February 5, 2010
The Docks Are Empty Now
From ’79 to 1990 the North was starved of air/
They thought that we would lose our voice they thought we’d disapear/
Karma flowers from the hilltops, the guilt of slavery/
Shipyards are haunted by the ghost of industry.
Union power disabled, crushed until bled/
A city held to ransom with a Tory gun against it’s head/
And what was the alternative? It wasn’t Kinock’s left/
Hatton and the militants destroyed what pride was left.
- The Down and Outs, Boys from the Blackstuff
After reading Giles’ excellent re-write of ClimateHate, I’ve been doing some introspection about where my own tribal political allegiances come from.
Because I really hate the Conservative Party. Which doesn’t meant that I hate all members of the Conservative Party. On the contrary, I’ve met two in my life that I actually quite like. They have radically different perspectives to me, but they’re good and decent people.
For the actual institution of the Conservative Party, however, I hold a deep-seated and visceral loathing. Why?
I’d like to say it’s because the Tories are the party of power and privilege. The party which defends the interests of the already prosperous and empowered. The party which does this whilst having the audacity to claim that it works for the interests of all. The party which through its appeals to crass, simplistic, selfish and unreflective ways of (non)thinking preserves the status quo in favour of the few at the expense of the many.
Certainly that has something to do with it. But that can’t explain the deep-seated ressentiment I feel against the Conservative Party. It’s something more formative, more primal, than that.
To get a handle on where my hatred comes from I have to go way back into my past. To a day when I was only 6 or 7 years old and growing up in Southport, a small, relatively well-off town to the north of Liverpool.
I was in the car with my mum. For some reason now lost to me we’d been in Liverpool and we were driving home to through Bootle and Seaforth, two large areas mostly covered by housing estates. Prior to the 1980s, these estates provided the bulk of the labour-force for the Liverpool docks, a centre of world shipping and British industry.
But as we drove through them that day the ghost of industry was more than haunting those areas, it was tormenting them.
Poverty is a little like pornography; very difficult to describe precisely, but everyone knows it when they see it. Being only 6 or 7 years old, the only thing I could compare what I was seeing to was images I’d watched on Newround or Blue Peter of faraway lands where people lived in squalor after some war or catastrophe. The broken houses, the boarded-up windows, the shopfronts smashed and the people hanging around idly on street corners whilst dogs roamed the pavement. I thought we must have secretly travelled to another country. I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
My mum explained to me – and this is one of my earliest memories – that during the 1980s all the people who lived in these parts of Liverpool had lost their jobs, and that the special organisations (the trade unions) that had helped support them before were attacked by Margaret Thatcher and her government. She explained how all the jobs went to other countries, but how the people that were left behind were abandoned by the Conservative Party.
Over the following years I would ask my parents about this history. I can remember my Dad telling me about the 1970s, and about how the Unions had become too powerful and the government needed to bring them under control – but how after that Margaret Thatcher’s government had decided to take revenge on the Unions by virtually destroying them. He told me about Newcastle and Sunderland and Shefield and Glasgow and all the pit villages of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and about Liverpool. About how the people who lived in those places first lost their jobs, and then how the communities that depended on those jobs were abandoned by the Thatcher government out of political revenge.
He told me about men like Norman Tebbit who laughed at the idea that there weren’t any jobs and that families and children were suffering, and just told the parents to “get on their bikes” and find work. Even though there wasn’t any work to be found.
All the while, the memory of those North Liverpool slums would play in my head.
Today, Liverpool is in many ways a city transformed. The back-door poverty relief fund known as the European Capital of Culture project has made a visible and tangible difference. After years of above-average unemployment rates, Liverpool has enjoyed enormous levels of regional growth and (despite the recession) levels of unemployment in the city seem to have eased. But that’s what it took: a massive EU subsidy in the late Noughties to drag the city out of the post-Thatcher depression. But it’s worth pointing out that, in many ways, areas like Bootle and Seaforth remain as poor and deprived as ever. And the spending cuts of the post-recession have yet to take their toll, so who knows what the future holds for Liverpool and its people.
The image of Thatcher’s legacy in Liverpool was burned onto my memory before, I think, anything else of substance. What I later found out about her party, what it did in the 1980s, and what it still continues to stand for, only reinforce that formative experience.
And that’s why I hate the Conservative Party. And why I always will.
freethinkingeconomist said,
February 5, 2010 at 2:34 pm
First, thank you for the link.
Being much older than you (well, a decade or so), I have had the experience of actually switching away from the Tories. In fact – and you will hate me for this – I can even remember exulting at their 1992 victory, and yet, even before Blair became leader, kinda wanting them to lose. By 1995-6 it was definitely tribal – a quite unrationalised desire to see unhappy Conservative faces. In 1997, I actually bought £3 per seat of Labour at 350, so convinced was I that my feelings were widespread.
But they were not motivated by the considerations you mention – I have long lived in the South, and dryly package things up into “necessary structural reformations that were delayed and therefore exacerbated by lists of previous governments”. Instead, it was the sheer arrogance and unpleasant quality of many of the people in that Party. Portillo’s “We dare. We win”. Jonathan Aitken – a really unpleasant man at times, I’ve been told by people who had met him. The whole Spectator thing – people like Taki, predecessors of Jeremy Clarkson. The lunatic Eurosceptics.
The Tories found ways of seeming unpleasant even while that government was actually doing a reasonable job – introducing inflation targetting, Maastricht, a difficult fiscal consolidation, Northern Ireland. Once you have alienated people, it is very hard to win them back on grounds of competence, because, in fact, many of their ministers were quite young and had a decade more in them (Portillo, Lilley, Redwood, Howard, Clarke, Dorrell, Hague, Davis – all these ‘big beasts’. Who are the equivalent right now for labour?)
What I find interesting is that a lot of people still feel towards them how they did in 1995-7.
franlydie said,
February 5, 2010 at 3:43 pm
“The Tories found ways of seeming unpleasant even while that government was actually doing a reasonable job – introducing inflation targetting, Maastricht, a difficult fiscal consolidation, Northern Ireland”
NOT Northern Ireland: that came later, under Blair.
Paul Sagar said,
February 5, 2010 at 4:11 pm
No, John Major laid thefoundations in Northern Ireland. Blair finished the job.
Major deserves enormous credit. Not least because the IRA tried to mortar bomb him first.
Giles, I too have an enormous aversion to many specific Tories. This was exacerbated at Oxford. But it’s secondary for me, although the odious callousness of many top Tory brass adds to my impression that it’s a party orientated around screwing the less privileged.
fabooks said,
February 6, 2010 at 3:18 pm
How fortunate you are, to live in such a black and white world.
Your (self?) hatred, I suggest which has a life independant of the Tory Party.
Other people are no different from you. Mostly they do what they believe to be best for themselves and the people they love.
The next step is to advocate the extermination of demons.
We need to evolve I think, if we are really going to help the people we claim to want to help….
Straus said,
February 6, 2010 at 8:38 pm
I remember driving along the Liverpool Docklands on the way to catch a ferry to Ireland in the mid-1970s. I can recall to this day the shock that my ten-year-old self felt at the scenes of unremitting dereliction and destitution that unfolded before us as we drove along the quayside.
The Toxteth Riots, which happened in the summer of 1981, were in many ways the nadir of the city’s fortunes. I was about 18 at the time. Nothing like that had been seen on the British mainland for nearly two hundred years. Clearly the situation was desperate – a toxic mixture of ingrained racism and desperate poverty and neglect.
Latterly, it has become customary for the left (and numerous media commentators) to associate these scenes of blight and unrest with Thatcher and the Tories, as if they were to blame for them, as if those slums, that dereliction, that feeling of alienation and despair had been conjured up by the Conservative government in just 26 months in office. Because the Conservative Party itself is still shamefaced about its record and reputation dating from that period, it does very little to correct this impression. Instead, they prefer to say “We’ve changed – let’s forget all that and move on”.
The truth about Liverpool under the Tories is that far from being a Dark Age when the city’s once proud industrial might was hammered by a party hell-bent in wreaking revenge on the unions and left-wing Labour councils, it was in fact the period when the city started to sort out its problems and the first glimmerings of a renaissance began.
Here is a quotation from an article that Tristram Hunt (a long time Labour Party activist) wrote on the basis of an interview with Michael Heseltine in 2004:
“Peter Kilfoyle, a Labour Party organiser in the Eighties and now Liverpool MP, remains full of admiration for Heseltine’s achievements in the city. He recalls Heseltine as a politician who ‘cut through the crap and got things done’. His drive brought about the successful redevelopment of the Albert Dock (now home to the city’s Tate Gallery) and, through the novelty of a Garden Festival, regenerated acres of derelict land.”
There are, no doubt, plenty of reasons for people to hatred Thatcher and the Tory Party in the 1980s. However, I don’t think that what happened in Liverpool is one of them.
Paul Sagar said,
February 6, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Straus,
I see where you are coming from. There’s no doubt that Liverpool had problems before 1979. I didn’t mean to deny that. And certainly, the hard-left militants In Liverpool like Hatton did the city no favours (I meant to acknowledge this via the lyrics at the start of the post).
But my formative impression came at the start of the 1990s, after over a decade of Tory rule.
For sure, Michael Heseltine (a man I’ve always had respect for, one of the few Tories I will ever say that about) did something for Liverpool. But it’s hard to deny that Heseltine was very much unusual. The dominant Tory atitude and policy towards Liverpool under thatcher was to let the city rot.
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February 6, 2010 at 9:46 pm
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Straus said,
February 6, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Paul,
I accept that the Thatcher was often motivated by a desire for ideological vengeance that led her to extreme positions, but I still think that you are painting a bit of a crude caricature of her government.
Norman Tebbitt is, I suppose, one of the more unrepentant Tories you clearly loathe. But you do him a bit of an injustice when you say that he “laughed at the idea that there weren’t any jobs”. Tebbitt’s “on her bike” comment was based on the recollection of how is unemployed father had had to cycle to find work in the 1930s. Tebbitt came from a working class family. He was not someone who was unfamiliar or unsympathetic to the problems of poverty. He just didn’t feel that welfare handouts was the answer to solving it.
More recently (13 January), you may have noticed that Tebbitt blogged in support of Nick Clegg’s tax plans, which he said were the best solution on offer for helping people in low paid jobs to avoid the poverty trap:
“It is madness to claim that people so poor that they need welfare payments are at the same time sufficiently well-off to pay income tax.”
Straus
yorksranter said,
February 7, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Being only 6 or 7 years old, the only thing I could compare what I was seeing to was images I’d watched on Newsround or Blue Peter of faraway lands where people lived in squalor after some war or catastrophe.
Yes, I remember Bradford looking a lot like that in places in the same period.
DBX said,
February 7, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Margaret Thatcher bears a large share of responsibility for the dereliction of which we speak. Her approach with economic policy was deranged. It was the approach of a revolutionary, not the approach of someone who actually paid attention to the needs of business, industry and workers. She wanted instant change and paid no attention to the fact that people need time to adapt. And her instant change unleashed a ferocious recession with no parallel among western countries at that time.
Here’s how. VAT went up overnight from 8 to 15 percent, with no phase in, despite advice from her colleagues, just declassified under the 30 year rule, that it would be inflationary and recessionary which it was. Then came interest rates, jacked way up to curb the inflation she caused with the abrupt VAT change, and without any attention being paid to the money was coming into the country anyway for the North Sea Oil. All of a sudden the pound was a petro currency with very high interest rates. Not surprisingly, the combination meant a huge hit on exporters because the pound became very overvalued and credit became extremely expensive. And the private sector had to cope with all of this in the space of about a year, from her June 1979 budget to mid 1980. Each of the three years prior to this budget, the British economy had grown (at about 3% a year), unemployment had dropped, and inflation had dropped. In other words, the 1979-1981 recession was almost entirely of Mrs. Thatcher’s making — and unemployment continued to rise through 1986. With a few strokes of her pen, she knocked out a third of British manufacturing industry. Then, just as she could do no more harm on her own, came the 1982 recession that hit the rest of the developed world, triggering another spike in unemployment in the UK. No wonder there was dereliction. While the rest of the world had one recession, the UK essentially had two.
She avoids a lot of responsibility for this because the North Sea Oil revenues covered over her mistake by enabling the government to cover the enormous cost in welfare and unemployment benefits without a rising deficit. With a sensible government, that money would have been available for capital projects like better roads, railways, schools and defense procurement. With Margaret Thatcher, all simply on welfare benefits to cover up for her disastrous economic policies.
By way of contrast, let’s look at John Major. The first two years, not good, as he tried unsuccessfully to maintain the strong pound policy (through the exchange rate mechanism) and this culminated in Black Wednesday. But then, five years of steadily repairing the damage, five years of some of the best economic policy Britain has seen in the past 50 years. An appropriately and competitively valued pound. Available credit for the private sector. Rising exports. Declining inflation. The utmost caution on taxes — a modest VAT rise when he had no other choice; appropriately “conservative” on public spending; mildly progressive changes to the income tax including a basic rate cut; and generally a careful, gradual approach that the private sector could adapt to and follow. And, other than the unfortunate mismanagement of rail privatization (where Major went against his own instinct and accepted bad Treasury advice on how to structure the industry) a thoughtful approach to infrastructure investment that led to the successful St. Pancras redevelopment, connecting East London to the Channel rail link, and Newcastle connected to the motorway network, among other things. This was the stable and successful economy that was bequeathed to New Labour.
As the history continues to emerge, I hope this era will be evaluated very closely, and that Margaret Thatcher’s role in particular is scrutinized. She bears a very personal responsibility for the troubles of those times.
Doddy said,
April 6, 2010 at 12:02 pm
The Down and Outs lyrics at the beginning are what drew me here. I was thinking of posting them around to drum up my friends and convince them to get out and vote. Do you have the rest?
Kev Walsh said,
April 6, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Sagar you’re well better when youre driving home from gigs discussing how much you hate Dark Eldar. Bring that Sagar back, thats what I say!
Hope you’re well mate, and cheers for the nod to Down And Outs lyrics!
Kev