In the autumn/winter of 1978/9 I was a 24 year old office worker in the now defunct occupation of telegraph clerk. I worked in Central London and living in Kent. I had recently returned to civilian life after 3 uneventful years in the army and wasn’t particularly interested in politics.
My first daughter had just been born and I remember clearly the piles of rubbish piled up in Central London as I made my way to work in the morning; this was the winter of discontent.
I had always voted since the age of 18 deeming it a necessary duty. Without much thought I had voted Liberal (now Libdem) mostly due to my mothers influence. My father was a working class tory and he and I had argued bitterly over world events in my middle teen years (the late 60’s).
Although I didn’t really know why, I was bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war and embraced hippy culture. Never a deep thinker I just knew that when people better informed than me talked about civil rights, equality and social justice I instinctively found this attractive. I tried to talk to my dad about these things but he just pooh-poohed it as idealistic nonsense. He would always end our conversations with “its right to be idealistic son but when you get to my age you’ll know better. If you’re not a communist at 16 you have no heart and if you don’t vote tory at 36 you’ve got no brain”.
Because I could get nowhere with my dad I asked my mum what she thought and she just said “Son I vote Liberal because they pick the bits that make sense from both sides”. This outlook appealed to me and so Liberal it was.
Back to 1979. My salary was well above the national average, my job felt secure and I owned my own house, there was plenty of cash left over after the bills were paid for luxuries. The 1979 general election was the first one I had every really followed with any sense of interest or understanding. I knew instinctively my future prospects would steadily improve under a Thatcher administration and yet listening to her even then, despite the experience of the winter of discontent, there was something of the night about her that left me deeply uneasy. I voted Liberal.
All through the 80’s and up to the early 90’s my material circumstances steadily improved under the tory administration and yet there was still something about this group of people I instinctively disliked. The miners strike for the most part had passed me by, I found yuppies rather ridiculous and thoroughly enjoyed ‘Only Fools and Horses’ on the television, readily identifying with the Delboy character played by David Jason.
Through a number of major life changing circumstances in the early 1990’s and the advent of the Internet in 1995 rendering my trade obsolete, my life had taken a dramatic down turn. My marriage was over, I was in substantial debt, my parents were either dead or dying, I had to bring up my 2 daughters on my own and I was unemployable.
They say there’s nothing like a crisis for concentrating the mind and this was a crisis. During quiet moments I found solace in raking over the ashes of a life that, bar my children, was all but over at the age of 40.
Now that I was unemployed and living on benefits I suddenly understood why the miners, print workers and so many others had fought Thatcherism so hard in the 80’s. By this time I was living in Yorkshire and saw first hand the decimation of the communities around the South Yorkshire coalfields. Once thriving communities had been reduced to 60% unemployment with nothing on the horizon. Drug and alcohol abuse was endemic and by 2009 when I left Yorkshire to move to Dorset there were 3 generations of workers in South Yorkshire that were either employed in low wage service jobs or had never worked at all.
Although a South Easterner that had by and large done well from the Thatcher years I saw first hand the evidence of the way Thatcherite economics had devastated traditional working class communities, not just in Yorkshire but all over the UK.
This evil woman and her toadies in the tory cabinets of 1979-90 had wrecked and divided communities, fought an anachronistic colonial war that beggared belief, unleashed the forces of casino capitalism that had disproptionately made a few people very wealthy and impoverished millions and set back hard fought for working class rights nearly 100 years.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron continued and continue this work apace. The working class, the disabled, the homeless, and just about anyone else that doesn’t have a substantial financial reserve stashed away in a tax-evading offshore haven are, in 2013, under the most sustained class war attack perpetrated by the ruling class probably since Victorian times.
The question is can we halt it? Well we have to. Sadly we now also have to re-fight the battles of history by such great people as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, The Chartists, The General Strikers and the Jarrow Marchers. That evil woman made Lucretia Borgia seem like Francis of Asisi.
“Workers of the World unite – you have nothing to lose but your chains” has never been more relevant.
Graham Horne
Swanage.
