Wednesday 17 April 2013

A Quick Birthday Rant


A quick birthday rant



At the grand old age of 47, a pretty nondescript sort of age, I decided that today I would spend my time reflecting, meditating, thinking and not thinking. As I sat in quiet contemplation, before going out to meet some of my friends and spending some birthday money, I received a phone call. Thinking it was possibly one of my lovely friends or family who wished to speak to me, I answered the phone full of charm and contentedness.

Sadly it was just British Gas trying to convince me to do something that is allegedly of benefit to me but in reality is more beneficial to them. Thank you Mrs Thatcher. THIS is part of your legacy!




The conversation went as thus.

British Gas: Is the Mister of the household available? (Please note it was very near asking for the mAster of the household).
Me: No, I’m afraid he’s not.
British Gas: Is it him that deals with the gas?
Me: Yes, he just about manages me, thank you very much.
British Gas: Oh? Er……
Me: Oh indeed, and despite my hair being blonde and the fact that I haven’t got a willy, I do know how to talk about gas and electricity. In fact, I’m pretty good at both.

And then I switched the phone off and calmly replaced it in its cradle.





The thing is, I really resent this.

Last month, there was a flow of water coming up from my next door neighbour’s drive; spurting water out of orifices that previously didn’t exist. After a day of this, and seemingly no action whatsoever, I contacted the water board using a telephone number that was on my bill.

I got through to a charming young man who asked me for my name and my account number. I duly gave them to him, despite it being a total irrelevance to the call. I explained that I wanted to report a leak but couldn’t locate the emergency number. He then asked if I minded being put on hold.

On his return he said that he didn’t think he could talk to me any longer because the account number I had given didn’t correlate with my given name. I then offered him the possibility of an alternative name, i.e. my husband’s name.

“Ah yes!” he said, “That’s the name on the account!”

So I politely asked if I could now talk to him. His response was that it wasn’t possible to do so due to the fact that my name wasn’t on the account but I could have my name added if that is what I would like. I said that is exactly what I would like, thank you very much. His response, of course, is that I couldn’t do this without my master’s permission!



I fully appreciate these companies need to follow their blasted rules, and contrary to certain opinion, I do respect their need to operate a system that is safe, secure and mindful of privacy. However, it wasn’t as though I was asking for some monetary rebate to be made out to me. All I was doing was trying to report a leak, and even if I had been phoning to discuss a possible change to the payment system, I couldn’t do that without the “man of the house” giving me permission.

So much for equity – let’s say thank you to Mrs T again because she did SO much for women’s rights, didn’t she?

In the past, when I have been supporting a friend with regard to utilities and other such mundane activities, I’ve actually had to pretend to be their partner in order to get over the first hurdle. Even then, in the majority of cases, I’ve had to pass the phone to my friend to confirm that I’m allowed to negotiate standing orders, direct debits or even ask for a quote for house or car insurance with his permission. Again, I understand protocols but sometimes, it just seems that the little woman has a much smaller and less important voice than the male counterparts. I appreciate also, that if I was single, my rights to speak about such matters, would be recognised.

At the grand old age of 47, I am a human being in my own right, whether my name or someone else’s is on the bills that come to MY home. I’ve contributed to the family income for over 20 years and I really, really resent being treated as a second class citizen because I haven’t got a willy. I’m a human being in my own right irrespective of whether I am married, single, co-habiting, divorced, widowed or a dim-wit moron who doesn’t know how to talk on the telephone to these services.

Perhaps someone ought to tell Sid all of that!



And now, for something completely different, I shall return to the delights of my birthday gifts – CDs of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones which I was thoroughly enjoying listening to before this happened.

Anybody seen my baby?

Saturday 13 April 2013

A Child From the Thatcher Era

The title: I can't bring myself to call myself one of Thatcher's children. I don't want that sort of association.

.................................................................





On the 3rd May 1979, we had a bereavement in the family. My pet hamster decided to choose this day to depart from the world. My father immediately suggested that Humphrey had made a sensible choice. Not even a hamster should have to endure life under Margaret Thatcher.

At the time, I had just become a teenager and my views on politics were largely influenced by my parents and the many discussions we had throughout my childhood that ranged from crises in the Middle East to mismanagement of local politics from our Conservative local Councillor neighbour who lived across the street.

We hear about the legacies that people would like to leave to their children, so often in monetary terms. I will never receive a financial legacy from my parents because they never had much money, despite my father being a head teacher, and I hope my mother lives long enough to use all the equity in her existing house to sustain her into old age. However, one of the greatest legacies they have left to me started when I was a toddler – that is the gifts of political thought, empathy and discussion.

Politics was an integral part of our family life. At some point during the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel at the end of the 60s, I walked into the kitchen to see my mother bent over the radio listening to the most recent atrocities in that part of the world. Deep in thought and restraining herself from crying, she continued to listen to the report of murder, destruction and annihilation – and I silently joined her. To a four year old girl, carefully ensconced thousands of miles away, this world of violence was incomprehensible, and I turned to her and said, “Don’t they realise that they’re killing each other’s brothers and daddy’s?”

And there was my first political statement – full of unreasoned hope and ideology with a strong sense of compassion that has essentially shaped the next forty plus years of my life.

Discord to harmony, error to truth, doubt to faith, despair to hope – I thought my father would explode. He wasn’t an angry person. He rarely became over-heated or aggressive and yet here he was on the 4th of May 1979, getting out of his seat and waving a finger at the television shouting, “How dare she!” as Thatcher quoted from the Prayer of St. Francis on the steps of 10 Downing Street.

“She’ll destroy this country!” was his next prophetic statement, but even he had no comprehension of the extent of such a comment.



So how was Thatcherism for me?

A friend of mine recently said that she was “too young to appreciate her [Thatcher’s] politics at the time”. Although I understood what she meant, I recounted her words with astonishment because this friend is exactly the same age as me, and I was painfully aware of Thatcher’s politics at the time – from the moment she got out of the car in Downing Street in 1979 to the time some eleven years later when she stepped tearfully back into the car to be driven away.



Yet I was one of the lucky ones. My parents were both employed in public sector jobs that were relatively secure. I wasn’t living in a mining area, blighted and scarred by the civil and class wars that became an integral part of my latter teenage years. My brothers didn’t go off to fight in a seemingly pointless war on the other side of the world. I wasn’t a member of an ethnic group who would be victimised and abused as some sort of scapegoat for the state of economic decline in the country and I didn’t have my sexual choices deemed to be unfit for “promotion” under the Clause 28 agreement.

However, my childhood and my early adulthood was still drastically affected by the rise to power of this woman, and with careful and considered thoughtfulness on the part of my parents, I was never allowed to ignore the impact that Thatcher and her policies were having on people in this country and globally.

At this point, it’s also worth mentioning the importance of creativity and the expression of others. On first reflection, Thatcher herself may not have had a direct bearing on my life that influenced the choices I made. On second reflection, her attitude, behaviour and mentality did have a significant and direct bearing on the choices I made in life. Yet others who creatively displayed their heart-felt concerns about what she was doing to the country were the first to impact on my thoughts during Thatcherism.



Alan Bleasdale is one such person. Thirty years on and I am still deeply affected, even wounded, by the portrayal of hopelessness that was shown through the characterisation in “Boys from the Blackstuff”. The despair on the face of Angie Todd, played by Julie Walters, as she saw her husband – brilliantly portrayed by Michael Angelis, disintegrate in front of her is an incredibly strong memory, as is the removal of Yosser Hughes’s children, kicking and screaming, as they were taken away by social services from a man whose sanity had failed him in the depths of overwhelming despondency. Whilst these particular characters were fictional, there were real living and just about breathing people who were far from fictional, attempting to survive as Thatcher and her policies destroyed their lives, their living and their communities. That wasn’t fiction.

Peter Fluck and Roger Law, together with the rest of the Spitting Image masters, managed to satirise with such accuracy that the caricatures almost became the people that they were mocking. From my student accommodation, I remember with absolute clarity the stunned silence that befell the room when the final moments of the 1987 General Election Spitting Image Show occurred – “Tomorrow Belongs to Me!” In that instance, we knew that we had another four years of that woman, and it felt like a real kick in the teeth, no a kick in the heart and the soul. The despondency I’d witnessed a few years before watching a television drama came flooding back. The nightmare was continuing, and I just couldn’t understand why people couldn’t see!




In 1982, I started my O-Level course and had the ‘pleasure’ of reading Orwell’s “1984” for my English Literature coursework. Simultaneously, I was studying Stalin in history. Both of these extreme dystopias were evident in my life too. Even a pathetically naïve youngster such as me could see some synergy between what I was learning and what was happening in my country – and it chilled me to the core.

I can remember distinctly sitting in a mobile classroom (the 1930s school was falling down and has only just received funding from the disestablished Building Schools for the Future funds to rebuild on the neighbouring field – the one that wasn’t sold off for the quick buck of housing) when there was a scurry of activity coming from the sixth-form block. At the end of the lesson, we went to find out what was happening, and it transpired that one of the British ships beginning with ‘A’ had been attacked in the Falklands. Fatal injuries were reported. Confusion and concern was paramount. Our friend Richard was on board the “Ardent”  or the "Antelope" and his twin brother had just heard about the attack on the news.



The futility of the Falklands conflict (I won’t grace it with the Hawkish term war) had already been a subject of intense scrutiny in our household, and here was that futility personified, living and breathing in the form of a friend called Richard who could easily have been dead in a far-off land. The next few days were excruciating as we awaited news. The outcome was positive. Whilst he had been injured during the explosion, he was alive but many weren’t.

And many were alive but barely living. You couldn’t possibly grow up in the West Midlands without seeing with your own eyes what the unbearable truths of Tory policy were doing to our people. The long and abandoned factories of Darlaston and Wednesbury could just about be seen from certain parts of my school. My uncle, who’d spent a lifetime working in the Rubery Owen – the ironworks, was given a list of people to speak to prior to its ultimate demise; a year short of its centenary of production. It was his job to go and tell them that their services to the company were no longer required. With the job completed, he walked back to the management rooms and was then told to add his name to the top of the list of redundant workers. He still talks of that moment today.



By the time I was 18 years old, the Miner’s Strike was in full flow. For my 18th birthday, my parents hired a minibus and my family, together with a few friends, travelled to North Wales for a breezy day by the sea. One of these friends was a history teacher at my school by the name of Alun Thomas. It was this man from the mining valleys of South Wales that was driving the minibus when we were stopped by the police as we travelled back to Walsall. One look at this stocky, dark haired and obviously welsh man was enough for us to endure a series of questions to ensure that we hadn’t just driven down from Nottingham or Sheffield – and if we had? Was that suddenly a crime? Secondary striking was – yet another infliction on our civil liberties.

The strike continued and again, the visual memories from that time continue to haunt, particularly this week. I remember travelling to Wales and seeing the lines of army vans with metal grids over their windscreens, transporting the scab coal to the steelworks in the North of the country. Police vans escorted them on their journey as striking miner’s draped their banners over motorway bridges proclaiming their rightful protestations. And as for those television images of civil war between miners and police in Yorkshire, well I wince at the thought. It’s just too painful.



I did my small bit, the only thing I could do. Spending a year on the dole myself as one of the “One in Ten” that UB40 used to sing about, I travelled to that groups home town every Monday to study in the Central Birmingham library. At the bottom of the station slope in New Street, stood a miner with that infamous bright yellow “Coal not Dole” sticker. From my ‘income’ I donated a pound each week into the donation bucket at his feet. I wonder where he is now.



Onto college and I became embroiled in student politics and proudly marched amongst the 120,000+ crowd in November1985 as we took to the streets to protest about Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and our government’s refusal to participate in economic sanctions against Apartheid. The Commonwealth countries took a vote. The outcome was a resounding plea to commit to sanctions with 49 voting for sanctions and 1 against. Thatcher couldn’t agree with the consensus. When asked about her unbelievable stance with such a unanimous conclusion, what was her response when asked how she felt about being the only person to vote against sanctions? “I feel sorry for the other 49!”

How can a person be so blind to injustice and unfairness when all about them are united? Her truth was her truth and she was going to stick to in spite of any argument or debate put to her. When even some of her political or ideological allies were trying to explain the error of her ways, she vehemently and steadfastly refused to consider for one minute that she might just be wrong. Ultimately, of course, she was proved wrong. Sanctions worked.



She was wrong about other things too. London needed a local government. The power of the Inner London Education Authority and the Greater London Council intimidated her, so she stamped on them, because she could. Like a rabid dog who tastes blood for the first time, her thirst for further political dominance was seemingly unquenchable. Not satisfied with ruining the lives of so many miners, she paired up with her great pal Murdoch to smash the unions once more. Of course, new innovations meant that the press had to change but it was the manner in which it was done that was so devastating and thoughtless, and let’s not forget that there’s a wealth of evidence that the mines could have been financially viable, if you had the will and the nerve to stay in the game and look at the bigger picture.

There are many other memories of Thatcher and what her policies did, including the delights of training a fascist dachshund to bark at the mere mention of her name, but this piece of writing is too long already. We could all write books of our personal recollections and why we feel so passionately about the harm this woman did, and they are all relevant and pertinent even if only to ourselves. Thatcher wounded and killed people through her policies. Let’s not shy away from this fact. People died. They lost their lives because of her policies. As I said, I was one of the lucky ones. But I lost something too.

I lost my political party.

I appreciate this is just my personal opinion and one that would be staunchly debated amongst my socialist friends and family but with the Jack mentality and the dismissal of society and communities (only individuals and families) she took away the normality of togetherness, of empathy and of equality. No wonder she wasn’t fond of the French with their national slogan of “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”.



She pushed party politics to a middle ground that is a void of nothingness with no reason or conviction. That’s not to say her own politics was embedded in “middle”-ness. Far from it! But overcoming the philosophy of Thatcherism meant that an utter dilution of justice and fairness ensued, under the premise that anything was better than a continued diet of Thatcherism.  Because of this, I have felt disenfranchised for most of my adult life.  It will take further writing to explain this in detail but her statement that one of her greatest achievements in life was the emergence of New Labour is not funny. Let’s remember, she had no sense of humour by her own admission.

As Glenda Jackson so brilliantly said, “everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward.”


And it’s this that not even my insightful father could see, as he shouted at the television about how this woman was going to destroy the country, which makes me so despondent. Yes, she was radical. Yes, she shaped society – and she never said it didn’t exist, she just didn’t believe in it.

And now for a final comment.

At 10.50 on Monday 8th April 2013, I was sitting in my brother’s house doing some work when I saw him charging through the garden with his fist victoriously raised in the air. I rushed out to him and all he had to say was “She’s dead!”

Instantaneously, I knew who he was talking about and exploded into a fit of multiple “Yes’s” as my bemused children looked on. Expletives followed, as did a question of confirmation as to whether it was true because the news still hadn’t materialised on the television. I concluded with the comment that Madiba had outlived her – which was one of my greatest hopes and something that had caused me unnecessary concern over the Easter weekend as Mandela resided in hospital.

For a few hours, with tweet and television viewing, my elation continued, and I’m not massively proud of this feeling. However, by the end of the evening, I was calmer and a little sadder. Throughout the day, I’d been remembering all the reasons why I disagreed so vehemently with Thatcher and why I despised her policies, and a touch of hopelessness crept in. Laurie Penny, writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, had written “Thatcher has died. Her legacy lives on. Sympathies to her family, and to the families of all who suffered because of her leadership.”

My legacy from my parents was my political persuasions that were and still are steeped in a sense of justice and a belief in humankind. The best way to secure Thatcher’s legacy is to do nothing and to accept what Glenda Jackson said about vice and virtue as merely being the way of the world. It isn’t. If all those who feel passionately enough about this unite, then we collectively ensure that the legacy of Thatcher dies with her.

United we stand, together we will not fall.