in Britain. I called the FBI in the morning to say I was sure I had it wrong and could they check for me. ‘You sure have,' came the reply. ‘That figure's a year out of date. It's up a thousand since then.'

Such violence – much of it almost as casual as illegal parking – is justifiably held against American society. I could never get over the cheapness of human life – it took a really exceptional murder to raise public concern – nor the easy way in which politicians were bought off by the gun lobby from enacting gun controls that would have gone some way towards disarming hoodlums and disturbed citizens alike. But while I was away, Britain's crime figures rose inexorably, numbing the public with meaningless statistics of the ‘serious crime every nine seconds' variety that eventually make any subject as incomprehensible as economics. More concretely, the head of Brixton CID announced: ‘We are now dealing with more serious crimes than the busiest precinct in New York.' Individual criminals were showing a wanton contempt for their victims that could scarcely have been matched in Los Angeles.

In the few days I was in North Peckham, an attacker elsewhere in London threw a two-year-old girl strapped in a pushchair into a canal, having first knocked out and robbed her mother; a few miles away in Deptford burglars tortured a sixty-year-old man for forty minutes, repeatedly hitting him in the face with a hammer, driving a nail file into his eye and eardrum, and slashing his body with a knife. In the months after my return there had been some reported story of violence to file every day, ranging from ‘Bored boys tortured gerbils to death' to ‘Rugby match PC “bit off ear of opponent”'. Stabbings, attacks on transport staff, sexual assaults, even the ‘bombing' of punters on the River Cam rolled on day by day. I had once almost been a ‘mugging' victim myself, when I was attacked by two youths after I had inadvertently stopped them robbing from a woman's handbag on the Underground, so I knew a little of the fear and the impotence felt by people on the receiving end. My attackers ran off when another man – by great good fortune – appeared round the corner.

The use of knives in south London was beginning to rival the American use of guns. Dr Robert Ware, head of the intensive care unit at King's College Hospital, Denmark Hill, which lies between Brixton and Peckham, told me that the lives of cancer and heart patients were at risk because of the amount of operating-theatre time occupied by the victims of stabbings. Even when stab victims' lives were not at risk, patients awaiting operations frequently had to be sent home – often deeply distressed – for a further wait. ‘It seems the macho thing to carry a knife, and the bigger the knife the more macho. They are going round now with eight-inch knives' – and he demonstrated their wicked length with his hands – ‘and there are not many places in the body where you can push that without causing serious injury,' he said. He told me that when he had been a young casualty officer fifteen years ago, knife injuries were rather messy slashings by drunken Irishmen; now they were systematic through and through stabbings, mainly of and by people engaged in the drugs business. The hospital, he estimated, received seven stab victims a day, at least one of whom would require major surgery. One a week had to be admitted to intensive care, where the mortality rate was almost one in three. The victims – sometimes brought to casualty in stolen cars – were fortunate in that King's College has a cardiac unit, which saved several lives that would have been lost in less well-supported accident hospitals.