Before the Messiah

What forty years of destruction did to working class communities — and where the anger went

The views expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not represent my employer or any organisation I work for.

Sorry anyone reading this stuff I said I’d post something about Dostoevsky and I will, but first I need to fill the historical gap because the argument I want to make about Corbynism only makes sense if we share an understanding of what came before. I know folk will know their history and I don’t want to bore or patronise anyone, so skip this to my next post if you want, but you never know I might just say something valuable here. Thatcherism was brutal, and it’s personal to me and working class folk who lived and felt the way it battered us.

My Granda worked in Singer’s in Clydebank. My dad worked in John Brown’s shipyard. These aren’t historical footnotes to me — they’re my family, my place, my inheritance. Singer’s closed with 3,000 jobs gone within a year of Thatcher’s election. John Brown’s followed. The yard that built the QE2. The factory that employed half of Clydebank. They weren’t inefficient relics to me or my family, they were the centre of the community. Even if you hated working there those manky sheds and soot-covered buildings were the reason Clydebank existed and the reason people in Clydebank knew who they were. When these places (containers for our identity) went, something went with them that no amount of retraining programmes or enterprise zones was ever going to replace. You can’t backfill real people’s lives with good intentions and “action plans” when they’ve already been wrecked. My dad ended his time with John Brown’s Shipyard with a psychiatrist for his depression and anxiety. I’m sure many others trod similar paths of ill health and dark clouds. It’s not just a shipyard shutting, it’s a town.

Widen the lens out from me and my family. Look at photographs of closed factories and shuttered collieries and you’re usually looking at something worse than war damage, but bombs don’t choose their targets. What happened to the pit towns and the steel towns and the dockyard cities was chosen, and what my dad and his work mates went through together was planned too. The machinery was sold off, the land left to rot, and there wasn’t even the acknowledgement of loss that you get after a bomb falls. What followed was a lecture. Tories from Essex and the Home Counties telling folks who built ships to “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, “Get on your bike” and find work. Suddenly working class folk were redundant, out of date, not with the modern times. Whole towns, regions, sections of society, all working class, all now anachronistic and slapped down with the language of self-reliance delivered as a scolding by people with private school ties who’d never had to rely on anything in their lives except their class connections. Working class people weren’t given managed managed decline, it wasn’t even that “good”, what we got was managed contempt.

Let’s be clear, the past wasn’t perfect. Council housing could be grim. Services were often inadequate. Working class life was hard in ways that shouldn’t be romanticised, but as a class we had power, and that power meant conditions were improving. The welfare state, the unions, the collective bargaining — none of these were gifts from kind governments. All of it was fought for and won by working people who knew what they were fighting for and who would benefit. My mum and dad had the reasonable expectation that their children, my younger sister and I, might do better than them. That hopefulness has been robbed — not just that future kids might have it worse, but that there might be no planet left for them to exist on. A robbery and disaster carried out by people who understood exactly what they were doing. The same people digging luxury bunkers and planning to fuck off to Mars.

When Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was taking place in England’s green and pleasant land a Channel 4 News reporter was dispatched to Glasgow to interview people and get their views. One older Glaswegian woman was asked what she thought of Margaret Thatcher’s death and the reply was at once brutal and worthy of cheers and celebratory choirs, she said “They should put a stake through her heart to make sure she disnae come back!”, what a woman! Sometimes Glaswegians just make me so damn proud of the unashamed working class pride and identity we share. Her hatred of Thatcher was widely shared among working class folk, not universally for sure, but viscerally and with good reason.

I was a teenager during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike, which was no more or less than the British state under Margaret Thatcher’s Tories making a decision to deliberately break the strongest organised force in the working class. The National Union of Miners. Thatcher had prepared for years: coal was stockpiled, the policing operation planned, and the National Coal Board ready to close pits regardless of economic logic. This was a turning point in British history as much as any battle or war. Through a year on the picket line, communities held together through terrible hardship, with solidarity coming from across the labour movement. In the end the strike broke, the union fell and the working class was in retreat. The print workers at Wapping followed, Murdoch and the state working in explicit collaboration. The dockers too, and others besides. Each one a lesson delivered to the whole class: organise and we will break you.

The communities left behind after those defeats weren’t forgotten by accident. They were left deliberately, as proof of what resistance costs. So let’s be super clear about the shared root of anger, and the root of my anger about what I carry home from every shift — the damage in lives wrecked and communities broken is the long tail of all of it. The people on the other end of the line who are, in many cases, the grandchildren of miners and steelworkers, growing up in places that were never meant to recover, carrying the weight of a defeat their grandparents didn’t choose and didn’t deserve. The suicide rate of young men in Scotland was born in the defeats we’ve just mentioned. Those are just the tip of the iceberg. No wonder the brilliant old woman wanted to put a stake through Thatcher’s heart.

Blairism and the Labour victory in 1997 came as a wave of joy and relief. Surely now “things could only get better!” as the song said over and over wherever the man grinned his way through crowds. Getting rid of eighteen years of Thatcher and Major felt like something. The contempt stopped, the scolding stopped, there was money for schools and hospitals. Lots of folk, even loony lefties like me were relieved, but looking back it feels obvious that what won wasn’t the working class movement, it was never really “us”, it was a party that had made its peace with everything Thatcher had done and proposed to manage it more humanely. Still, even that felt better than the Tory boot on the neck, for a while at least. But trade unions became even more marginalised. Clause Four and any such commitments to nationalise for the public good remained beyond-gone, and of course The City was courted. I remember a certain Peter Mandelson telling us all that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. What working class people got in place of wage growth and real security was access to credit and rising house prices — debt dressed up as prosperity, the illusion of wealth without the substance. You couldn’t get a pay rise, but you could remortgage.

What Blairism built institutionally was the lanyard and the liaison coordinator — whole career structures built around managing the consequences of the right’s destruction rather than reversing it. I remember attending a lecture by Tariq Ali in the early noughties in which he argued that Labour had shaken off any semblance of being a workers’ party and was now a career for the middle class. Labour politicians, instead of being mostly like us, became the liaison co-ordinator hell spawn of Tom Leonard’s poem.

I might as well be emotionally honest here. I don’t believe the Labour right held working class people in any less contempt than the Tories did. The contempt just changed its accent. Tory contempt told you that you were worthless. Labour right contempt told you that you were incapable — that you needed to be managed and guided by people who knew better, rather than having the power to speak and act for yourself. One was honest about its hostility. The other dressed its hostility as concern. Now where do we think working class hatred of Labour “wokeism” might really have its roots?

New Labour didn’t really resolve the anger or the losses and bereavement that Thatcherism inflicted on us. Blairism simply made it a career to manage the smouldering wreckage and wounded. So the anger didn’t disappear, it just turned inwards to working class self harm. Nowhere to vent or hit out as a class, so inward to despair, the addiction, the physical and mental health crisis that is the political story written in bodies. If even the party that was supposed to be yours accepts the new reality, builds the liaison coordinator career structure, and tells you the answer is a skills assessment and a benefits form… of course ordinary people are beyond angry, they should be! The utter failure of the Labour Party, the betrayal of Blairism in surrendering the class war and the emergence of a lanyard wearing class to manage the undeserving poor stoked white hot anger with no political home. Into that vacuum came Farage, who at least sounds angry, who at least names enemies. The wrong enemies, but still enemies. The relief of that, of someone finally acknowledging the fury, is what I try to remember when I’m watching the roundabout painters and the flag wavers. The anger is legitimate. The direction is catastrophic.

I’ll need to dedicate a whole piece or more sometime to the Indyref which was joyous, and to Brexit which was far from joyous, but let me say all too briefly that the anger I’ve been illustrating found other expressions in both referenda. Two constitutional earthquakes in two years, rooted in the same forty years of loss.

This is the ground everything else grows from. I want to talk about The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky, Corbynism and Starmer in the next post. Let me say it loud and clear though — every voice on the line at three in the morning, every closed factory photograph, every pit town that became a food bank town is fed by this well of generational betrayal and anger. The losses were greater than any war. The trauma was legitimate then, it remains legitimate now. But before it found the fag breathed, beer-belching racism of Farage and the referendum ballot boxes, it briefly found something that pointed it in the right direction. That moment, and why it ended, is what comes next.

This is the fourth in a series of posts.

The next post is the one I promised — Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor, Corbynism, and why the last serious attempt to change things tells us something we need to hear before we talk about what comes next.

Clydebank, June 2026