After what seems like months we've finally buried Mrs T. As a child who was in secondary school before she lost power, I lived through a lot of what happened when she was in power and the fall out after she left.
But one of the main things I noticed was the gulf between my father and I. When David Cameron foolishly said "we are all Thatcherites now", he was wrong but only in so much as while we are are not thatcherites, we are thatchers children and the world we live in was a very different one than before her premiership.
One of the main ethos's of the old Labour party, and we are now seeing it creak but in with Ed Milliband, was the idea of "them and us" the "haves and have nots". Much has been made of the privileged background of many leading members of today's Tory party. Given the cuts to the poor and needy by these privileged ministers and the laughable idea of a millionaire saying "we're all in it together" I can see the appeal of such a PR campaign.
This stems from a pre-Thatcher idea of everyone knowing there place. As a child I attended many funerals of 80-90 year old women (they live long in the country) who had the same eulogy every time. Soandso was born in year x to soandso and soandso in the village of whatsit. she went to whatsit village school till the age of ten before going into service............ ("going into service" meant becoming a servant in the Downton Abbey sense) And that for many in my family was what was expected. Either service, farming or the military. What status in life your were born into, mapped out your life.
The TW3 sketch about class, while funny was a clear indicator of the way you brought up to think. My dad has often been asked to help with the planning of work at the firm he works for but has repeated turned down promotions. To date he has never held a potion that gave him authority over someone else. Like many others of his generation he finds it hard to imagine someone born in the position he was to "rise" up through the ranks. When my mum was offered a pub to run she didn't feel worthy for similar reasons.
I am different.
During my childhood my hero was a soldier called Sharpe, the fictional character in the TV series of the same name. Here was a working class lad, fighting in the peninsular war, who had gone up through the ranks to become an officer and fought, not only the French but also the posho officers that didn't think he belonged in the mess with them. The script was written in such a way that the posh officers either came round and did accept him or were shown to be idiots or buffoons. Without realizing it, the old way of looking at society was dying around us.
This was partially due to those raised in the 60's with the new ideas coming out were now in positions of power in the media but also because the things that kept "them and us" separate were, one by one, being taken down. When you look at it from the point of view of what did "they" have that "we" didn't the list goes something like..
Owning your own home, owning a business or working for yourself, having banks offer you a line of credit to do both of these things, owning shares, having your kids properly educated, being in power, having access to higher education, being officers in the army, holding management positions, negotiating with unions rather being in them and many more.
Prior to the 80's these were definite items one could tick off a list to say which class or social group you were in. From 1979 to 1990, we saw great changes in our legal system that allowed those formally seen as "working class" to have access to the things they were previously denied.
They were given assistance to buy their council homes to become homeowners, another tick. This led to them getting a credit rating which the banks would never have allowed the working class to do before. This lead to the working class having credit cards and other financial goodies that in turn help grow the economy at the time. Though it must be said that her failure to replace the social housing that was sold off, is a direct cause of many of the problems we now suffer with house prices and homelessness.
The banks were also forced to offer loans to small businesses which lead to working class people working for themselves for the first time. The grotesque figure of Harry Enfields "Loadsamoney" character may have been seen at the time as all that was wrong with Thatcherism and consumerism, but it also showed that we now accepted that you could be rich and working class at the same time. This, on a large scale, was inconceivable even 10 years prior unless you were a sports start or pop singer. "Loadsamoney" was as a cockney plasterer who, like many in the building trade, would branch out on their own, away from the large building firms and set their own hours and wages.The concept of a the small businessman was no longer a novelty.
When unprofitable public utilities were sold off, those asking for the least number of shares were given preference over the rich. This, along with the changes made in 27 October 1986, dubbed the "Big Bang" meant that access to the stock market was opened up to the working class and control was taken away from the old boy network that had run a closed shop for many years. This also meant the working class took an interest in more than just saving. They were able to shop around for pensions and insurance and financial institutions had to up their game to provide better services. This sadly led to another ugly side of Thatcherism, the rise of the yuppie.
A side note
Though I wonder if the words "vulgar" and "ostentatious" would have been applied to a member of the upper classes for the heinous crime of liking nice things, living in bigger houses and spending money? could the hatred towards yuppie and loadsamoney be just an extension of envy? I don't think so, but I do feel there was certainly an element of either not "knowing your place" or "ignoring his roots", depending on where in the social scale you come form. I personally take stick for enjoying opera and ballet, the guys in the pub think I'm getting above myself, whatever that means. But I think this is best left to a blog about on another day.
The number of University's in the UK rose faster than at any other time in UK history and she was instrumental in saving the open university in 1970 when the Tory government wanted to scrap it. This lead to the numbers of working class children, like myself, being able to go to University despite our backgrounds. The fact that I had done any examinations at all made me the most educated person in my tribe and to then go to uni............? this really was a turning point.
At school we were told the only jobs we could not aspire to were though denied solely by our genes. You couldn't be a jockey if you were over 5 foot 6, girls couldn't go on the front line in the army etc. But that was it. Repeatedly we told that we could and indeed should, aspire to do any job we wanted and the only barrier was the effort we were prepared to make to achieve it.
Part of this was down to changes in employment law that made it harder for people to be turned down for work just because of where they were from. No more old school tie meant that people were being hired on ability. Companies that still hired based on how went to school with whom very soon lost out in a world were the best rose to the top of their field and those relying daddy's connections were left by the wayside. Though to fair the unions need to take a massive amount of credit for this as well.
Oh the unions! Any talk of the old bird that doesn't mention them is worthless. Though opinion is still divided as to what she did and didn't do.
First let's dispel a few myths. The UK in the 70's was a mess. The Week described it as "torn apart my social unrest....the sick man of Europe, a sorry place, afflicted by football hooliganism, three day weeks and power shutdowns, a stock market crash, the humiliation of having to beg the IMF for a loan" Many people point the finger at the unions for the power shortages due to strikes in the coal mines and power companies that lead to the three day week and thus a massive drop in industrial productivity. But this ignores the fact that the oil producing country's of the middle east had formed a union of their own, OPEC, that started to demand more for their product that they knew the west could not do without. A massive hike in oil prices meant a rise in the cost of goods and thus inflation at a rate that basic wages could not keep up with. When the unions asked for more money for their workers they were simply looking out for their members.If the unions had stood by and done nothing they would have failed not only their members but society as well. Given this I support the unions for their work but with the benefit of hindsight i can see way others did not
Secondly, the myth that Thatcher closed the pits is quite disingenuous. With the rise of open cast mining in Australia and mountaintop removal mining in the US where the cost of collecting was minimal compared to the very high cost of mining here in the UK and more traditional mining in the third world were wages and therefore staff cost are almost nothing, British coal became the most expensive in the world. British power companies only used it because they were owned by the UK government. We were paying men money we didn't have to dig coal that was worth less than the cost of mining it to produce a product that no-one wanted. The pits were a millstone around the neck of Britain and more than one PM understood this. It's a very under reported fact that the Labour PM Harold Wilson closed more pits than Thatcher.
I just deleted 7 more paragraphs about the coal mine strikes and the uselessness of the cars "produced" by British Leyland. I could have written man many more but this post is about how her reign has had a long term effect on the British people so I will make this point. Before her, the British unions had a concept that large firms and government owned businesses were there for the benefit of the those employed there. Whether there was any work done, to what standard and even if the work needed to be done was irrelevant. Now we have a society where everyone is expected to pull their weight. This is possibly why the support for the cuts to excessive welfare, while opposed by the normal sources has been, in the main, received such public support that even the Labour party is frantically rewriting its policy on this front.
The Britain I live in now has no barriers for me. My eldest daughter is looking to be a doctor, My son wants to be an inventor and the other three? well what ever they decide there is no reason why they can't do it. The Britain I grew up in was never offered to my dad even though we grew up in the same county, went to the same kind of school and were raised by the same family just 20 years apart.
The poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling contains then lines
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
I believe that when a working class woman goes to Oxford university, then leads a male dominated and at the time sexist political party then goes on to run the country for longer than anyone that century, we all started to feel like that line in the poem.
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