Mrs. Thatcher's Children
For many - but not all - of the people who live in it, Mrs. Thatcher's
Britain feels today like a rich and booming society. In the London stores,
money flows freely. In the clubs and pubs, so does the
lager and the champagne -even more so now that Britain's once strict licensing
laws have been relaxed. True, down by the Embankment of the river Thames,
beggars work the commuting crowds and homeless young people sleep under the
bridges, huddled in cardboard packaging. But downriver a sparkling new skyline
shines - the post-modern high-rise towers of the thriving City of London, the
banking and business quarter. The famous Square Mile - England's Wall Street -
is an area of glass fantasy these days, and every building has its tree-filled
atrium and its crystal elevators. Spreading out over the poorlands
of the East End and onto the old docklands, once the heart of British imperial
sea trade, it is the core of a new empire, now based on invisible transactions,
electronic impulses, video display unit screens, fax machines and, above
everything else, the new enterprise spirit.
Everyone will tell you that during the 1980's the mood of
Britain changed. Now everything is leaner and meaner, cleaner and keener. Concrete
gives way to glass, sex gives way to money. Along the banks of the Scottish
river Clyde, they built the great trans-Atlantic liners. Now the high cranes
hang useless over closed shipyards, and unemployment is pandemic. But just go
to nearby Glasgow, and see the boom.
Glasgow is striving, with some success, to wrest from West
Berlin, and before that Venice, the title of Europe's ''Culture City.'' There's
an art boom, based on the great Burrell Collection, the heritage of the
art-nouveau architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and
the new experimental realism in the Glasgow School of Art, some of whose
painters attract high prices in the Manhattan market. There's a literary
revival, with playwrights like Iain Heggie, fiction
writers like Alasdair Gray. Downtown, stores, services and excellent
restaurants thrive. A new blocks-long atrium shopping mall rivals anything
elsewhere in our new, smartened-up world. Even Prince Charles, that scourge of
modern architects, likes it.
The new Britain is a land filled with
such sharp contrasts - dying industrial towns and great new construction
projects, spoiled inner cities and commuter-packed superhighways. What's bad
for some is good for others. In this Britain, it's better to be highly trained
than unskilled, better to live in the smart new South than in the dying
industrial North, better to be young than old, white than black, healthy than
sick. If you are doing well, you flaunt it. You're one of Mrs. Thatcher's
children, and even we call them yuppies. They work hard, own stocks and shares,
take out large loans to buy their own homes or apartments. They exercise, take
ski-holidays in winter, dine out regularly, network
with their friends. They generally practice serial monogamy, take their 1.9
children to the art gallery on Sundays, trade domestic chores because both
halves of the couple are working professionals, are computer-literate, carry
around beepers and portable telephones and tote their plastic money in
leather-bound organizers that also contain the address of their acupuncturist.
This is Britain's New Class. And not since World War II have
we seen anything like their bustling seriousness, their designer style and
their confidence in the future. Britain emerged from the Second World War a
victor-power, but she had lost her empire, economic infrastructure and historic
confidence. Visitors like the literary critic Edmund Wilson came and thought
they saw not a victorious power but a defeated one. Postwar Britain looked
tawdry, bomb-damaged, poor and socially insecure. Even the much-admired welfare
state, which advanced social opportunities, often had a tattered air, and as we
rebuilt our cities with high-rise public housing developments they often took
on the look of Prague or Warsaw. The British class system was pronounced dead -
though the way you pronounced anything still gave another Briton the chance to
tell what class you really came from.
In the 50's, we called ourselves the New Elizabethans and
looked back - in anger, in nostalgia, in post-imperial dismay. The 60's changed
that, bringing returning affluence and growing confidence. London was swinging,
the Beatles were singing. Class distinctions seemed less important than how old
you were. And if you wanted to be a pop singer or a hippie -and who in the 60's didn't? -it hardly mattered whether you were
reared on the playing fields of Eton or on the tarmac yard of a Liverpool
comprehensive school.
Nervous prophets, though, warned that the underlying economic
problems were not solved and that England was sinking, giggling, into the sea.
In the 70's, they seemed right. With an oil crisis, 26 percent inflation, a big
new balance-of-payments problem and unstoppable wage demands, trouble had made
a comeback. Why, if class war was over, did the workers' unions flex their
muscle power at every Government? The British public looked for a solution, and
in 1979 Margaret Thatcher's Tory Government came into office.
So, after the Fearful Fifties, the Swinging Sixties and the
Sagging Seventies, came the Economic Eighties. Mrs.
Thatcher let unemployment rise and old manufacturing wither. Public spending
was cut, the power of unions weakened. Whatever she may tell you, not everyone
in Britain likes Mrs. Thatcher. But everyone would admit there has been a
Thatcher revolution. Admirers see it as a permanent transformation. Political
enemies call it a temporary blip, financed by the fortunate windfall of North
Sea oil. Whichever it proves, the Thatcher revolution will go into history
books as the decade during which Britain stopped being postwar - the social and
the political climate took a turn upward and the New Class came onto the scene.
It was a political gamble, promising that the lean years would be succeeded by
the post-Industrial Revolution.
So far, so good, for some at least. Mrs. Thatcher
steered Britain through the Falklands War and, less heroically, through the
Westland helicopter company scandal, which cost the careers of two cabinet
ministers who supported rival projects and would have brought down a weaker
Government. She has presided over the Big Bang - the massive deregulation in
1986 of the City of London and its Stock Exchange, releasing vast new financial
and commercial activity on a world scale. One year later came the October
crash, chopping stock values, decimating investment-fund managers. But
Thatcher, along with capitalism, seems to have weathered it all. Ten years on,
in her third term of office, she's still there, no political rival anywhere in
sight.
Many of Mrs. Thatcher's children have grown up knowing no
other leader, no other policy. They belong to her post-Industrial Revolution,
her high-tech, innovation-driven, banking-led world. They have made their
dreams, careers, fortunes, and sometimes misfortunes, in the Thatcher era. They
belong to the computer age, the information technology age, the designer age.
They're smart, they're snappy, they're clever, they're
clean. They start small businesses, find new ways of working information, construct new professions. I'm a university teacher and like
anyone who lives in a world where a new class comes in every year, I know that
every student generation, every group of new young people, has its own style
and temper. I'm also a writer, working just now on a television drama series
about the New Class called ''Anything More Would Be Greedy,'' from an
investment firm's newspaper ad that promised all of us wealth without excessive
risk.
To research Mrs. Thatcher's children, I started out at home.
I LIVE IN NORWICH, IN Norfolk. ''Norwich, A Fine City,'' say
the signs as you drive into town, with un-British bravura. And a fine city it
is, with two cathedrals, one ancient and one Victorian, a Norman castle which
is now an art museum and fine medieval streets with half-timbered houses. In
the Middle Ages it was England's Second City, a kind
of 14th-century Chicago, rich on the wool trade and on commerce with the
continent of Europe. When the end of the 18th century came, the Industrial
Revolution passed it by for the coal and iron, water and steam power farther
north. For 150 years after, Norwich survived on shoes, printing, chocolates,
insurance. Mostly it slept, being 100 miles from London on a route to nowhere.
It always had a communication problem; as we say here, Norfolk is cut off on
three sides by the sea and on the fourth by British Rail.
But Norwich today is thriving vigorously, with the new kind of
thriving that goes with the Thatcher revolution. It's in the desirable South;
its sea coast faces the oil rigs and the European Common Market. Because it had
no Industrial Revolution, it's a charming, unspoiled, amenable place to live, a
perfect setting for the post-Industrial Revolution. If you go downtown, you
will find, in an elegantly remodeled Edwardian shoe factory, the Last Wine Bar,
set in what is now proudly called Merchant's Court. Old shoemakers' lasts
decorate the walls. There are elegant furnishings, antique tables, stripped
pine and a good menu offering kiwi fruit with everything. Outside stands a
black Porsche, a white Saab and a row of other designer cars. Inside you can
find yuppie Norwich, Mrs. Thatcher's New Class.
There's low, arty Muzak. The people
are almost or around 30, and look good. The men mostly wear suits,
Jermyn Street striped shirts and red suspenders. The women are either in softish silk or crepe de Chine designer dresses, or in
those sharp dark business suits with big shoulder pads that make it seem they
have been left too long on the hanger, upside down. They speak either in the
loud confident voices of the old British aristocracy and gentry - baying, as
Evelyn Waugh said, for broken glass - or else in the hustling certainties of
the self-promoting professional. They drink good wines - French, German,
Australian, Californian - from an informed, up-market
wine list. Or else, they drink Bolly (Bollinger
champagne), the broker's way to relax. Naturally, you
ask yourself the oldest of British questions: Just who are these people?
An easy-going, wander-round-the-tables social survey yields
the answer. The table over here is mainly bankers and venture capitalists,
local and national. Over there are accountants from the big international
company Coopers & Lybrand, which has moved a big branch into Norwich. Here
are some people from television (Norwich has a big television production company)
and from local radio. The group still holding onto its
code-locked briefcases are investment analysts in the City of London,
commuters from Norwich on the newly electrified, much-speeded rail line. Those
wearing Adidas sports shoes are in computer software and CAD - computer-aided
design -and they commute by car to Cambridge, 60 miles away. Norwich has fine
houses at cheaper prices than either London or, now, Cambridge. They've made a
good investment. They've moved in just ahead of the game, because East Anglia
is Britain's fastest growing region. The population is expected to rise by 15
percent in the next 10 years, with professionals dominating among the
newcomers.
Conversation? It's mostly about business, income,
property, where to ski this year. Salary? Around
$:25,000 to $:40,000 (about $46,000 to $73,600), with some of the people from
the City of London doing considerably better, in the $:100,000 ($184,000)
range. Sex roles? The women are as professional as the
men: lawyers, accountants, an art gallery owner, a television news presenter. Class origins? Some are linked to the old Norfolk gentry,
which survives very nicely, but some are from lower-middle or working-class
backgrounds, topped up with a degree in accountancy, computing or business
studies, or a professional qualification from a small private law or business
college. Interests? Cars, parties,
even art and books. Style? Confident,
smart, poutingly aggressive. Here they are,
the sons and daughters of the superchip, the computer spreadsheet, the electronic
office.
I ask myself when this breed first appeared in my own classes.
In the late 60's and early 70's, my students, rich or poor, all wore the same
clothes - torn-off jeans, castoff battle dress from one of several different
eras of warfare - and talked permanent revolution. In the mid-70's they cast
off their castoffs, appeared in off-the-rack designer wear from Benetton and
Next, and talked Serious Money. They stopped saying ''Never trust anyone over
30,'' and started saying ''I want to be a millionaire by 30.'' They stopped
heading off into social work or the alternative life style and went into law
and accountancy. And when parents offered the chance to travel, they forgot the
mind-blowing trip to India and satisfied their heavenly dream by getting into
the M.B.A. program at the Harvard Business School.
Table-hopping, I ask the people in the Last what's sexy now
that sex apparently isn't. Money is sexy, says one; tension is sexy, says
another. Off-piste skiing, good clothes, dining out, are all
sexy. Getting your ears pierced is sexy, ballooning is sexy, water is sexy, if you have a boat to put on it. ''Yes, and
work's sexy, when it's going well,'' someone says. I ask advice on where next
to look for the New Class system. Docklands, where the new yuppie apartments
rise among the old warehouses and everyone gets a view of the Tower Bridge and
guaranteed access to a marina? No, say the new people, opening up their Filofaxes and giving me privileged addresses, try the
Cambridge Phenomenon.
THE OLD UNIVERSITY city of Cambridge is an hour or so drive
across the East Anglian flatlands, where the sugar
beet harvest is muddying the landscape. Coming toward the city on the
well-developed road links that have fed the local boom, you see, before you
catch sight of the dreaming spires and the towers of the old colleges, the
Schlumberger building, a long, low and elegant tent-like structure that looks
as if it was designed for the Sultan of Brunei or the sheiks of Abu Dhabi. In
fact, it's a research center for an oil and
electronics multinational, and the first visible sign of the Cambridge
Phenomenon.
It was about a decade after the high-tech growth phenomenon in
California's Silicon Valley and around Boston's Route 128 that a similar
development was noted around Cambridge. It was linked to a university that had
a major tradition in electronics, artificial intelligence, computing and
bioscience. Many of its people had worked in wartime code-breaking the German
Enigma machine. After the war they moved to Cambridge and Manchester, and a new
code-breaking era began. In the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Francis
Crick and James D. Watson broke the DNA code. In the university's Computing
Lab, Maurice Wilkes and his team conducted advanced software research that spun
out into small new software, hardware, high-technology and biotechnology
businesses that worked in what they like to call ''synergy'' with university
departments.
It was the day of small, inventive high-tech businesses, with
from four to 50 people. Nobody then talked volume production. Instead of taking
a lectureship inside the university, you started an innovative company in a
garage off Histon Road, designing new information
systems, refining the chip, discovering the new heart-and-lung machine. There
were 200 high-tech business starts between 1974 and 1984, and people began
talking of Silicon Fen.
Now Cambridge's medieval towers and spires are surrounded by a
ring of science parks and new high-tech buildings. Elderly, gowned academics
still ride their ancient bicycles through the pedestrian-filled Cambridge
streets, reading Gibbon as they go. But they jostle with young high-tech enterpreneurs on 15-speed racing bikes - the quicker way to
jog - as they speed toward that million before the age of 30. The colleges of
the university wisely got in on the act. Most of these science parks are on
otherwise unusable university land - like the Trinity Science Park, where I
went to find the Cambridge Phenomenon.
Trinity Science Park is not old Cambridge. It's rampant with
architectural adventurism. High-tech companies like to express their style in
high-tech buildings. They also like high-tech names of the type of Uptech and Downtech, Quicktech and Camtech, and have
actually named some Interactive and Coherent. I went to Cambridge Consultants
Ltd. (C.C.L.), two stories of white, big-windowed elegance. It's a company that
spun out from the university and started in small stores and sheds in the
Cambridge back streets. It took univerity-based
projects and converted them into industrial and commercial research and
development. It struggled its way through the 60's, and grew through the 70's,
as the climate changed. By the early 80's, it was big with a multiplicity of
invention.
Now the receptionist in the plant-filled foyer says, ''Hi,
have a nice day,'' and gives you a security tag as you enter. I went to see
Stephen Temple, the resident mad inventor,
''consultant and polymath,'' who works on uncommissioned
innovation and represents the dream of everyone involved in this world of what
is now hard-nosed business - the dream of pure discovery. With his feet on the
desk, he looks like a young university lecturer, shows the research excitement
of the eternal postgraduate, and worries about his place on the competitive
company squash ladder. He also reminds me, as we talk about the dream of pure research, that a good many commercial crises have happened
on the way to C.C.L.'s success. He reminds me that many hopeful young Ph.D.'s
may not realize that C.C.L., like many of these companies, is no longer owned
by its original visionaries. In fact, it's a subsidiary of Arthur D. Little, of
Boston. The synergy these days works on a trans-Atlantic axis.
Temple shows me machines I could never understand without
being 20 years younger and coming from a different culture. He explains that
the garage starts of 10 or 20 years ago are in the league of world-class
business now. The Ph.D.'s who went into commerce to find adventurous research
found a different Holy Grail: the revitalization of capitalism. The work that
came out of the labs and the garden sheds has become the motor of technical,
financial and managerial innovation worldwide. The venture capitalists saw this
in the 70's, and put the commercial verve into what were often visionary
student projects. Those errant Ph.D.'s who 20 years ago would have evolved into
university dons and 15 years ago would have been thinking about windmills to
irrigate the Sahara took to the new culture. And some of them did become
millionaires before 30.
Many got there without quite having the souls of businessmen.
When the mergers started, the volume production began, the American
corporations moved in and the venture capitalists quoted the company on the
stock market, they took the golden handshake and returned to being visionaries.
The million was nice. It paid for a lot of sailing, bird watching and foreign
travel. It also serviced the most familiar of British dreams. As someone once
said, every Briton wants to make his pile, and then live in one - a noble pile,
an Elizabethan pile, a Georgian pile, a country manor at the end of a long
lime-tree drive and plenty of acres to control the view. Don't think the
British have changed completely.
The heroes of the Cambridge phenomenon are men like Clive
Sinclair or Alan Sugar. Unlike many of the New Class, these two didn't start in
the university. Sugar, of Amstrad Consumer Electronics, a very prominent
electronics and low-priced personal computer company, ran a barrow in the
streets of the East End before he became multinational. Sinclair was a whiz-kid
who started in radio parts and journalism, then moved to Cambridge, realizing
that there the new technologies were booming, the university was spilling over
with innovation, and young educated scientists like living in this kind of
city. He started a computer company, and by 1982 he was getting his cheap
personal computer into the Christmas stocking of almost every kid in the land.
Sinclair was a new science success. Mrs. Thatcher gave him his knighthood. He
bought his Elizabethan pile and set up his business in it.
With an endearing Britishness, he
turned to a new project - an electric three-wheel car intended to revolutionize
urban transport everywhere. Low-slung and bullet-like, a postmodern rickshaw,
you saw it for a time on the streets, even on the superhighways. Inside sat
some courageous pilot, squatting at ground-level, shouting for help as he swung
in the tail wind of the mega-trucks taking superchips to the factories. Pure
folly, they said when his computer business, once valued at $197 million, was
sold for $7 million to Sugar of Amstrad. But what every rich man deserves is a
folly.
Sinclair and Sugar, these are the folk heroes of the Thatcher
era. They proved Mrs. Thatcher's belief that small-business men can make big
businesses, micromachines make Big Bangs. But the old
hands shake their heads now. Computer time moves fast, and we're already into
the third generation - the era of the faceless young technician, the pension
plan, the small stockholding, the takeover, the merger. The Elizabethan
adventurers and high idealists may well have had their day. The young ones now
flooding into Cambridge, up to Norwich, along the Thames corridor, are the
apparatchiks of high-tech, often working in the changed financial world its
products and technologies have created. But if the international trade budgets
don't balance properly, the glass-and-steel frame buildings may crumble and
fall, the glass elevators halt, the plants in the atrium run wild and the
potted palm jungle will soon take over.
For now, the New Class is home and dry, in residence in the
old British country houses. But today there's a satellite dish on the
Elizabethan roof, a Rolls Royce and two Porsches on the gravelled
drive, a helicopter pad in the old rose garden.
The owner's around 40 now, and he
sits in the library, surrounded not by books - it's a high-tech age - but
computer screens and Bang & Olufsen hi-fi
equipment, ventilating after his morning jog. He's thinking about his second
million and where to get it. He's already discovered the superchip,
revolutionized the conductor, reorganized city brokerage and had Richard Rogers
design his super factory. Now it's been sold, taken over, merged, and he's
wondering what next. Invent the bio-chip? Start a kissogram
agency? Move to Mustique? The old British
aristocratic adventurer is back, this time in Benetton and jogging shoes. So
are his progeny, the New Class, looking for more of the same.
Published in December 11, 1988
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-thatcher.html
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