Hearts Of Oak, Men Of Steel And The Iron Lady
By Ann Czernik
09 April, 2013
Morning Star
What we leave behind marks our place in the scheme of things, and Margaret Thatcher's legacy is lasting.
Thatcher destroyed the heavy industries and the people who rebuilt post-war Britain. She took their jobs, their pride and their sense of self. There will be no state funeral in their memory. Thatcherism has run in the corridors of power like a baton, passing since she left No 10 from one government to the next.
The woman who wrote: "The heart of politics is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live" and pledged to "reunite a divided and disillusioned people" created three-and-a-half million unemployed, the start of an era of mass joblessness that has stayed with us.
Thatcher's government left untold misery in its wake. A widening gap between rich and poor, more children living in poverty. Thatcherism is still alive and kicking the working class with each successive government.
In the chaos and confusion of recession, Thatcher offered the "free market" to an ailing nation. But no amount of entrepreneurial spirit would sweeten the pill for miners, shipbuilders and steelworkers.
I grew up during the Thatcher years. I watched my father, a steelworks manager, return from work so angry he couldn't speak on many occasions.
My father worked as a manager at the Ravenscraig and Clydebridge steelworks. The latter was then the most efficient plant in the world with progressive union relations. At its peak it provided employment for 3,000 people and supported many smaller businesses.
But my father had to deal with Ian MacGregor, the Scottish-born US hatchet man Thatcher had parachuted in to chair British Steel in 1980. He would visit to order further "improvements" and redundancies. But Clydebridge didn't need lectures on time-keeping and efficiency from a man who would turn up half an hour late to trade union meetings just to make sure everyone knew who was in charge.
I'd know he'd visited when my father would sit and stare at his food in silence. My mother would nod and say "MacGregor day." It might not have been my dad's turn to go this week, but next month, next year, who knew? There were no words to express the fear that engulfed the whole industry.
On MacGregor days it was best to stay out of the way.
"Every time he came, there was a fight between him and I," my father told me. "He was a foul-speaking man who couldn't string a sentence together without bad language."
Month after month MacGregor would find a new reason to close the plant and month after month the workers came back with reasons to keep it running. The relentlessness of the onslaught wore them down. Job losses in the steel industry were colossal. There were 13,500 at Ravenscraig alone.
We prayed for the day that my father could safely retire, pension in hand. Stress, anger and frustration were tearing families apart as men worried constantly how they would deal with redundancy, a family to support and precious little hope of finding another job. It bankrupted their souls.
The strain of breaking the news to the men took its toll on my father.
"It's not a nice job telling a load of men: 'You're sacked'," he told me. "It's not a pleasant thing. The men didn't get the handouts we [managers] did and that annoyed me intensely. I spoke to the unions and said there's a list of firms looking for men and a lot of them did get alternative employment."
But eventually even that dried up. Lanarkshire was built on steel.
My father lived for the day he was 55, when he could claim a pension and pay off the mortgage. But MacGregor didn't initially want to let him go - he said he wanted him in London. I think the greatest moment of my father's life was telling the hatchet man "if he thought I was going to put up with him five days a week he had another think coming."
So MacGregor finally announced that my father was "no fucking good to him" and he would have a "settlement" on him at 55. My father had been a steel man for 40 years. He rang my mother and told her to make sure he lasted a few weeks till his 55th birthday and a new life away from the tension of abuse, insults and threats.
For months afterwards my father sat at the dining room table, writing letter after letter. It wasn't about the money - he had a pension. He needed to work, he needed the company that could only be found in heavy industry, in places where men realized their boyhood dreams to build from iron and steel. He needed to be a man again.
Following 150 rejections he eventually secured a job where he had started, in the drawing office of John Brown Shipyards. He went on to work well into his seventies, running a successful engineering consultancy. He told me: "British Steel paid my pension for over 30 years - can you see the sense in that?"
Thatcher thought you could run heavy industry like a corner shop. Steel making was as financially monumental as the huge ships it formed the basis of.
British Steel had invested £3 billion during the 1970s and accounting practices were making it look unprofitable. But Ravenscraig made a £19 million profit the year it was closed and even Scottish Tories begged for its reprieve.
In fact British Steel made the most technologically advanced steel in the world.
Engineers came from Germany, Japan and South Korea to find out how the British made steel.
We were world leaders in the efficient production of high-quality, high-tensile steels. BMW and Rolls-Royce made representations to the government to maintain British Steel, but it made no difference. The lady was not for turning.
I watched the men line the streets of Glasgow. With no work, there was nowhere to go. Men gathered on street corners, heads down, hands in pockets, hunched against the cold, peering out from beneath their caps.
When the pub opened, they sat with half a lager and made it last - a sign of poverty. No man with pride would ever order half a lager, but their masculinity was as obsolete as their skills - rightly or wrongly, heavy industry was a man's world. When it disappeared it destroyed their spirits and brought poverty, illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, depression and despair in its wake. Unlike my father, it didn't matter how many letters these men sent. There were no jobs left.
I was the first of my family to go to university but then nearly 90 per cent of new graduates were unemployed. I've never had a "proper job" in my life. The council set up arts projects in derelict industrial buildings and I escaped into dance, music and the theatre - which luckily for me led to a career. I knew more than my fair share of dead junkies and I still don't know why I wasn't one of them.
Today I'm watching my children face an uncertain future because the market has no use for a million unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds.
The specter of Thatcherism haunts us still.
The price the working-class paid for Thatcherism was far higher than any level of subsidy. The true cost of destroying British industry - sickness, premature deaths, prison sentences in desolate industrial landscapes - is paid by successive generations.
Will Thatcher's death be a catalyst for change? A point of departure where we reach for new ideas to reunite our divided nation and rediscover the wealth we have in human beings?
Thatcher said of the 1970s that "there has been a feeling of helplessness, that we are a once great nation that has somehow fallen behind and that it is too late now to turn things around."
Such a feeling runs deep in the broken Britain she left behind. But it isn't too late. What's done is done, but the men of steel live on - in us, in our children, in our hearts.
Like the Iron Lady herself Thatcherism should be ceremonially buried. Out of sight, out of mind. And out of government.
Comments are moderated
