March

On May 1st 1981, five hundred working class British citizens set off walking from Liverpool's pierhead. They were marching to London with purpose. It was "The People's March for Jobs".

One of the main organisers was a fiery trade unionist from Birmingham called Pete Carter. He was admired by many and had a proud history of fighting for workers' rights in what had become Thatcher's Britain. Others felt differently about him - including most members of the ruling class, their newspapers and the aforementioned PM Margaret Thatcher with her deeply conservative cabinet.

Like all public figures, Pete Carter had a private life. He was married with two children - Susan and Michael but that marriage, that family life was breaking apart. Soon Pete would depart, making new relationships and two bitter children who found it difficult to love or forgive him.

Thirty seven  years after the original march, Michael Carter set off from Liverpool with a heavy rucksack and a bunch of ideas. He would follow the exact route of  "The People's March for Jobs" and he would talk to people along the way, observing his surroundings. And he would reflect upon modern Britain and his relationship with his late father. In this process maybe Mike would at last find some peace with Pete Carter.

"All Together Now?" is the story of Mike Carter's long walk but it is also a contemporary portrait of this kingdom, warts and all - focusing on globalisation, immigration, workers' rights, planning laws, industrial history, how the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and personal stuff too. The anger, admiration, hatred and affection that Pete (Mike never calls him Dad) lit in his heart.

I found it a fascinating account and I recognise many of the points that the writer makes about changes in our land. In lots of ways, it is a different country from the one that I grew up in and plenty of those changes are not for the better.

Ar one point this last week I told Shirley that the book was quite depressing, quite brutal. My view of modern Britain would not be quite as glum as that for I see more rays of sunshine and hope than Mike Carter appears to notice but in the final analysis I am afraid that the author really did cut through a lot of pretence - right to the bone. What he writes is deeply political and I must admit - on the whole true.

Here's a taster:-

Alone again, I looked at the council building where in 1981, the men and women of The People's March were billeted on camp beds overnight. Then I looked across the road for the public toilets. Pete had built them, and every time we drove through West Bromwich when I was a kid he would point them out. "I built that," he would say, and as it slid past the window I would think my dad was as important as Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Thomas Telford or any of the great engineers we were reading about at school.

But the toilets were gone. There was now a giant supermarket there. It should not have been a big surprise. Public toilets have been rapidly disappearing from our high streets, with over 1,700 facilities closing in the last decade, as local authorities have been forced to spend their slashed budgets elsewhere. (Page 227)

It almost goes without saying that when those determined participants in "The People's March" reached Number 10, Downing Street after twenty eight days on the road, Margaret Thatcher refused to meet with them. But she was happy to invite the ousted Chilean dictator General Pinochet round for dinner.