"He appeared to shrug off life’s disappointments until I mentioned Margaret Thatcher."

Everyone's morning smile should have been because, on this day in 2013, Margaret Thatcher was dragged down into the bowels of Hell where she now spends eternity.

My Dad hated Thatcher and neoliberalism in equal measure. Below from Harry's Last Stand, he sums up Thatcher's legacy to his beloved Yorkshire.

As we entered the outskirts of Halifax, it started to rain. I longed to go directly to my hotel but my relative wanted to show me how much the city had changed since my adolescence and my first married years. Jetlagged, I let him drive me along soggy roads and laneways to addresses I thought were best forgotten. Don’t get me wrong, not all of my experiences in this city were negative or painful and I am thankful for the true friends I made while I lived here. But sadly all my mates from those long-ago days are now dead. So any time I return to this town, I am reminded of the the clock's steady march onward.

It is only natural that when I visit Halifax now it makes me wistful for the vanished age of my youth because, despite the hardships I faced, I was young enough to believe in the prospect of a brighter future. I realise that once I am gone, there shall be no one left to remember those hungry days I experienced before the war. Nor will there be anyone to recall the frantic efforts my friends and I made, after the business with Hitler was done and dusted, to grab some happiness and meaning for our humble lives. 

On our journey, I asked my relative how work was going for him. He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. It was difficult for him to form a lifetime of disappointment into a Yorkshire stoicism. But he tried his best, and said: ‘Job’s all right, I guess, for part-time labour, but that’s all that can be got for a bloke like me.’ ‘It must be tough,’ I responded. He lit a duty-free cigarette and laughed with a smoker’s cough: ‘No tougher than it was for you.’ I was quiet while I remembered my own famished youth, the General Strike, the breadlines and how much human potential was gutted by inhuman poverty and the greed of the ruling classes. ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said. I thought again what a miserable existence it had been for most everyone in the country. But after it was done and the war was won, the politicians promised us that no one in this country would face that type of unemployment and helplessness ever again. So I really don’t know why the Western world wants to go back to those bleak, unhappy times without a murmur of dissent. 

My relative flicked his cigarette out of the window and shifted gears as we came to a red light. ‘Too long,’ he said to me. ‘There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ’s sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It’s all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It’s all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.’ 

I must have looked crestfallen because he apologised and said: ‘Look, here or down south, no one cares about the likes of me. We’re just the crap that’s fallen on the factory floor. The government and ATOS swept up blokes like me and put us into the tip with the rest of the day’s rubbish. Those buggers don’t give a toss for anything but their bloody money. I can bet you a pinch of salt to a pound of shit that once they have sorted out my lot, they’re going to have a go at everyone else that isn’t part of their gated fucking community.’ I grew silent because I didn’t have any ideas as to how my relative could emerge from the murky depths of the semi-skilled labour pool. His story is unfortunately too familiar to this island. Still, it bears repeating because the bad luck of people like him has left a smudge on the soul of this nation. He was born in 1959 when it appeared that the country, after years of trial and error, had developed into an affluent and egalitarian society. Alas, it was a chimera, because by the 1960s Britain lagged far behind Germany and America in industrial output and GDP growth.

So for my relative, along with the rest of the nation’s baby boomers, their formative years were wedged between two politically unsustainable extremes: Labour’s long winter of discontent and a new form of conservatism heralded by the ascension of the Iron Lady. I wasn’t surprised when he told me that his days on the dole equalled or surpassed the times he’d been employed. His story was the same as so many who lived in what was once Britain’s industrial heartland. Not Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown or Cameron ever tried to prepare them to face the challenges of working in a globalised economy that favours grotesque profits for the few over employees’ right to fair wages and a decent life. My relative rattled off a string of jobs he’d held in mills and factories that were once famous for their productivity but were now derelict. His employment history read like a catechism to the North’s obsolescence. On our trip across Halifax, he appeared to shrug off life’s disappointments until I mentioned Margaret Thatcher.

My relative remarked sardonically: ‘When I heard she died I went down to the pub and celebrated with the rest of my mates. I can tell you that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for laughing.’ I don’t blame him for not spilling a tear for our former Prime Minister. It is hard to mourn the passing of such a divisive politician. Too many people were at the sharp end of her stick when it came to economic, social and educational policies. After all, she had utter contempt for most people in this country. She despised the working class and the unions that fought to preserve their rights.

Her politics were about division, and using the seven deadly sins to her party’s advantage. Thatcher pitted region against region with policies like the poll tax that abused hard-working people. She unashamedly favoured her wealthy supporters with patronage, while she balanced the treasury books by privatising state infrastructure, at the expense of today’s government. She was a tempest of hate that dismissed Nelson Mandela as a communist agitator, allowed IRA prisoners to starve themselves to death in prison and supported cruel and murderous dictators like General Pinochet because she thought she was a master of realpolitik. In truth, she was a deluded, self-aggrandising politician who sacrificed friends, family allies and most of the nation to feed her lust for power and prestige. 

For a while, as we drove, we were silent. Instead of talking or thinking, we listened to the windshield wipers. Near King Cross, we drove past a crowd queuing for a food bank to open. ‘Poor bastards,’ I said. My relative laughed and said: ‘Nowt can be done but cry into our beers.’ ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but it’s still not right that a person, who is in their prime can’t make ends meet because the best they can do for work is a part-time job on a zero-hour contract. It reminds me too much of the 30s when men like my dad stood before the gates of factories and begged for a day’s work, just so that their children might get something in their bellies before bed.’

Looking at Halifax today, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what became of all those grand dreams and promises made to us by our leaders in 1945. What became of that vision to build a just and free society for everyone? I didn’t see it when I looked out my relative's rain-spattered car window. Instead, all I saw was- the hurried despair of people who seemed to live from pay cheque to pay cheque. On the high street, once-familiar shops were shuttered or replaced by pawnbrokers who sought, as in my youth, to turn wedding rings into grocery money. ‘We pay cash for your unwanted gold’ ran across an LED screen attached to the shop window. 

I cringed at the raw cynicism of the advert because it reminded me too much about my own family’s experiences during the Great Depression when my mother pawned her ‘unwanted’ dress and my father’s ‘unwanted’ Sunday suit because that was all that was left to trade for food. Once it was done and she had been given a few stray bob, she said to me: ‘If the tides don’t turn soon, it’s the poor house for us.’ Back then, it was a hard business to stay alive but at least we didn’t have to contend with the ubiquity and predatory nature of payday loan companies. It seemed they were on every street corner we drove past that day. ‘When did these all open?’ I asked.

It seems perverse to me that we have these loan sharks situated on Britain’s ailing high streets and accepted by society as if they are businesses of stature. In fact, they are the opposite, because they are simply a means to squeeze money from millions of hapless people and keep them forever in debt and behind bad luck’s eight ball through outrageous loans, fees and interest rates. ‘The world has changed a lot since you were a boy,’ said my relative.

Though I didn’t want to disagree with him, it seems to me that the problem is that it hasn’t changed enough.

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