When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Author:Robert Chesshyre [Chesshyre, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Britain, Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, Iron Lady, reportage, politics, Maggie, 1980s, north-south divide, poverty, wealth gap, poverty, immigration
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2012-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

‌Chapter 8

‌The ‘New Jerusalem’

No one would stumble upon the new town of Skelmersdale by accident. It is a remote Bantustan; 42,000 people – most of them uprooted Scousers – dumped on the Lancashire plain between the Pennines and the Irish Sea. The town’s isolation was ensured by planners who fractured the ancient road that linked the market town of Ormskirk in the west with Wigan to the east. The traveller is compelled on to a looping ring road which leads – via innumerable roundabouts – from the rich, black farmland of west Lancashire, with its dark stone walls, smell of Brussels sprouts, and occasional scarecrow, to the red-brick ribbon that marks the outskirts of Wigan. The bypass is set in generous open space, so little can be seen of the town apart from factory roofs and the fringe of housing estates.

To get that near requires local purpose and knowledge. Thousands drive by Skelmersdale each hour, pounding north and south along the M6, intent on the Lake District or Scotland perhaps, or counting off the miles to Birmingham. Those travelling east and west pass over the ‘town’ boundary on the M58, an almost deserted motorway that disgorges vehicles north of Bootle’s docks, close to the Grand National course. A clergyman told me he had only once seen all three lanes occupied by traffic, a bleak comment on economic activity at the margins of the motorway. Passing motorists may notice the unusual Lancashire names – ‘Pimbo’, ‘Up Holland’ and ‘Skelmersdale’ itself – sturdy village names, telling of generations of yeoman farmers. Stop for a pub lunch in Parbold or Scarisbrick and your companions will be large, square-faced, curly haired men in brown overalls, who will depart in new BMWs. The dark peat they farm is among the finest, and most profitable, agricultural land in England.

If the sun is shining as you return past Skelmersdale towards the M6, your attention might be caught by an improbable, almost Levantine sight – four-storey blocks of flats, white against the low hills. Locals, with heavy irony, dubbed those flats ‘New Jerusalem’. Twenty years ago, in the mid-sixties, Skelmersdale was indeed to have been the New Jerusalem. The ‘homes fit for heroes’, pledged since Armistice Day 1918, were at last to be built: the slums of Liverpool fifteen miles to the south were to be razed; model factories would arise in the green fields; children would breathe truly fresh air for the first time and attend schools made of steel and glass set in wide playing fields. Freed from the exploitive past, the citizens of Skelmersdale were to become the new Britons. The second wave of post-war new towns was to be the apogee of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. Skelmersdale was only a brisk crow’s flight from Wilson’s own constituency of Huyton; and it would have been a fitting tribute to the spirit of 1966, when the first new house was occupied, to have named the new town ‘Wilsonia’. (A play performed locally

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