The state vs the people.

Introduction and note to readers.

Well, good morning everyone and I trust you are all well, this isn’t a normal blog post but neither is it one of my random series….rather it’s stuff that I have been thinking about, and making the odd note about, for the last 30 years or so. Today, as we seem to be suffering at the hands of an exhausted government that is all out of ideas and doesn’t seem to be able or willing to deliver anything I was reflecting on how this period is a bit like the last time we had an exhausted conservative government – and that what (and who) came next, was far worse.

Graffiti with punctuation.

This isn’t exactly a blog post although I hope that I will achieve, at minimum, Stephen Fry’s definition of a blog being “graffiti with punctuation” it won’t be a book though, not because it will never get published but because I doubt that I can ever achieve the standard of cohesion that book status deserves. Some readers of my blog, and more interestingly some subscribers who follow my tiny YouTube channel have asked me why I haven’t, or don’t, write a book about my small genre interest which for those to whom my hobby job of blogging, writing and filming, is unfamiliar, I have actually completed most of the first draft of a slim book loosely based on the late Maurice Griffiths first book, intended for sale at news-stands at railway stations back in the 1920’s and 30’s. His book (I have a yellowed and dog eared copy right here) was called Sailing on a Small Income, sold for a couple of shillings back then and is nothing like as good as his first major works that are still read and discussed today – the first being The Magic of the Swatchways and the other being Swatchways and Little ships.

Griffiths, at that time, was trying to make his way in the world as a struggling writer and where he ‘found his feet’ was as the editor of a small sailing/yachting magazine which eventually became the successful Yachting Monthly. At the same time he seemed, from his writing, to spend hours aboard the branch line trains that still existed and when the track ran out he boarded his bicycle and cycled around much of the coats Essex, Suffolk and Kent trying to find a boat that he could afford. While having spent hours and hours here at my computer and having produced enough words by way of my blog and then enough thematic pieces to go towards an actual book I finished the latter only to find that aside from the excellent Tom Cunliffe nobody writes new books about sailing and yachting that actually sell enough copies to make even a small income from – the days of their being dozens of popular sailing writers is well over – just as popular leisure sailing itself is ‘over’ and what remains is a high-end world of yachting,and yachts tied up in expensive marinas. a corporate end of large racing yachts with their crews all sounding and looking like corporate clones and my end (the cheap end) many of the boats that I grew up with being broken up in giant crushers.

The world of sailing and yachting that Griffiths and his first wife (Dulcie Kennard) is now long past except perhaps in a few muddy creeks in odd corners of the east coat. This winter one of my main reading projects was to find out more about the life and times of Dulcie Kennard who was also a struggling journalist/writer who wrote under an assumed name (Peter Gerard) and also oddly, a sailor who had a great desire to sail her own vessel and be her own skipper. Griffiths and Kennard married, owned several boats in partnership but the marriage broke up and both of them went on to new partners and different boats ; it always comes across in his writing that Griffiths had a roving eye for boats and it seems, from his first wife’s writing, that maybe he had a bit of a roving eye when it came to attractive women and boats both. I read ‘Peter Gerard’s’ now Mrs Charles Pears own work ‘Who hath desired the sea’ and I did my best to also track down anything she had written for the then yachting press but to no avail. Her story really ends shortly after the onset of the second world war when her new husband had work to do as an official war artist but she herself found little to occupy her once her own boat (Juanita) was laid up. I can’t but help thinking that just as her first husband became an effective Royal Naval Reserve officer, that Kennard/Griffiths would have become an effective ‘WREN’.

My ultimately fruitless search for Kennard/Gerard took me to another written work about sailing and yachting written by a yachstman and academic from nearby Exeter university Mike Bender – A New History of Yachting. Mike Bender’s main thrust is to give us a social history of sailing and I would add that his main point seems to be that we can only understand a social history of sailing/yachting by setting that history against a more general background of what is happening socially at whatever time we are taking an interest in. I am perhaps a bit odd that I missed most of the history of the inter war years except for the main events leading up to Weimar Germany, Soviet Russa and ultimately to the rise of the twin dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin. Somewhere in there I know is the rise of the suffragette movement and perhaps the rise of women getting to take on traditionally masculine roles but those things don’t appear much in Mike Bender’s book which is why, combined with many errors of fine detail, that I didn’t find the book as engaging say as Griffiths writing about running a steam trawler as a mines clearance vessel or Gererd’s (Mrs Charles Pears) writing about the slow loss of the usual freedom of movement orders for leisure sailors.

I find Mike Bender’s main idea quite useful though because I only started my sailing life during the great rise of leisure sailing in the UK, lived through, and engaged with the era of big sailing events (such as the Whitbread race) and I now live alongside the slow decline of sailing as I knew it and the awful snatching away of all freedoms as an ongoing political process. It’s the latter feature that I mainly want to focus on in this piece and I almost want to do the opposite of what Mike Bender did in his book – in my version I see the world through the odd view from the foredeck of a big boat ‘kicking arse’ in the great southern ocean or in it’s own opposite – being quietly at anchor in a muddy creek somewhere in a very ‘Griffithsian’ style.

As I write I am most likely much nearer the end of my sailing life than it’s beginning and I am trying to work out the bare bones of a plan to get my current boat from the edge of Cornwall all the way around to the Thames estuary and spend a season there exploring many of the places that Maurice Griffiths also moored in, explored and wrote about. Iv’e never been an east coast sailor so alongside my reading of The Magic of the Swatchways I often needed to have one of my Thames charts to hand to understand the various channels, mudbanks and features ashore. I got on more easily with his first wife’s autobiography as a lot of the time her background is sailing offshore between the Solent and the west country harbors – the west country rivers and ports being my home cruising ground for the last 20 years.

I should also say that I feel more in common with Kennard/Gerard because she grew up not really knowing what to do with her life but eventually found a life and way in what would have been a traditionally very male role…..I on the other hand did the opposite and having worked in at least one very masculine (and misogynist) job, left that and took up a strongly female dominated role in the form of becoming a male nurse and at a time when such a role was seen by most only with deep suspicion – either that or with strong prejudice.

My first story within a story here is that I left a job in nursing to run away to sea as a crewmember and ‘medic’ aboard a Whitbread race boat and came back to Ma Thatcher’s England just after the imposition of the Poll tax in 1990 and my first act was to get a job again just to be able to pay that tax and thus survive financially and in a country that I was beginning to despise.

My second example of sharing a strange experience with Peter Gerard (Kennard) came for me on the night of our Whitbread race finish in Southampton – to cut a long story short I an several other crewmembers from the same boat were actively denied access to the bar of the supposedly host yacht club and another English skipper said to me it was because we were regarded as professional seamen and therefore of low class. It may also have been an early example of reverse bias and anti male sexism because the obvious media darlings of the day, Tracy Edwards Maiden crew were all hosted and lauded. That slight psychological link is because some 40 years previously Dulcie Kennard (then Mrs Griffiths the first) was disallowed from entering the bar of another famous south coast yacht club on the eve of an early Fastnet race with several of the crew she was to sail with because she was a woman and like dogs, blacks and the working class, were not allowed in the bar.

The end of the Whitbread race (the on I sailed in) should have bee a celebratory, even great, experience but it wasn’t because once the brief media attention and ‘brouha’ was over (all of 15 minutes later) the reality was a sharp come down and having to find work as soon as possible. As soon as I got back to work the first question and response I got was “nice sailing trip” – in retrospect that may have been a natural, even fair, reaction because, while I felt some degree of achievement from it most people saw it as an esoteric activity of no great importance.

I saw a strange video on YouTube recently in which it was suggested that the so called urban myth of ‘no blacks and no Irish’ was just that – a myth : my problem though is that I spent time in highly conservative yacht clubs in the 1970’s and 80’s and actually experienced the overt bias against women , against people other than pure white , and in my case against the working class and actual sailing professionals – who, I note, were far better sailors than the blazer clad chinless wonders forming the club committees. I’m glad to say that that whole scene has now mostly disappeared as most of that social class has died out and those yacht clubs have had to close down. One of my strange observations of that era is that the same blazer clad chinless wonders were also mild or serious alcoholics, staunchly middle class, equally anti black and anti Irish and just as staunchly supporters of Thatcher and pretty well anything (such as the miners strike) done by the Police.

My story might seem strange because this version of it only starts halfway through while the actual story starts for me with action seen (mostly) at a distance and only became personal in 1990 with the hated poll tax. The actual story, the one which I claim made me aware of politics for the first time, started a few years before and specifically during the miners strike of 1984 although a couple of things had already happened that made me aware of how Mrs Thatcher could and would act against the people if business concerns were at stake. The first Thatcher action that I was really aware of was her action against the print unions and her direct support of their main antagonist Rupert Murdoch, this via a friend who worked next to the printing industry and saw it all at first hand. The odd thing for me is that the greater events that I saw closer to home may have happened before this but it isn’t the way I remember it.

When it comes to a piece like this I find that I sense a danger with memory because the way I remember Margaret Thatcher is extremely polarized due to just a few events such as the miners strike, the printing strike and the battle of the beanfield (which I should explain later). When I think about her life and actions as British prime minister it is without a large amount of factual detail which is why, to write this piece I am reading a history of someone I detest – possibly without much of the detail to hand (right now I am having to check my memory of events against the Wikipedia page.

Another problem here is that I only partially see Thatcher’s life, time and government through the eyes of my own experience and bad enough as that was I also saw it through satirical TV humor such as the TV show ‘spitting image’ in which, later on, Thatcher was depicted as a creature from director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror movie Alien ; with acid for blood. She was depicted as having several voices too : one moment she could be all ‘mumsy’ and the next strident or dogmatic ; given that the little I knew about her back then one thing that may have been myth is that she failed a job interview due to being dogmatic and inflexible.

It’s odd but Mrs Thatcher’s government was the first one that I voted for (oh the shame) I think only because I was somewhat naively impressed by her stance for individual choice rather than a big state and for a ‘free’ market. My mistakes were many in not recognizing her as the inflexible, dogmatic and non-negotiating monster that she became – she went to ‘war’ first against the hippies of the so-called peace convoy but then the miners, the print workers, most of the Irish people and finally the Argentinians only after it was her government mishandled the situation of the Falkland Islands…..odd that they are in dispute again today with an even weaker, more corrupt and worse led conservative party in office.

It seems strange to me how similar Thatcher’s government and the current one (Johnson/Sunak) have acted – that though is why I have to go into detail of what happened when : also that it might sound as though I am an anti conservative and pro labour fool. While I was briefly enthusiastic about the end of the Thatcher government I quickly saw just how bad the Labour party in England would be under Tony Blair it’s just that everything would be done behind a knowing grin. If I have gone from a grim despair about Thatcherism and complete contempt for Blair slithering his way out of responsibility and blame for anything I have ended up at the point of extreme cynicism about both ; my own oft said view being “2 cheeks of the same arsehole”,

What happened then ? what came about to turn me against Thatcher, nearly everything that she stood for and everything that the typical conservative club and yacht club member seemed to believe in and stand for.

Rather than taking this chronologically I’ll try and deal with it thematically so in the first government example we have the HIV and AIDS outbreak and in the current one we of course have the Covid 19 Pandemic, both, I would argue were handled badly by those 2 governments some 40 years apart – the current one almost comically so. During my nurse training between 1981 and 1984 I knew nothing about HIV and AIDS even when we had to cover sexual health and sexually transmitted disease in our final year. HIV and AIDS barely got a mention and even when it did was seen only a problem among a few gay men in the USA west coast cities. We only really became aware of HIV when it suddenly appeared in infected blood and was quickly seem to be able to spread between Intravenous drug users. That some of the early vectors of disease were Gay men, prostitutes and IV drug users was a feature that played directly into conservative political sensibility – seen as a ‘dirty’ disease spread by sinful people it was an easy target for spreading fear of Gays and disgust towards prostitutes and drug users who became easy targets for the Police and it seemed every conservative council wishing to criminalize and marginalize everything and anything as a vice.

I still remember the so called ‘public information’ films being produced as a government response to HIV and AIDS, one I remember featured an iceberg to remind us of the hidden menace and if I remember this correctly it was narrated by the actor John Hurt. Another thought I had then and still have today regarding COVID 19 was how badly the British people showed themselves up as exhibiting fear and then disgust and finally in hatred and an intense desire to regulate and control. Taking this whole idea forward to the COVID 19 era we had, once again, an incompetent conservative government and a press (and social media) given free reign to spread as much fear as possible and this time the fear spread to social authoritarians who started to insist that infected people should wear a badge of some kind (today of course I ask : what ? you mean like a yellow star ?) and it was genuinely kicked around in some countries that those who refused vaccination shouldn’t keep a job and should be denied hospital treatment. Today of course we are right in the middle of the official COVID inquiry and what do we see but everyone trying to shift the blame onto somebody else….anyone responsible and at fault except themselves. While being a so-called conservative government they seen to have learnt that trick from Tony Blair.

Thematically, HIV/AIDS and Covid 19 seem horribly similar in that they were both viruses although transmitted by different means medically but fear was spread deliberately at the same time as debate and questions were actively suppressed and in some cases dissidents arrested and assaulted in the name of the state while big business and big Pharma prospered and profited.

The COVID 19 era did see the return of a particularly nasty political tactic, one that has been used by both far right and far left organizations ; the rapid and simple ‘labelling’ of people to identify them as enemy and ‘other’ as with any tribal ‘out’ group. In the case of the COVID years the insult and denigration became both ‘far right’ and ‘anti vaxxer’ and now ‘far right’ seems the term of choice that the so called elites use to label and denigrate any collection of normal people who are not fitting the elite narrative in some way…..distressingly a far left and big state narrative.

But anyway lets cast our minds a few years back to the years that led up to the early AIDS era and particularly to 2 events that took place in England : firstly the miners strike and even earlier to the destruction of the so called ‘peace’ convoy at the battle of the beenfield

I assume that anyone old enough might remember a few events from modern British social history, what many people of my age will remember is the ‘winter of discontent of 1978 and 1979 which was largely the direct result of local level strikes but escalating to national strikes and just so happening during an intense winter. That was largely the fault and problem of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government but only after he tried to put a cap on wage rises by first capping the wage rises of public workers – NHS workers for example who at that time were particularly badly paid. It was this crisis (Crisis, what crisis….The sun) that caused a crisis in confidence of Jim Callaghan’s government, led to the rise of Margaret thatcher and her rampantly authoritarian and anti union stance that led directly into the later miners strike and it could be argued her use of a politicized Police force to break the unions and take direct (and illegal) action against the so called peace convoy and against what were called at the time ‘free’ music festivals with their roving bands of ‘traveller’ hippies. Unfortunately the way the peace convoy was covered in the national press seemed to play directly into the conservative attitudes of what we can call today ‘middle England’ so when Thatcher ‘let the dogs off the leash’ there was little support or sympathy from the English middle class.

For a reasonable read of what actually happened it’s worth a quick read of the Wikipedia entry below although what I got myself was the first hand account of illegal acts by the Police which is why I made my first ever complaint to my MP of the time, the home secretary of the time and to the heads of the Police forces mainly involved. One of the illegal acts I heard about directly was that of out of control Police entering vehicles (which were people’s homes) wrecking them, assaulting and then arresting (with no charges) the travellers and all while wearing overalls to cover their Police tag numbers. It did eventually go to court against the Police and they were found guilty of several offences and while compensation was awarded it was mostly swallowed up in court costs.

Worse was to come.

If I had finished writing this piece twenty years ago, when I first worked on it in note form I would have said that the miners went out on strike and that Mrs Thatcher, who held strong anti union views marshalled the government, the Police, the press and her mainly middle class and conservative supporters against the miners and in a bitter dispute basically beat them into submission or when that failed simply closed the industry down.

Deep coal mining in the midlands and the north of England had reached a peak in the late 1970’s with some 170+ collieries still working, even by the turn of the century there were only 15 deep pits still working and power production had largely gone to gas and nuclear power. One feature early on is that Thatcher’s government claimed that all pits ran at an economic loss and that even at the beginning of the strike it cost over £3 per ton loss to extract. It is also claimed that coal could be bought and imported on the open market cheaper than it could be extracted by mining in the UK.

Even today though the whole story is worth a thorough read which is why I have included the link below. Reading it again today is still uncomfortable because, while Arthur Scargill’s action in declaring a strike was contrary to union rules and caused deep divisions in the workforce the actions of the government, the courts, the Police and so on all seem like the worst examples of the state working against the people.

The strike was probably the worst industrial action ever experienced in the UK and the final outcome can be said to be the closure of the coal industry and the slow ‘neutering’ of the union movement by the conservative government.

Obviously I find that I could so easily just go on and give example after example of what happened during the actual mounted Police ‘cavalry’ charges against the miners picket lines : what we were shown on national TV was plenty bad enough to help form the opinion that the state really was beating down the people….quite literally because they had risen up and this was not to be allowed by a prime minister who, by then, was acting far more like a right wing dictator. If I was writing an essay just about the miners strike I would draw on the many features of the Police action that seemed (and was) highly government coordinated but which also seemed well out of control when it came to bobbies swinging batons and cracking heads – it really did happen that way but instead of a dry essay I choose to write a more personal account of what I saw at first hand and what happened to me, after all it coloured my view of the state, the police and the media right up until today.

At the start of the miners strike I was in my final year as a student nurse at Preston in Lancashire and while Preston was an old industrial center, mostly based on the cotton mills, there was mining out to the east , which must still have been one active pit or maybe more. My own story is simple enough and only peripheral to what was playing out on mainstream TV at that time, but anyway here goes –

My story is that on the day concerned I was out on my motorbike, riding between Preston and Burnely – my purpose being to visit my then girlfriend there. I do know that I was a bit lost and somewhere out on the moors. The next thing I remember is a series of curves that shielded my view from what would have been helpful to see – basically a Police roadblock and some Police activity around the site of a coal mine nearby. I had to come to a halt pretty fast because I had been riding a bit enthusiastically and as I stopped I was roughly seized by a several Police and my bike fell over sideways onto the road – I think someone had the nous to turn off the ignition. I was marched to one of several Police vans and roughly pushed inside where I was questioned (with attitude) about who I was, where I was from and what I was doing out there that day. Nowadays I hope I would stick to the only legal requirement and that is to only give my name.

Then though, I was a lot younger and hopelessly naive and so, under coercion, told them where I lived, what I did and that I was on my way to visit my girlfriend locally – I think that it didn’t help my cause that I wasn’t on the direct route between the two towns. Now, obviously I had ridden into the back of a Police action and my view, at least, was that the Police were ‘loaded for bear’. I think there was some communication with higher ups because after half an hour was sent on my way and instead of riding onwards I hightailed it back towards Preston although I did stop at a view point to collect my wits. Today, I think that it was my panicked fast talking that got me out of there – that and maybe a radio call to check that I wasn’t on a list of ‘wanted’ miners. It left a very bad memory though and although I came to no actual harm except for some scratches on my motorbike I think it left a great wariness and distrust of the Police that continues to this day.

Long term effects.

I’m glad, in a way, that I didn’t write this piece back in 1984, just as my own professional career started and yet at the same time the double life that I had led for several years mostly fell apart. Alongside a rather egalitarian life as a student nurse I still spent many of my days off riding over to north Wales where would kip on someones floor before going out to race in the Menai straits or further afield in the Irish sea. On the one hand I was slowly taking on the life and attitudes of the profession while on the other I was usually surrounded by the strongly opposite bias of the mainly conservative yachtsmen that I sailed with and socialized with in those days : my problem being that I was slowly withdrawing from those people without knowing it at the time. I wrote part of a blog essay about this once and based on a question I was once asked when I worked at the boatyard in Wales – the question being “are you a yachtsmen or a sailor” ?. I thought it an odd question even then and only began to understand what my interlocutor was getting at several years later, after I had finished one of the then most significant events in ocean sailing and had been disallowed from entering the host yacht club – In that moment I got a hint that I was definitely not a yachtsman and that this was my first inkling of understanding the politics of class and work in England.

If I had written the piece back then it would only have been a polemic against Margaret Thatcher, telling you guys what a bully and a monster she was, at least in my eyes. In my opinion it wasn’t just because of her involvement with the events that I have already described but her inability to negotiate in the most serious conflict (within the UK) at the time : I am talking about that ‘weeping sore’ of British politics…..Northern Ireland.

Given that the ‘troubles’ : our own English term for what was essentially a civil war, mainly happened between 1960 and 1989, and that is the central period of my own adult life I feel today that however much I read I still won’t understand the whole story and that nearly everything I have thought Ireland is wrong – not the least in the new situation in the Republic today. As I have said before I came to adulthood with ‘the troubles’ as a continuous background event that seemed to become ever more fractious and violent as the years went by, By the mid 1980’s I was a staff nurse in an Intensive Care Unit and I was regularly attending events and conferences of which some part focused on the clinical problems…..gunshot and blast injuries….that we had to know something about. In one chilling presentation, the morning after our traditional conference knees–up we had a long lecture given by a senior pathologist who dealt with one of the bombings that took place in London and my main memory of that is a long line of plastic bin bags full of body parts.

Although the ‘troubles’ did represent one of the worst periods in English/Irish history it doesn’t seem to constitute THE worst period as in recent history there was an actual civil war that goes back to the 1920’s and years and decades of suppression by Westminster and the native Irish parliament. Today I have a slightly clearer view, and greater anger. from reading a history of Catholicism by Enlish Labour politician Roy Hattersley and in which the so-called ‘liberal’ church of England comes across extremely badly – not that the Irish Catholics weren’t capable of intransigence.

The main period I am thinking about today though is the years when Mrs Thatcher (once more) is the English prime minister and it is hard to imagine anyone worse for the job. Even other British politicians described her as domineering and incapable of negotiation, that was certainly true of her inflexible attitude to the unions and equally true of her fixed attitude towards anyone she regarded as a ‘terrorist’ as she did in the case of the IRA/Sinn Fein and even Nelson Mandela. I would suggest that nearly everything that did happen was made much worse by Thatcher’s inability to negotiate when negotiation and compromise were so sorely needed : amazingly it was her weak and seemingly ineffective successor who got negotiation going but only under pressure from the American government.

This morning, as I write, I finally get to one of my own questions about all of this and is the one that I have to ask whenever a new situation arises ; the new one, in my view, still involves Irealand although it’s the republic of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland. Just recently a truly awful thing happened in that an immigrant stabbed 3 children and 2 children in a single incident on a street in Dublin. What followed seems to be that information was initially suppressed but when rumors were confirmed a riot ensued as angry locals hit the streets. The Irish authorities, including their Police (the garda) and the Irish president (the taoiseach) were all quick to label the rioters as having ‘far right’ ideology and as I write are enacting draconian anti freedom and anti hate-speech laws – seemingly to suppress the Irish people. My question, by the way is 2 sided : what is the state ? and who are the people ?. It was obvious with the battle of the beenfield , the printers strike and mostly even the miners strike who and what the state was and just who the people were but it gets a lot more complex with the Irish troubles and even difficult to define in the recent problems within the Republic because the problem seems not so much being created by the Irish state as the superstate in Brussels and it’s seeming to afford second rate status to Irish natives and yet support of an immigrant one. Even worse perhaps is that Ireland consciously operates a 2 tier housing and benefits system and worse one level more. a 2 tier criminal system.

Well, that’s about it for Margaret Thatcher for now ; I thought that she was an inflexible monster even back then and I have changed my opinion very little. My slight change of heart is that who and what she was up against was every bit as bad as she was, for instance that her chief enemy in the miners strike had strongly communist tendencies and didn’t even go so far as ensuring a national ballot of miners before calling a strike and as it turns out many of them didn’t want to strike and kept on working.

I first tried to write the piece sometime during the 1990’s when we had a labour government and I tried to write the piece because of my worsening view of ‘Teflon’ Tony Blair who, if such a thing is even possible, turned out to be a far worse prime minister than Mrs Thatcher and I believe left us with worse long term problems than did her successor John Major who at least started to resolve the northern Ireland problem. I’ll take a break here to tell what I think is a funny story about my accidental involvement with the last days of John Major’s government,

By 1997, the year of the next general election I had given up on the north west of England and had most of the professional sailing career that I would have and was back as a very small cog in a very large machine – this time one of the intensive care units at the Southampton hospitals and working every shift that I could to pay off negative equity. Margaret Thatcher’s middle class dream of home ownership had gone sour for me and many others and it took me 2 years of extra shifts to climb out of that hole. Today, I associate that mistake (buying a property during a rapid increase in property prices) with what felt to me like the ‘greed’ that ‘Thatcher’s way’ (as I called it) was unleashed. Today though I don’t associate my mistake so much with party politics as something going on (and going wrong) with ‘the people’. Anyway, in 1997 I was glad that the Tory/Thatcher era was over, at least for then, and I had great hopes for Tony Blair’s different way of doing things – my hope soon turned to cynicism and contempt though.

My big problem was that by this time any sense of politics that I had was already highly polarized by Margaret Thatcher’s years in power so as soon as I saw what Tony Blair was doing, and what he was like as a person, it was though I had an ‘anaphylactic‘ response to him. The odd thing that I remember was that the period of the Thatcher government years coincided with me usually having female bosses and female managers so the other thing I kept an eye on were those who were like Thatcher in temperament – bossy and highly ‘right’ about anything and everything. There were quite a few of those along the way so it was quite a shock to see that Blair was a weaker leader than most of those but he did bring something different to his job and it’s what I came to see as a smart but ‘hollow’ suit with no real substance plus a sickening nervous grin, Weird I know but I came to classify nurse managers as either being Thatcher types or Blair types.

My accidental story about John Major.

Just before the ‘Blair’ election that put ‘new’ labour back into government for the first time that I can actually remember I was working an insane number of shifts in Southampton and living out in the Hamble – somewhat entertainingly between the safe conservative stronghold of the village one end and the housing estate the other. It was my habit to only take a night off when I absolutely had to and I would often sleep for 18 hours and then go and do a huge shopping trip and start batch cooking to get me through the next run of shifts ; just occasionally I would walk down to the local boatyards for a look around and then catch the little ferry across the river and go get my monthly treat over at the nautical bookshop. Speaking back in sailor more for a moment this was the period of my emancipation away from the godawful International Offshore Rule (IOR) racing yachts that I had grown up ! with and a slow shift to the odd, the practical and the workmanlike in boat design.

Anyway, on this morning I already had something to chew on for the month, as I remember it some offering from Phil Bolger or L Francis Herreshoff, so anyway instead of making the short trip across the river and back I got myself a coffee and parked next to the waterfront near the conservative club, I noted the activity – lots of fit looking service/security guys in smart suits and not quite discrete enough jacket bulges that shouted ‘weapons’ at me. Given that it was the first week of the build up to an election and there was still trouble going on in northern Ireland I figured that there might be someone important in town but quickly forgot about because I had a coffee in hand plus a new book about boat design to get stuck in into and it was a nice bright day so for once I was just enjoying the day.

For a while I was aware of increased activity which then declined but when I looked up to pay attention to what was going on whatever action that had been going on was obviously over except that there seemed to be a TV crew filming in my direction…..kind of made me look behind me because I couldn’t have been the cause …..could I ?. Well, it turned that very briefly I was the cause as I found out when the ‘producer’ came across grinning broadly at me. The first thing he said was “thanks for that” and at that I must have looked mystified because the second thing he said was “don’t you realize what just happened and what you did ?” and I answered in the negative because I had no idea.

It turns out that what just happened was this was the first stop on the then conservative prime ministers first stop on his election tour and to a normally safe conservative seat and his first stop was the conservative club…..right near where I was sat. The ‘action’- it must have been a thin day for news……is that the election tour bus turned up, the security guys must have checked me out and given my presence the nod and then the prime minister of the time (John Major) hopped out and went to do a quick walkaround before disappearing into ‘safe’ (ie hardcore conservative) territory.

It is said that John Major was a bit dull and ‘grey’ and also said that he wasn’t a natural at doing walkabouts but I guess that this was the first day of his election campaign and he obviously decided to start his campaign with meet and greet in a safe seat…..its just that the first person he decided to meet and greet, ie me, completely ignored him and that happened on film. The TV crew filmed the whole ‘interaction’ and the producer asked me if I was ok with being on national TV while clearly blanking the prime minister….as it happens the clip was never used because the upcoming media and TV star ( Tony Blair) upstaged John Major that day…..probably by doing something utterly banal while looking good.

So, I wasn’t particularly adept at meeting and greeting famous people as I will explain in the companion piece to this post – “the people vs the state” and why, in later years, I was kept firmly out of view when famous or important people came by to say a few (banal) words and cut a ribbon.

This was, for me, bit of a blank period in my life, I didn’t do very much except work an insane number of shifts and on my rare days off I would mooch about in the Hamble or nearby trying to find a small sailing boat that I could afford to buy : finding boats for sale in the Hamble or generally in the Solent area should be pretty easy it’s just that finding a boat with character that I could afford wasn’t working out so well. One day when I was out and about in one of the many boatyards in the area a broker directed me to go look at a small canoe Yawl which he thought might suit me. It did, in fact it fit like a glove, the only problem being that it would have been three times what I could have afforded and I still had a mooring to find – the price, per year, of a mooring in the Hamble was about as much as I could have raised just once to buy a boat : like many low paid nurses in those days what I really needed was a payrise !.

As I said earlier I got through the month of work by keeping my expenditure extremely low and at the end of the month would treat myself to something from the nautical bookshop over the water in Warsash.  Mostly I entertained myself by reading one of my small collection of sailing related books but even in the days before the internet crashed into my life I messed around with writing ; it was finding some badly written notes from that time that prompted this post. The notes that I found must have come after this time and they concern a file that I was keeping on a certain Tony Blair who had come, at first, as a huge relief but that relief went sour quickly. In my notes I compared Thatcher and Blair by describing Margaret Thatcher as a kind of east end thug who would nail your ears to the table if you stepped out of line (hard……but fair !) while Tony Blair I described as a confidence trickster who would smile while taking your money. Another thing that I said in my notes was that Blair was like J R Tolkiens depiction of one of Sauron’s servants : looks fair but feels foul.  Feels foul was my summary of Blair’s government – from going to war with no good cause to being obviously scared of the press and saying anything to win a favorable view on the day.

Today, some 30 years (on average) onwards from the days of Thatcher, Major and Blair it seems to me that we are doing ‘rinse and repeat’ in the UK as, once again, a conservative party has been in power for what seems an age, has promised much and yet delivered nothing…..please someone tell me some positive things that this government has done. This is actually the central point of this piece – that now feels just like then only this time we are feeling all of the effects and fall out from policies and decisions that were made by our former leaders plus we have a whole load of new factors brought in by the new crowd of public shoolboys (and girls).

When I started this piece my intention was to make a comparison between the Thatcher years and the one we have just coughed and sneezed our way through…call it the Bojo years then !. Right now we have a tedious post Covid inquiry going on and it seems all about who said what to whom rather than asking the questions that most people want answered which seem to center around something like “what was the evidence for the lockdown” ?, what was the evidence for mandating paper and even less effective cotton masks” ? – in short “what was the evidence” ?.An even more serious question for me is why any question challenging the narrative of lockdown, vaccination, social distancing etc etc was so heavily and thoroughly suppressed ? – especially by the legacy media and the social media ‘tech’ giants in a different country. Personally, when I peel back one layer I find that the whole thing is like a rotten onion – layer after stinking layer !.

So, I was looking for a common thread that appears as a major feature in each government and I think that it is the press as that is the one thing that successive governments seem to be actively afraid of and/or is the one organization that they seem to have to stay in favor with, In writing this piece I have been reading and researching quite a bit – at least one evening’s reading of the appropriate Wikipedia page per prime minister and similar for each major event that happened…..the miners strike and the peace process as a couple of examples. Lightweight I know but I also headed into town and picked up one book covering ten recent prime ministers which is why I got a brief look-in on John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May.

Coming right forward in time to the Johnson/Covid years that’s the one time when, for a while, I used to listen in on the Covid briefings (so called) and one feature I noted was how one particular press reporter used to use those briefings to put forward her own opinions and in a sometimes direct way get Johnson to agree and go along with that view – it seemed like the tail wagging the dog despite the obvious fact that that press reporter clearly knew very little about virology and public health….but there again neither did Johnson or his so called health minister (Matt Hancock). As I said previously I am writing this piece with the selfsame inquiry going on and although it falls way short of the mark it does seem to reveal that Johnson really was out of his depth with a virus based pandemic, that there was no existing plan to deal with it, that the whole cabinet environment was ‘toxic’ and if there was one belief or attitude that Johnson had it was that the vulnerable elderly should ‘accept their fate’.

This feature that I thought I found, that it was the press and not the government ‘steering the ship’ was obvious with Margaret Thatcher’s government but in the way that Rupert Murdoch’s press group openly admired her and would go along in helping to create the ‘right’ view in their section of the press – and secondly when it came to that iteration of the pairing of press and cabinet that ‘one hand washed the other’ and, if you will, that there was a third partner in the form of a politicized and anti people police force ; that being seen most clearly during the miners strike. Coming forward 2 governments, and I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but the Blair/Brown government was always extremely aware of and nervous of any negative opinion about Labour’s spending and taxation in a (mostly) dominant right wing press.  If the press really did have that kind of influence then it was also just a small segment of the press – in fact, for a while, I might have asked the same question as did a former conservative prime minister (Edward Heath) ; who rules the country ?.

In a very important way this has become my version of Heath’s question….‘who runs (rules) the country’ or ‘what defines the state’ ?. In the case of Edward Heath that answer was probably the unions as they couldn’t rule but could seriously disrupt the country and then strike for higher pay, in the case of Margaret Thatcher the answer would have been ‘us’ and enthusiastically nodded on by the Murdoch element of the press but by Blair’s government and later Cameron’s it could be said that the press was in the driving seat but then with Cameron he really was a weak leader who sought to give away power while being a Blair ‘clone’ – looking and sounding good for the cameras.

If I asked the same question today – who rules or governs the country, then I wouldn’t automatically say the government, instead I would point to any one, or several, competing pressure groups, be they the pro Palestine pressure groups, the alphabet soup groups including the tiny (in number) but highly vocal trans groups. I might still point to the press although not the legacy media any more especially that we see a greater ability to censor and censure from the corporate tech giants telling us what we can and can’t say on social media and home made video’s. Some might say that government has little actual effect compared to the corporate voice although that is more a feature in US politics and ‘pay to lobby’ companies there.

Another factor and feature that is something that Thatcher’s government brought back was the large councils which came with a large and financially hungry budget and whichever means of raising (and spending) income that they could. An unintended consequence , we might say, of having a Muslim mayor of London is a policy of being pro migration, pro Islam and right now anti white and anti motorist

The opposite question is ‘who is the government governing for’ ? and that might seem a politically loaded question but it always seemed that Mrs Thatcher mostly governed for and on behalf of the middle class while later governments like that of Blair, Cameron and Johnson that they seemed to rule for only the corporate class and a certain group of pro Europe elites – that seemed to be the case when it came to the later Labour governments when the mainly white working class abandoned them in favor of a ‘softer’ form of conservatism.

If there is another thing that is a common factor in the governments that I am comparing (aside from over confidence and sheer hubris) it is that none of them seemed to think very deeply about anything other than ‘how will this look’ it is that none of them seemed to be able to think about the unintended consequences of actions that their ideology, their over confidence and their desire for ‘power’ – thinking here along Nietzschean lines. Each of them had a clear desire to lead or at least to be at the head of the greasy pole they were on and from what I am reading right now they tended to spend a lot of their thinking time in a major effort to first acquire and then hold on to political power. It’s perhaps a lot to expect of our ‘leaders’ to not only have high competency in doing something that they’ve never done before, but also being competent or at least knowledgeable across several domains and also to have the mental agility and humility to accept the idea that the decision they are about to make might have an unintended consequence – or maybe it’s a feature of being a political leader that they have thick skin and really don’t care that much when they aren’t the ones on the sharp end of the stick.

There is a thing that iv’e been trying to get at here and it started with an actual question about the actions of the cabinet in 2020 – my question being ‘why did the government/cabinet choose to take the action of locking down the country and imposing/mandating that on everyone along with a whole load of other actions that now begin to be seen as unnecessary, even directly harmful…..our unintended consequences again. You could say that Margaret Thatcher’s takedown of the miners strike was an ideological political move even if, by her reasoning, it was right to shut down inefficient pits : I happen to think that it was personal with her and she had to be seen to ‘win’ at least in her mind. That creates an uncomfortable legacy for her – that why she exercised power and made the decisions that she did wasn’t out of a sense of moral duty and she didn’t seem to care that the unintended consequences in that case was a huge increase in unemployed miners, the destruction of mining communities and a large increase of the state costs in then supporting those communities ; it didn’t make sense…..even by the standards she was working to.

I asked the fundamentally same question when Tony Blair took the country to war in Iraq as there was no other compelling reason to do so other than that the USA obviously was going to go to war and Blair seemed to work harder and harder to paint himself into a corner. I have a sense that he thought he had a moral duty to act even when large sections of the populace were disagreeing with him – it is almost the very fact of having that sense of moral obligation made him do exactly the wrong thing. Taking your country to war is just about the most serious thing you could do and acting on your own sense of moral obligation now seems like the exactly wrong way to act in politics. Just as a sideline here Blair always hid behind the reason given often given – that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction – that was never proven to be the case and interestingly Blair had no competence to decide on intelligence matters.

My big question, at this stage in my reading was ‘are our prime ministers getting better or worse’ ? and having lived through several of them’s term of office ; from memory – Callaghan, Wilson, Heath,Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and finishing with Johnson….. It would be impossible for me to sum up each premiership in a few sentences so I won’t try to do that but I think that the low points were Blair and Thatcher closely followed by Johnson and now Sunak who seems to have acquired some of the worst aspects of most of them while retaining none of their qualities. The absolute low point (for me) comes with Tony Blair btw.

When it comes to the Covid pandemic and our response to it all it has already been said that the then prime minister and his response is the worst thing that could possibly happen because he was temperamentally the wrong prime minister to handle that kind of problem – as if we could select our PM’s on their likely competence to a problem of that scale. At the time I thought that he was obviously under huge pressure, that he didn’t understand even the basic material himself and that he was ‘supported’ by other ministers who were themselves incompetent and venial. My big problem is that in considering the interaction of a government, media and the people I don’t think the press did a good job in that all they seemed to do was increase the level of fear and anxiety but then neither did I think that we had a smart enough and resilient enough public to deal with the close-in everyday problems that the pandemic created. One example is the teachers – mostly young women is their demographic, relatively young and with a relatively risk free client group they only acted (it seems) based on their own neurosis and then with a high degree of authoritarian control.

Beginning to round this up while trying to stay close to my original remit iv’e found that iv’e had to read far more widely and in far more detail than I thought I would have to and iv’e had to ask dozens of peripheral but seemingly important questions. One outcome conclusion of my own is that we didn’t have a competent government at a time when that was really what we needed but also that we didn’t have a competent press and as a public society we were way too compliant with the social media controls. I thought also two things about the public response and, if you will , the public response to government (and press) words first and to actual knowledge second. To explain this a bit more fully it seemed to me that we went from having an entire public voice that was self declared expert when it came to anything with an ‘ism’ on the end….race-ism, sex-ism etc and whatever was driving that almost immediately drove itself to a pseudo expertise about virology and public health and the thing that arose was a demand for an authoritarian approach at everyday level : for example if you got labelled as an anti vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist then there was a call that you shouldn’t receive healthcare, shouldn’t have a bank account and be ‘cancelled’ from society in every way possible ; thankyou for that Mr Piers Morgan.

I might follow this up in either one of the 2 companion pieces that go with this one : my first one which i’m already working on is titled the people vs the state and the final one is to be called ‘the people vs the people’ . Warning…..it gets a little weird !

Links

Margaret Thattcher : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher

The ‘Wapping’ dispute (printers strike) :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute

The battle of the beenfield :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beanfield

The miners strike : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingdom_miners%27_strike

The Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ 1960-1998 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

The Northeren Ireland Peace process : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles