The Prophetess Thatcher - a curse be upon her - famously remarked ‘There is no such thing as society’. And by abolishing capital controls the year she came to office she ensured her vision came to pass.
The consequence of the lifting of controls on the export of capital was the de-industrialisation of Britain. Manufacturing was transferred overseas to take advantage of cheap labour. With two results: a boost to consumerism as the cost of manufactured goods came down, and a systemic rise in unemployment. As Harold Macmillan commented in 1985: ‘Sixty-three years ago... the unemployment figure] in Stockton-on-Tees] was then 29%. Last November... the unemployment [there] is 28%. A rather sad end to one's life.’
For the point about employment is that it gives the individual a sense of self-worth, of connecting to others as part of a larger structure. S/he has a personal investment in that structure, in other words is part of society. Where unemployment is systemic - not only have you never had a job, but neither have your parents or any of your friends - society is an ‘other’ and you have no other point of reference but your own real needs and the artificial ones created by consumerism. Why not smash a shop window and grab a flat-screen telly if you think you can get away with it?
Thatcher’s other key policy, privatisation, was a second major contributor to driving up unemployment. To give two examples from personal experience: as an LEA maintained FE College Section Leader in the early eighties I had 17 hours a week class-contact. When I regained the position in the late nineties, in the now independent corporation, this had risen to 21. The consequence of raising lecturers’ class-contact hours was that you needed fewer of them, thereby saving the College money. And what were those savings spent on: better facilities for the students? Were they, buggery: they were spent on hugely increased salaries for the Principal and the ‘Senior Management Team’.
The summer before we moved to Italy there was an eight hour daytime power cut in the Fens. The length of time it took to restore the electricity supply would have been understandable if it had occurred on a winter night when roads are treacherous and engineers are having to work in the dark in inhospitable conditions. But on a summer’s day? I rang Eastern Electricity to enquire whether the delay might be caused by the privatised company’s reducing the number of front-line staff in order to pay the inflated salaries and bonuses of the directors. The woman on the end of the line replied that she couldn’t comment, but the warmth in her voice suggested I’d hit the nail on the head.
Although it’s fairly obvious why we’ve landed in the current mess, it’s much more difficult to see how we get out of it. We can’t recreate our industrial base: those few ‘British’ manufacturers we have left - Jaguar, Range Rover, the Derby train manufacturer Bombardier - are foreign owned. The unemployed mob, only kept quiescent by free bread and circuses, was a perennial problem at the heart of the Roman Empire.And, alas, we all know what happened to that organisation, and the centuries of barbarism and savagery which followed its collapse.
