I
walked from Liverpool to London. Brexit was no surprise
Mike
Carter
Monday
27 June 2016 07.00 BST
Thatcherism
devastated communities throughout industrial England that have never
recovered. Their pain explains why people voted to leave in the EU
referendum
“In
1935, a young Laurie Lee set off to walk across Spain, from north to
south. In the book the adventure would eventually lead to, As I
Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee describes a country riven by
inequality, of communities in grinding poverty, and an out-of-touch
ruling elite. The fascists and the communists both laid claim to the
discontents, the rhetoric becoming increasingly polarised. The
narrative resonated across the European continent. By the time Lee
got to Malaga, in the summer of 1936, the Spanish civil war had
begun.”
On 2 May this year,
I set off to walk from Liverpool to London, a journey of 340 miles
that would take me a month. I was walking in the footsteps of the
People’s March for Jobs, a column of 300-odd unemployed men and
women who, on the same day in 1981, exactly 35 years previously, had
set off from the steps of St George’s Hall to walk to Trafalgar
Square.
In the two years
after Margaret Thatcher had been elected, unemployment had gone from
1 to 3 million, as her policies laid waste to Britain’s
manufacturing base. In 1981, we saw Rupert Murdoch buy the Times and
Sunday Times. We witnessed inner-city riots, unprecedented in their
scale and violence, in Liverpool and London. The formation of the SDP
split the left. The Tories lost their first assault on the coal
miners, capitulating over the closure of 23 pits.
My father, Pete
Carter, was one of those who organised the original walk. My journey
was an attempt to work out what had happened to Britain in the
intervening years. What I saw and heard gave me an alarming sense of
how the immense social changes wrought by Thatcherism are still
having a profound effect on communities all over England. It also
meant that when I awoke last Thursday to the result of the EU
referendum, I wasn’t remotely surprised.
Some of those
charity shops had closed down. What does it say about a town when
even the charity shops are struggling?
I left Liverpool the
week of the Hillsborough inquest verdict, flowers and scarves still
adorning lampposts. The inquest had finally vindicated the families
of the 96 killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final, exposing the lies and
cover-ups of the police, the media and the political class, who had
spent over a quarter of a century traducing not only those fans,
mostly working class, but also the city and its people. In fact, that
demonising had found expression in 1981, too, when Geoffrey Howe
suggested to Thatcher privately that, after the Toxteth riots,
Liverpool should be subject to a “managed decline”.
I walked through
Widnes and Warrington, past huge out-of-town shopping centres and
through the wastelands of industrial decay. In Salford, down streets
where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find
them, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors, I
found an Airbnb. My host was selling her terraced house. I sat in her
living room as the estate agent brought around potential buyers. They
were all buy-to-let investors from the south of England, building
property portfolios in the poverty, as if this was one giant fire
sale.
“Is this a thing
now?” I asked the agent.
“It is,” he
replied.
‘In Salford, down
streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you
could find one, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal
doors, I found an AirBnB.’ Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian
On I walked. Through
Stockport, Macclesfield, Congleton. The flag of St George flew, from
flagpoles, from guttering. Leave posters were everywhere. I didn’t
see a single one for remain.
Just before
Stoke-on-Trent, I passed the immense workings of the Chatterley
Whitfield Colliery, closed down in the 1970s. The mine, one of
Europe’s largest, had become a heritage centre and museum. In 1993
even that had shut.
In Hanley, I started
asking people what they thought about the referendum and if they
wouldn’t mind telling me how they’d be voting. There was little
reticence. “Out,” they would say. “No question.”
“Why?” I’d
ask.
“Immigration,”
would come the response. “We want our country back.”
The Potteries museum
opened in 1981, the year of the People’s March. There I read about
Stoke’s industrial heritage, the ceramics, the coal mines, the
steel industry, employing tens of thousands of people. All gone now.
Stafford, Cannock,
Wolverhampton. Different towns, same message: “There’s no decent
work”; “the politicians don’t care about us”; “we’ve been
forgotten”; “betrayed”; “there’s too many immigrants, and
we can’t compete with the wages they’ll work for”. Nobody used
the word humiliation, but that’s the sense I got.
In Wolverhampton,
the Express and Star newspaper was reporting on the fury from Wolves
fans at the football club’s new shirt sponsor. It was to be the
Money Shop, a payday lender. In Walsall, where I went to college, I
walked around a town centre unrecognisable from 30 years earlier.
Everywhere there were betting shops, dozens of them, and right next
door to every betting shop was a pawnbroker or payday lender. It was
a ghoulish form of mutualism, or symbiosis, the “natural” market
at its most efficient.
And there was
another thing I noticed about all of these towns: the ubiquity of
mobility scooters, and not all of them being driven by the elderly.
Was this a manifestation of the established links between poverty and
ill health?
I walked on.
Birmingham glittered, a skyline of cranes and high streets of
fashionable shops, a confidence, a bounce. But out of the city centre
the familiar motifs returned: boarded up pubs and shuttered shops,
leave posters in windows, and a proliferation of hand car washes. It
began to make sense why these have blossomed in modern Britain: why
invest in expensive automated machinery when labour can be sourced so
cheaply.
Nuneaton, the home
town of George Eliot and Ken Loach, had more charity shops in its
high street than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And some of those charity
shops had closed down. What does it say about a town when even the
charity shops are struggling?
In Coventry, whose
car industry is now mostly gone, there seemed to be a construction
frenzy. These were mostly new buildings for the colleges and
universities, competing not only for a bigger share of domestic
students but also for the lucrative foreign student market. A friend
doing an MA in the city told me that 90% of the students on his
course were from overseas, and the majority of them Chinese.
As I moved south, I
thought that the economic picture might change, but in Rugby,
Bedford, Luton the high streets all had the by now familiar
composition: betting shops, fast-food outlets, tattoo parlours. And
the answer to the question “in” or “out” never changed
either. “We’ve been left behind,” a white, middle-aged man told
me at a bus stop as I rested in Hemel Hempstead. “Those politicians
don’t care about us. Immigration has ruined this country.”
I walked into
central London, through Chiswick, past people sitting at pavement
cafes, shops selling expensive furniture, estate agents offering
two-bedroom flats for a million pounds. Through Hyde Park and on to
Wellington Arch, with all the pomp and puffery of empire, and then
Buckingham Palace, as tourists lapped up the pageantry. I was in,
literally and spiritually, another country.
In 1935, a young
Laurie Lee set off to walk across Spain, from north to south. In the
book the adventure would eventually lead to, As I Walked Out One
Midsummer Morning, Lee describes a country riven by inequality, of
communities in grinding poverty, and an out-of-touch ruling elite.
The fascists and the communists both laid claim to the discontents,
the rhetoric becoming increasingly polarised. The narrative resonated
across the European continent. By the time Lee got to Malaga, in the
summer of 1936, the Spanish civil war had begun.
A student by the
gates of Downing Street approached Mike Carter and asked him if he
could tell her who was pictured on her worksheet. It was Margaret
Thatcher. Photograph: Mike Carter
I thought about
Lee’s journey, about Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and thanked God
for the 70 years of peace we’d had since. I walked up Whitehall. On
30 May 1981, Thatcher had refused to meet the marchers to accept
their 250,000-strong petition. On 30 May 2016, I paused at Downing
Street, all high fences and machine guns now, and spoke to one of the
armed officers. He told me about the attacks on police pensions,
about the terrible morale these days in the force.
A girl came up,
spoke in faltering English. She was on a school trip from Belgium.
She had a project to complete, she said. Could I help her? She held
up a piece of A4 paper. “Can you tell me who this is, please?” On
it was a photograph of Margaret Thatcher.
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