The post-election media coverage has naturally focused on how wrong the polls were. From the Nuneaton declaration onwards, the BBC’s output has had three broad themes: how could the pollsters get it so wrong, a sense of anguish about the loss of their spiritual fellow travellers (that they’ve assumed is shared by their audience) and the accepted wisdom that David Cameron is going to be a hostage to his “right wing”. Not for the Tories does the nation get treated to the non-stop carnival coverage that greeted Tony Blair’s “breakthrough” or Barack Obama’s “dream”. Oh well. As “right wingers”, we’re accustomed to being ignored or patronised by our betters in the media.
But one thing I haven’t read much about is this: Who exactly won the election for the Tories. We all know that ‘Mondeo Man’, ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’ are supposed to have played their role in bygone elections. But this time, you’ll struggle in vain for much more than “Lord” Kinnock’s assessment that people have decided they don’t care about their fellow man. Or the dear old NHS - whose foundations were laid by a wartime, Tory dominated coalition government, not the Labour party.
But I think I know exactly who won the election for the Conservatives. It was quite clearly Didcot Woman.
Didcot? Where? Why? How?
Best known for its 'Parkway' train station on the main train line west from Paddington, Didcot is a small, nondescript south Oxfordshire town. Crippled by its historic layout, which places social housing opposite a one-sided High Street, Didcot remains impervious to renovation and gentrification. Developers instead have built a Pound Shop dominated shopping block away from the main drag, giving that area all the convenience of Milton Keynes, without the charm. It was no surprise to locals that the town was 20th in the list of Crap Towns in the popular book of that name.
Didcot Woman does some domestic work for me occasionally. Ad hoc. You could say on a zero hours basis. I call her up when the ironing, cleaning, childcare arrangements and other things get a bit much. She’s lovely really. I’ll call her Eileen. Eileen must be in her late 50s/early 60s. She lives in Didcot with Tony, her husband of 30+ years. Eileen and Tony’s kids have grown up. They’re both lifelong Labour supporters – as are their children: what Mrs Thatcher did to those mineworkers etc – you know the story. Eileen doesn’t like the Tories much. Well, she didn’t. But her life has been transformed by them in the past 5 years. And this time, she actually voted for them. First time ever. She hasn’t even told Tony. And here’s why.
Tony lost his job 20 years ago. He sunk whatever money he could scrape into a little sole trader business. That failed. He lost his mojo and then found getting work hard. He started claiming benefits. He didn’t like doing this at first. But after a while, he lost hope and started to feel quite sorry for himself. He put on a bit of weight. And he started to get terrible pain in his back. He was assessed as ‘disabled’ and life got a bit easier with incapacity benefits and a disabled badge. He no longer felt bad about his life on benefits because his health wasn’t good and plenty of other people seemed to be living that way now anyway. Life for Tony – until 2012 – revolved largely around Cash in the Attic, Homes under the Hammer, Pointless and occasionally Loose Women. Daytime TV took up the time he had earmarked to renovating an old Austin A40 that his father had left him. Tony was resigned to his life. When I would drop in to pick up ironing and so on, Tony largely kept himself to himself, staring at his somewhat large TV screen in a conservatory at the back of Eileen and Tony’s house. Eileen and Tony’s quite large house. Eileen and Tony’s massive, 4 or 5 bedroom house, with a conservatory and outbuilding. This large house, which were allocated when their 4 children were small, was in the centre of Didcot. It must have been worth over half a million pounds. But it was now used by two near pensioners, one of whom was being paid to watch TV all day.
The “bedroom tax” has been a greatly demonised policy. Penalising people for having bedrooms they don’t need was so obviously mean-spirited. And Tony was very angry when he and Eileen were effectively forced to move to a 2 bedroom bungalow in another part of Didcot. The bungalow still has room for Tony’s cars, but it’s a fraction of the size of the old place. Eileen was secretly relieved. The local authority sold the house. For over half a million I believe.
Next up came Tony’s work capability assessment. How demeaning. Tony had been paying in to the system for all those years. Now that his health wasn’t so good, clearly he was entitled to help from the state for his troubles. The assessment asked Tony what he could do, instead of what his problems were. Nobody had ever asked that before. Tony ended up getting a part time Taxi co-ordinating job. He’s lost a bit of weight. He doesn’t half moan about his work colleagues and how annoying the customers can be. He’s full of it in fact. You can’t actually stop him talking about his day. Eileen can’t believe it. Although he’ll never find anything nice to say about the bastard Tories who forced him out to work. He’s even started working on that car in his spare time.
Eileen has 2 grandchildren so far. They’re both in nearby schools. The schools were pretty dire historically. But in the past 5 years they have actually got better. Ofsted said that for the first time, the secondary school was “Good”. The family are pretty pleased with both kids’ progress. They didn’t understand much about what becoming an “academy” meant. But so far it all seems pretty good. Eileen didn’t think much of the visit they all had to make to a mosque. But she knows that the Tories don’t really think much of that kind of thing either. Not really.
Eileen doesn’t follow politics. But she’s aware that Labour doesn’t think the Tories can be trusted on the NHS. She knows that Labour is the party of the NHS. But she also knows that her mother didn’t exactly get great end-of-life care. It wasn’t Mid-Staffs bad. But it was fairly uncaring. Her mother seemed frightened to ring the bell to ask for help. The nurses weren’t very friendly. And that was when Labour were in power! She’s never heard the Tories say they want to privatise the NHS. But it doesn’t seem that different – better or worse – than it was under Labour. She’s not very happy about “people coming here” and using the system for free mind.
Eileen’s aware that the Tories are supposed to be evil, self-serving and nasty. She does a lot of work in the local villages. Most of her employers are what you might call “middle class”. She’s always known people from different walks of life – her parents used to rent the spare room out to students, travelling work people, trainee doctors and so on. They loved having new visitors. People are just people. She hasn’t really met any “nasty” ones, no matter what their class or wealth. Most seem to be struggling with this life thing, one way or another. The idea of “evil”, “nasty”, “selfish” Tories, hell-bent on “smashing up” the NHS doesn’t seem to ring true somehow.
The other thing Eileen is aware of is Ed Miliband. What’s he like eh? Did you see him trying to eat that bacon sandwich? What’s that tombstone he’s gone and made? Eileen knows a lot of people from different walks of life. Some of them are really dead posh. But she doesn’t know anyone who speaks like Ed Miliband. What the hell is he on about? I wouldn’t like to be his brother. Ha ha ha!!
So that’s Eileen. A not very likely 2015 Conservative voter. If you’d said to her she’d ever vote Tory, she wouldn’t have believed you. She lives in a smaller house. Her husband has had to get a job. But do you know? That’s probably right. It’s probably fair. And whilst he’d never admit it, Tony seems to be loving working again. Or at least gossiping while he is at work. He never watches Cash in the Attic now: Hasn’t got the time. And Tony and Eileen are delighted that their grandchildren's school is on the up. There even seem to be more jobs around for young people these days, which can't be a bad thing.
Didcot Woman’s life has been completely transformed. And the lives of people like them up and down the country. They all have a sense of fair play and are far happier paying more of their way in life. Could these people have delivered the election to the Conservatives? I think so.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
The Death of Thatch
I’m a bit of a musician on the side. I spent most of my career as an entrepreneur and in finance. But my heart and mind are in music and always have been. Online I ‘hang around’ with fellow musicians, artists, creative types generally. It was only on the day I graduated from University that it dawned on me that I didn’t actually know any of my fellow finance, business and economics students – all of my mates were graduating the next day on arts courses.
I kept a low profile when Margaret Thatcher died. Everyone I knew was busy uploading real-time exultations and bitter resentments to virtual forums, via state-of-the-art optic networking on their gleaming iPads, none of which would have been possible without infrastructure investment, privatisation, marketing and free markets. I lay low for a few days, remembering all too well the bitter contempt with which I held Mrs Thatcher when I was a teenager: Back in the day when there was no room for misinterpretation – this woman and her party were clearly evil, hell-bent on destroying jobs, industries and livelihoods. The thing is, I grew up. I actually took time to understand both sides of the argument. And ultimately, I had to leave behind such childish certainties. But I did so with a heavy heart because now my politics will always render me beyond the pale among my musical and creative brethren.
I therefore thought I’d jot down some thoughts about my journey across the political spectrum.
I became 'politicised' at a very early age. At 13, I was marching for CND, Amnesty, anti-Ba'ath Iraq, War on Want etc. Our art teacher would gather devotees to his classroom and tell us how it was and we teenagers unquestioningly adopted views that chimed with our naturally rebellious instincts. It all seemed so obvious - Thatch was a war-mongering hater of working people, you should just redistribute from the rich to the poor. Measures like abolishing the wages council and fair rents could only mean one thing - the woman was patently evil. These views were reinforced by a wave of cool alternative comedians that I worshipped, the musicians I looked up to, the academics and media commentators on the BBC programs I watched and in the newspapers I read.
What I didn't appreciate at the time was that almost all of the people espousing these views - Guardian leader writers, alternative comedians, politicians, media stars and to some extent musicians, had largely benefited from an education system and financial background very different to my own. It is fair to say that few of them had known the kind of poverty, bad schooling, lack of aspiration, benefit dependency, long term unemployment or “doing without” that I grew up in and around.
Smashing the grammar school system meant that I attended a comprehensive school. There, I suffered indifferent to bad teaching and went from being a confident, over-achieving kid who was gifted at Music, Maths and English to an emotionally stunted, self-loathing underachiever with no self-confidence and O and A level grades to match. I scraped a place at University and, free from the tall poppy culture that pervades in sink schools, I began to thrive. I found the student politics - after my years on the 'front line' - a bit embarrassing - where did all these screeching, angst-filled, smartly-dressed activists who ate - let alone had heard of - things like polenta, pesto and grissini? I'm not sure many of them had actually met a poor person before. The poor were there to be 'educated' so that they didn't read The Sun, didn't have socially embarrassing views on immigration and joined the front line, albeit in a role which was always subservient to their intellectual betters - patronised but never empowered.
I studied Econometrics - statistical economics. Aside from student journalism, it became my passion. I put way too much effort and time into it - largely because I was utterly focused on proving my parent-baiting economic theories right. These ideas were somewhat woolly, but basically involved giving money to poor people, proving everything I believed – that Thatch's economics were evil and wrong, that supporting rust bucket industries was some kind of rational economic theory, and that jobs needed to go to where the workers lived, not the other way around. My econometric thesis was the culmination of this. The subject was the North-South divide. Almost 100% of the literature was in agreement - it was so obvious. You just spent the money created in the South on jobs in the North. Job done.
Needless to say, I didn't find anything like what I expected. In fact, it emerged again and again that every trite, lazily received opinion I had about economics was entirely wrong. Giving money to poor areas and people was just a distortion, albeit one that could be perpetuated according to pork barrel politics and proximity to vital marginal constituencies. As I could see in my own family and community, if you just pay people to do nothing, it's pretty hard to resist accepting this as a way of life. I had my own experience of this when, after University, I was jobless for almost a year. There simply did not seem to be any jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and many other fields I wanted to join. There were plenty of low-level jobs I was prepared to do, but the local benefit office decided I was entitled to full unemployment or supplementary benefit and I was grateful and then lazy - filled with self-pity that the world wasn't beating a path to my door. Funnily enough, years later I met many people who did manage to secure jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and other fields. It seemed that their godparents, uncles, next door neighbours, parents' contacts and so on managed to get them something called an internship, after which, they had been offered a job. Naturally, their success was entirely due to how wonderful and special they were, not their connections or social class. Or internships.
In time, I had to accept that I had never even tried to understand what Thatch was all about. I had been completely and utterly wilfully and lazily blind to the economics of free markets. I just swallowed what the cushioned left had told me. My epiphany happened just as Mrs T was being booted from office and I embarked on a lifetime of having to tolerate the sneers, assumed superiority and total uncoolness of supporting free market economics.
It's interesting: For all the hatred and bile that Mrs T attracts, I'm not aware of many on the left who actively campaign to subsidise uneconomic industries, to hand back national power to trade unionists, who advocate reintroducing foreign exchange controls, who would prefer mortgage lenders to avoid lending to the poor as much as possible, who would reverse the privatisations of the Thatcher era, who have any clue how we would have gone from being a bankrupt international laughing stock to a successful free market economy that attracts immigration and companies from all over the world, who would increase income tax to levels where high earners either leave or give up. Mrs T's crime it seems is not that she was right, but that she dared to disturb the cosy decline of Britain. Being a conviction politician is noble in an Atlee, but is sneered at in a Thatcher. After all, how dare a grocer's daughter get so uppity? Well both were very great Britons in my book. RIP Mrs T.
{reprinted from an article first published in 2013]
I kept a low profile when Margaret Thatcher died. Everyone I knew was busy uploading real-time exultations and bitter resentments to virtual forums, via state-of-the-art optic networking on their gleaming iPads, none of which would have been possible without infrastructure investment, privatisation, marketing and free markets. I lay low for a few days, remembering all too well the bitter contempt with which I held Mrs Thatcher when I was a teenager: Back in the day when there was no room for misinterpretation – this woman and her party were clearly evil, hell-bent on destroying jobs, industries and livelihoods. The thing is, I grew up. I actually took time to understand both sides of the argument. And ultimately, I had to leave behind such childish certainties. But I did so with a heavy heart because now my politics will always render me beyond the pale among my musical and creative brethren.
I therefore thought I’d jot down some thoughts about my journey across the political spectrum.
I became 'politicised' at a very early age. At 13, I was marching for CND, Amnesty, anti-Ba'ath Iraq, War on Want etc. Our art teacher would gather devotees to his classroom and tell us how it was and we teenagers unquestioningly adopted views that chimed with our naturally rebellious instincts. It all seemed so obvious - Thatch was a war-mongering hater of working people, you should just redistribute from the rich to the poor. Measures like abolishing the wages council and fair rents could only mean one thing - the woman was patently evil. These views were reinforced by a wave of cool alternative comedians that I worshipped, the musicians I looked up to, the academics and media commentators on the BBC programs I watched and in the newspapers I read.
What I didn't appreciate at the time was that almost all of the people espousing these views - Guardian leader writers, alternative comedians, politicians, media stars and to some extent musicians, had largely benefited from an education system and financial background very different to my own. It is fair to say that few of them had known the kind of poverty, bad schooling, lack of aspiration, benefit dependency, long term unemployment or “doing without” that I grew up in and around.
Smashing the grammar school system meant that I attended a comprehensive school. There, I suffered indifferent to bad teaching and went from being a confident, over-achieving kid who was gifted at Music, Maths and English to an emotionally stunted, self-loathing underachiever with no self-confidence and O and A level grades to match. I scraped a place at University and, free from the tall poppy culture that pervades in sink schools, I began to thrive. I found the student politics - after my years on the 'front line' - a bit embarrassing - where did all these screeching, angst-filled, smartly-dressed activists who ate - let alone had heard of - things like polenta, pesto and grissini? I'm not sure many of them had actually met a poor person before. The poor were there to be 'educated' so that they didn't read The Sun, didn't have socially embarrassing views on immigration and joined the front line, albeit in a role which was always subservient to their intellectual betters - patronised but never empowered.
I studied Econometrics - statistical economics. Aside from student journalism, it became my passion. I put way too much effort and time into it - largely because I was utterly focused on proving my parent-baiting economic theories right. These ideas were somewhat woolly, but basically involved giving money to poor people, proving everything I believed – that Thatch's economics were evil and wrong, that supporting rust bucket industries was some kind of rational economic theory, and that jobs needed to go to where the workers lived, not the other way around. My econometric thesis was the culmination of this. The subject was the North-South divide. Almost 100% of the literature was in agreement - it was so obvious. You just spent the money created in the South on jobs in the North. Job done.
Needless to say, I didn't find anything like what I expected. In fact, it emerged again and again that every trite, lazily received opinion I had about economics was entirely wrong. Giving money to poor areas and people was just a distortion, albeit one that could be perpetuated according to pork barrel politics and proximity to vital marginal constituencies. As I could see in my own family and community, if you just pay people to do nothing, it's pretty hard to resist accepting this as a way of life. I had my own experience of this when, after University, I was jobless for almost a year. There simply did not seem to be any jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and many other fields I wanted to join. There were plenty of low-level jobs I was prepared to do, but the local benefit office decided I was entitled to full unemployment or supplementary benefit and I was grateful and then lazy - filled with self-pity that the world wasn't beating a path to my door. Funnily enough, years later I met many people who did manage to secure jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and other fields. It seemed that their godparents, uncles, next door neighbours, parents' contacts and so on managed to get them something called an internship, after which, they had been offered a job. Naturally, their success was entirely due to how wonderful and special they were, not their connections or social class. Or internships.
In time, I had to accept that I had never even tried to understand what Thatch was all about. I had been completely and utterly wilfully and lazily blind to the economics of free markets. I just swallowed what the cushioned left had told me. My epiphany happened just as Mrs T was being booted from office and I embarked on a lifetime of having to tolerate the sneers, assumed superiority and total uncoolness of supporting free market economics.
It's interesting: For all the hatred and bile that Mrs T attracts, I'm not aware of many on the left who actively campaign to subsidise uneconomic industries, to hand back national power to trade unionists, who advocate reintroducing foreign exchange controls, who would prefer mortgage lenders to avoid lending to the poor as much as possible, who would reverse the privatisations of the Thatcher era, who have any clue how we would have gone from being a bankrupt international laughing stock to a successful free market economy that attracts immigration and companies from all over the world, who would increase income tax to levels where high earners either leave or give up. Mrs T's crime it seems is not that she was right, but that she dared to disturb the cosy decline of Britain. Being a conviction politician is noble in an Atlee, but is sneered at in a Thatcher. After all, how dare a grocer's daughter get so uppity? Well both were very great Britons in my book. RIP Mrs T.
{reprinted from an article first published in 2013]
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