When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (31 page)

Aberdeen's fish-handling techniques hadn't been affected by the industry's proximity to modern oil technology. The hundredweight boxes were winched ashore, and hauled a few yards on ancient metal trolleys to be spread out on the market floor. Solid men with big bellies and red faces, wearing yellow oilskin trousers and Wellington boots, strode across the boxes, prodding and poking, turning out haddock and cod with wide-awake, baleful black eyes, sole (fetching on that day £200 a box), the high-value turbot and halibut, giant skate and plaice with livid red spots. The only signs of the twentieth century were the walkie-talkies and the portable phones with which dealers kept in touch with prices from other markets. When the dealing was over, men with long metal hooks dragged the boxes across the floor towards the loading bays. There was not a forklift truck in sight.

The profit in fishing boats was returning. Boats were grossing over one million pounds a year – in 1986 one boat had achieved this by August. Oil exploration had first disturbed the fish, but now the cod were growing fat on T-bone steaks and black-eyed peas thrown from the platforms, said Mr Symmer. A notice in the market proclaimed: ‘There's nothing new under the sun, but there's plenty new under the sea.'

The good years had proved short-lived for Aberdeen and the nation. Did we really, like a Third World country, have to allow others to pinch many of the lasting benefits of British oil from under our noses? When I left, there was only a scattering of oilmen at the airport, where once there had been dozens; the cocktail lounge in the terminal closed at 6.30 p.m. just as passengers for the last London flight were beginning to assemble; the airport shop sold tawdry, predictable Scottish souvenirs; the plane, once again, was only half-full.

No one would stumble upon the new town of Skelmersdale by accident. It is a remote Bantustan; 42,000 people – most of them uprooted Scousers – dumped on the Lancashire plain between the Pennines and the Irish Sea. The town's isolation was ensured by planners who fractured the ancient road that linked the market town of Ormskirk in the west with Wigan to the east. The traveller is compelled on to a looping ring road which leads – via innumerable roundabouts – from the rich, black farmland of west Lancashire, with its dark stone walls, smell of Brussels sprouts, and occasional scarecrow, to the red-brick ribbon that marks the outskirts of Wigan. The bypass is set in generous open space, so little can be seen of the town apart from factory roofs and the fringe of housing estates.

To get that near requires local purpose and knowledge. Thousands drive by Skelmersdale each hour, pounding north and south along the M6, intent on the Lake District or Scotland perhaps, or counting off the miles to Birmingham. Those travelling east and west pass over the ‘town' boundary on the M58, an almost deserted motorway that disgorges vehicles north of Bootle's docks, close to the Grand National course. A clergyman told me he had only once seen all three lanes occupied by traffic, a bleak comment on economic activity at the margins of the motorway. Passing motorists may notice the unusual Lancashire names – ‘Pimbo', ‘Up Holland' and ‘Skelmersdale' itself – sturdy village names, telling of generations of yeoman farmers. Stop for a pub lunch in Parbold or Scarisbrick and your companions will be large, square-faced, curly haired men in brown overalls, who will depart in new BMWs. The dark peat they farm is among the finest, and most profitable, agricultural land in England.

If the sun is shining as you return past Skelmersdale towards the M6, your attention might be caught by an improbable, almost Levantine sight – four-storey blocks of flats, white against the low hills. Locals, with heavy irony, dubbed those flats ‘New Jerusalem'. Twenty years ago, in the mid-sixties, Skelmersdale was indeed to have been the New Jerusalem. The ‘homes fit for heroes', pledged since Armistice Day 1918, were at last to be built: the slums of Liverpool fifteen miles to the south were to be razed; model factories would arise in the green fields; children would breathe truly fresh air for the first time and attend schools made of steel and glass set in wide playing fields. Freed from the exploitive past, the citizens of Skelmersdale were to become the new Britons. The second wave of post-war new towns was to be the apogee of Harold Wilson's ‘white heat of the technological revolution'. Skelmersdale was only a brisk crow's flight from Wilson's own constituency of Huyton; and it would have been a fitting tribute to the spirit of 1966, when the first new house was occupied, to have named the new town ‘Wilsonia'. (A play performed locally in 1978,
Love and Kisses from Kirby
, caught the
Zeitgeist
: in it ‘new town' tenants were made to remove their shoes when they inspected their homes-to-be.)

With hindsight, 1966 was a fulcrum year between the expectations of post-war Britain and the realities of the late twentieth century. England won the football World Cup. Wilson's government was handsomely re-elected, giving its supporters hope that the country was about to make a final surge towards prosperity, better education, better health, better housing for all. Harold Macmillan's ‘never had it so good' boom had prepared the way, but now the people, freed of Supermac's Old Etonian cabal and his seedy Edwardianism, would, as in 1945, again truly be the masters. A few miles from where the foundations were being laid for a neo-Napoleonic road system for Skelmersdale, the Beatles had been asserting the new egalitarian age: the class system, it seemed, was finally tottering from the British stage. Led by a grammar-school boy with a Yorkshire accent, a reassuring pipe clasped between his teeth, and a Gannex mac on his back, a meritocratic nation of pop stars and footballers, fashion designers and iconoclastic media folk like David Frost, was ready for the future. Colour television was only a year away.

I had been within a few hundred yards of Skelmersdale many times during the years of its building. My mother-in-law lived a short distance away, and my family would drive past ‘Skem' – as it is invariably known locally – speculating about life in this invisible, unvisited town. Lancashire folk, even in the optimistic years, steered well clear and pitied the six thousand inhabitants of the former mining village of Skelmersdale who were trapped within the new town. But those were the good years; employment was abundant, and people had gardens and decent schools for their children for the first time; the town's football team won the Amateur Cup. However, even then, to judge from local papers, Skem's citizens kept Ormskirk magistrates busy, and by the mid-seventies the bad news was more fundamental. The industries on which this brave new world was to be founded were collapsing like tents in a gale. Thorn, the makers of colour television tubes, departed (it must be the ultimate industrial disgrace that a nation of telly addicts cannot manufacture the sets that enslave it); Courtaulds closed the most advanced spinning shed in the world. Thousands were thrown out of work, while thousands more arrived to seek a new beginning. Within ten years ‘Wilsonia' had become ‘Doletown'.

The policies that had pitched 35,000 semi-skilled Scousers amongst people they derisively called ‘woolly-backs' were hurriedly thrown into reverse. The target population for Skem was slashed from 80,000 to 60,000: Liverpool realized that losing 20,000 of its youngest, fittest citizens each year, as it then was, to Skem and other new towns, was a recipe for disaster, and began to rehabilitate the city centre and encourage people to stay. Skem's hospital was cancelled, the population would now be too small to justify a Marks & Spencer store – a touchstone amenity in the minds of many residents; the road system mocked the low ratio of car owners. Twenty years after Skem's foundation, the town was a totem for Britain's lost illusions. It was more impoverished, more socially disturbed, more hopeless than Wigan, George Orwell's symbol of political and economic failure of fifty years earlier. By 1987 the metaphorical road to Wigan Pier snaked out of Wigan across the M6, through the village of Orrell, dog-legged past Up Holland, and ended six miles further on in a battered row of shops in Digmoor, Skelmersdale's most squalid estate.

Mine was the only car in the parking area for those shops, behind which litter and refuse piled up, giving the appearance of a shoreline on which a rubbish barge had been wrecked. Much of Skem is like that. Tons of waste must be dropped daily: the casual coke and beer cans, the fish'n'chip papers, the plastic bags, the more purposefully dumped black dustbin bags, their contents spilling kitchen waste through gashes made by dogs. The animals are kept in their thousands to guard homes against the house-breakers who haunt Skem. Each morning the dogs are turned loose to foul every path and walkway: my introduction to the town had been a huge dog turd slowly dissolving in the rain on the bottom step of a chipped and scabietic stairway up which shoppers passed. A small boy asked if he could ‘mind' my car: feeling intimidated, and visualizing a mighty scratch if I said ‘No', I agreed, and he was suddenly idiotically pleased. ‘Oh, I love minding cars, mister,' he said grinning. I decided to give him 50p rather than the 30p I first had in mind, and was genuinely disappointed not to find him at his post when I returned. The worst that happened to my car was that someone pinched an American football ‘Superbowl' bumper sticker, fresh from New York. ‘You were lucky,' said a Lancashire citizen later, ‘that they didn't take your wheels.'

Bulldozers had just demolished a second row of Digmoor shops, and two other small boys were biking furiously in the dirt. I was going to the offices of ‘Low Profile', a drug counselling centre, staffed – when I called – by a pair of indomitable women. Both were Scousers who had come from Liverpool when times were still vaguely good. The older woman, Margaret Scullion, was an indefatigable ‘doer' – she chaired the community centre committee, ran a weekly disco for teenagers (for whom there is virtually no provision in the town), spent each afternoon at Low Profile, and was as poor as a church mouse. Her companion, Lee Evans, had come to Skem twenty years before at the age of eleven; she lived alone and had been out of work for ten years, although she was soon to draw a wage for her Low Profile work. Both women smoked continuously, creating a smog in the small room. They drew deeply on their cigarettes, forcing the noxious fumes into their lungs and bloodstreams, as hooked as any drug addict likely to walk through their door. Both women wrote songs about Skem's plight, one of which – ‘Worra Life' – Lee sang through the smoke in a tuneful, folksy, mournful way. In part it went:

Don't complain, smile in pain,

Everyone must play de game;

Life means copin' wid da little bit more.

Lost ye file, sarky smile,

Got no Giro for a while,

Can't borrow money 'cos everybody's poor …

Mrs Scullion's forty-year-old son had been out of work for ten years; one daughter was seeking to emigrate; a second, unmarried, was bringing up two children on a little more than thirty pounds a week. Once, Mrs Scullion said, Digmoor had Gas and Electricity Board showrooms, a catalogue shop, shoe shop and restaurant. The area was now poverty-stricken. She said: ‘Some families, by the time they come up to their “money day”, they're a bit hungry. We're on our knees. People have lost hope; they're just hanging on to each other. I've got eight grandchildren, and I couldn't give one of them a Christmas present. We're in a lost community. It's a terrible thing to say, but I'm glad I'm coming to the end of my life, and am not at the beginning of it.' She added that people in Skem appeared defeated: they don't want to cause trouble in case their money is affected. ‘Seem to have lost their spirit. In Liverpool a whole street would stand together and fight, not in Skem.' Nostalgia for the gutsy atmosphere of Liverpool is common in Skem, but most remember the bad things also, and few desire to go back.

Lee Evans compared the days when she left school – ‘If I was unhappy in a job, I'd cop out and do something else' – with recent times – ‘I can't think of one friend who's in work.' Many people, the two women said, ‘were forced on to the fiddle' to clothe and feed their children, panic-stricken in case they got caught. The women had tried one summer's day to test how easy it might be to borrow money from friends and acquaintances in Digmoor. They accosted fifteen people outside the centre, and did not find a single person able to help. ‘They said, “I've just borrowed meself,” or “I'm on me way for a borrow,” or “Me Giro's lost.”' Miss Evans did have regular sources for small loans, and showed me her ‘debt list' at the back of her diary. Current debts came to £29, which was exactly the amount of her weekly supplementary benefit. Professional loans were available from offices in town, she said, at the rate of 47 per cent over twenty weeks: many had taken such loans to finance Christmas. ‘You feel guilty,' said Miss Evans, ‘because you want a glass of lager to get you out of your situation. We're just ordinary people and we haven't got a voice. Know what I'm saying?' She had recently been to London for medical treatment – her journey paid by the DHSS – and had been ‘gob-struck' by the money she saw being spent.

The women sat beside a well of human misery. They told of a woman – ‘housewife' is too privileged a term to use in Skem with any accuracy – whose electricity had been cut off a week after her seventeen-year-old son had been killed by a milk float: the ‘lecky' board wanted £200 before they would reconnect her home. They might, I gathered, as sensibly have asked for £20,000. Another woman, said Mrs Scullion, had lost a four-year-old son in a fire. The bereaved mother received a death grant for fourteen pounds and her bills have come to £1,000. She was, as so many in Skem are, ‘a one-parent family' with two other children. The little lad, they said, had been hyperactive because of his poor diet – ‘egg and chips, chips and eggs.' A lot of people, they added, were sitting without electricity or gas in Skem.

Mrs Scullion said: ‘People shout when there's trouble in the streets, but what do they expect? Skem deserves a pat on the back for its restraint.' Someone had to be to blame, and that someone in the early months of 1987 was inevitably Margaret Thatcher. ‘Does Mrs Thatcher live on this earth or in cuckoo land?' asked Mrs Scullion. ‘She's no woman. We understand that it is a whole government and not just her, but the hatred is directed at her. An old man told me he wished he had what it took to bump her off.' A young, unemployed man, who wanted to buy his council house and start a small business – and therefore, exceptionally for Skem, was pro-Thatcher – said: ‘A friend of mine blames Mrs Thatcher every time he has toothache.'

Low Profile has drug counsellors on the premises twelve hours a day. The cases they see range from glue-sniffing to heroin addiction. They refer addicts, and help them with their other problems. There is a support programme for people hooked on prescribed drugs like Valium. Bad cases, said the women, became like ‘zombies. It's pitiful. They get panic attacks, lack coordination, and cannot even shop on their own.' Miss Evans said: ‘We're just ordinary, poor people, looking for a decent day's work for a decent day's pay.' That is their tragedy: such people will never be in demand in significant numbers again, certainly not on Merseyside or in Skem, which have cruel abundances of the semi-skilled.

A few nights later, in one of the town's labour clubs, I met three men typical of Skem's population. They were in their early forties, and each had come to Skem as a young married man, two from Liverpool and one – via homelessness in London – from Scotland. They had come because Skem had houses. ‘All we could get in Liverpool,' said one, ‘was a room. If we'd waited for a house, we'd be waiting still.' Despite the years of unemployment, Skem had not disappointed them as a place to live. ‘The kids hadn't even seen grass till they came here,' said one. ‘It's nice and quiet, there's space, and it's healthy. I'm a travelling man, but this is my home.' Everyone said the schools – especially the primary ones – had been very good. The three men's grown-up sons had left Skem for good. One had a degree from London University and was working in the City, one was unemployed and was bumming somewhere in squats, another had joined the army. A Labour councillor I met had one son in the army, one on a YTS scheme, one unemployed, and one still at school, which must have made his family the pollster's ‘average' Skem household. The only money any of the three fathers earned was on forays out of town for construction work – mainly in London. They would board the ‘Tebbit Express', which took working men south from Liverpool's Lime Street Station late on Sunday night, or take a cheap coach. In London there was a network of contacts – various Shepherd's Bush pubs were good places to start – which led to work, forty-pounds-a day cash and no questions asked. They often slept where the job was; one, most recently, in the basement of a £200,000 Chiswick house that was being renovated. But they resented the travelling: ‘I don't want to be away from home two to three weeks at a time,' said one. But they were realistic: ‘There's loads from Skem working down in London. It's called surviving.'