Out of step
Wilfred De'Ath
Last week I made a misguided attempt to join the Peoples March for Jobs which is currently walking from Liverpool to London (where it expects to arrive on or about 28 May) in order to draw the nation's attention to the problem of unemployment. The March was by no means easy to find, but I finally caught up with it in Walsall, a depressing town on the edge of Birmingham and the Black Country. (Walsall itself has an unemployment rate of 14 per cent, the highest in the West Midlands.) Due to the vagaries of British Rail, who seemed determined to demonstrate once and for all that it is actually quicker to walk across England than to travel by train, I arrived in Walsall five or six hours behind the marchers. There was no trace of them in the town but I eventually found them in the Alumwell Centre, a huge comprehensive school complex on the outskirts of the city, just by the motorway. I say I found them but what I found were their sleeping bags and meagre possessions neatly laid out in rows in the school's enormous aircraft hangarlike gymnasium. Of the weary marchers themselves, among whom I was fondly imagining myself moving with my notebook like Henry V befOre the Battle of Agincourt, there was no trace. They were all out, apparently, at disco dances fraternally laid on for them in the district. That day's Walsall Observer had described them as 'exhausted' and small wonder.
Mick, an ex-soldier, who had failed to find the Army to his liking after a succession of jobs in civilian life, was on security guard at the school. He had been out of work since last August, he told me. We were soon joined by Terry, a rather paranoid English graduate from the university of Aberystwyth, who was sponsoring himself on the March (most of the marchers are sponsored to the tune of £100 by their trade unions). Terry told me that unemployment led to mental illness and that the current situation was a deliberate attempt on the part of Mrs Thatcher and her Government to make the whole country mentally ill. While I was absorbing this information a young punk marcher came in. I did not catch his name but he wore a badge with the words I AM AN ENEMY OF SOCIETY written on it in crude capitals. With these three I embarked on a political discussion. When I tried to tell them that I was not a political animal but that I was as concerned about the problem of unemployment as they were, Terry said: 'You are political the moment you come out of your mother s womb.' This discussion, which might conceivably have got better, was interrupted by the arrival of a large negro wearing on the elbow of his green uniform the insignia of a Marshal of the Peoples March. On learning that I wrote for this paper, he described me as a fascist and a racialist and, without giving me an opportunity to explain that I am neither of these things, forcibly ejected me from the building. I was lucky enough to find a taxi (it was raining in Walsall) which I shared with another March official, a prominent trade unionist, to whom the phrase that Auberon Waugh has occasionally employed to describe working-class People — 'foul-mouthed, dirty and drunk' — might have been applied with total accuracy. I retired to bed in an appalling hotel, feeling rather depressed. Next morning, Saturday, was sunny and I rose resolved to give the Peoples March the benefit of the doubt. They were due to assemble in a local car-park at 9 a.m. but it was nearly ten before the buses transporting them from Alumwell drew in. They were no more than 70 or 80 in number and naturally looked somewhat bleary and hung-over after their night at the drink and the discos. I had an interesting conversation with a very nice man standing next to me, a local tool-maker recently made redundant at the age of 40 and beginning to despair of ever finding another job. He and I agreed to a nostalgia for the Jarrow March which, though neither of us was old enough to remember it, must surely have had a far more authentic atmosphere, a feeling of hungry men in search of bread and work, than this miserable collection of discoridden punks.
The marchers, carrying their banners and wearing their attractive green anoraks, eventually set off in good order towarcis Birmingham to the cheerful music of a Jamaican band perched precariously on the back of a lorry. They were joined by a pathetically small contingent from Walsall itself. I found this surprising in view of the unemployment situation in the town. There were, also, very nearly as many policemen as marchers present. There were no 'incidents' and one felt that, had there been any, the Dave and Deirdre Sparts (there were about 30 Deirdres on the March) would have been seen off very smartly indeed .
I had intended joining the March as far as Birmingham as a gesture of solidarity (I am unemployed too) but, in view of the unfraternal reception of the night before, decided not to risk it, electing to spend what was left of the weekend on my Oxfordshire estate instead. There are occasions in life, and this was definitely one of them, when discretion is the better part of valour.
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