Gary Raymond

On examining my own development as a writer I have often returned to an essay TS Eliot wrote on Matthew Arnold, and in particular to the point where Eliot says, that for all of Arnold’s talents his major deficiency lay in the fact that he had "neither walked in hell nor rapt in heaven". Now, I am sure that Arnold’s unexceptional modus vivendi was as much the fault of external forces as it may have been his own, but nevertheless, the question of how one’s art is sculpted by surroundings, social climate, and how often you manage to shuffle through the palatial gardens of hell or saunter through the window box of heaven, remains a niggling one.

Heaven and Hell are not necessarily external realms, granted, and the downtrodden middle-class posturing of the likes of Rimbaud or Shelley could testify to that. But still, I feel that I come from a time in British History when my class, my countrymen and peers, were the losers in the last just war that "white civilised men" will fight against "white civilised men": the war against Capitalism. Thatcher had crept up on the nation, benefiting not only from a well-propagandised public fear that socialism was heading toward sovietism, but also benefiting from the fact she had wandered aimlessly throughout Heath’s government while his more obvious successors such as Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell went about destroying their own prospects. The iron claws of Thatcherism and the monetarist cronies that pulled rug after rug from under the feet of the working classes were to leave a shudder throughout British society that has a half life of well beyond mine. It has given birth not only to a generation (the first of many to follow) of politically disinterested students, but of working class shrugs rather than rallies. It has given birth to a right wing Labour government lead by a man who wants to give Thatcher a state funereal (if Blair thought opposition to the war was impressive, he wants to pop down my local the day he announces that one).

My existence is down to a union from two cultures that have always had close ties, historic parallels and overlapping anecdotes; that of an Irish Catholic Liverpudlian lineage and a Welsh-speaking mining ancestry. Thatcher’s Linke-like iron boot left its suffocating impression throughout both these communities and I was brought up within the ripples of the biting cynicism that spread as quickly as the communities shrank. I am certainly not a political writer, not an activistic poet or proselytising essayist, but Thatcher’s philosophy and the tangibly ruthless fallout of her power hungry bubble-dwelling middle class political theorists simply has to run throughout everything I do, in the same way that Milton had to live surrounded by the vapours of the plague. If being one of "Thatcher’s children" (a phrase that sends shivers down my spine) has not informed the content of my work to any great extent, it has formed the landscape, the attitude, because I suppose that has been Thatcher’s social legacy; attitude. Her insistence that there is no such thing as society has precipitated its disintegration, just as her social policy and economic repercussions created Mozzas as well as Yozzers. I can see that almost every foul-mouthed heavy-drinking cantankerous pariah that I have written is a creation of Thatcher, in the same way that Oliver Twist is a creation of Robert Walpole.

When travelling I have taken these attitudes with me and viewed every culture through its lenses. My distrust of "Turkishness", which I have talked about before in this publication, is unfortunately probably more a side-effect of an Imperialist attitude rather than one of a post Iron-Lady hangover – but my overall questioning of authoritative regimes, of plutocratic corporate "running" of the people (which I have also brushed upon), is something that can be templated upon many aspects of all Western cultures. It was Thatcher that gave political aid to the creation of a British mainstream culture that has become little more than the lovechild of Americana by snuggling up to Washington like no premier before. No Premier since has been able to get by without aping this behaviour (and in the case of Blair, accentuating it). Before Thatcher Britain had its own place in world politics, in world values and in world art. Now it is absolutely linked with those of its mighty ex-colony, albeit with the odd light of originality shining through – but rarely in the mainstream. In almost all cultural industries now the ultimate goal is to "break the American market", and there is no way this is solely down to the mouth-watering number of consumers the United States has to offer. Am I the only one that feels there is a touch of wanting to impress your favourite uncle in all that? I am certainly not saying that this is only negative - it may not be at all negative - but it seems to me that Thatcher left me a mainstream cultural void with which to work and the only characters left to create were ones who struggled with the shards of identity her reign had not bothered to crumble. I am now sounding like a political writer, a sermonising lefty, but in truth Thatcher is someone that rarely enters my thoughts. The significance of her to me is that she destroyed a thousand council estates like the one where I was born, crushed millions of hard working good tax-paying family men like my father, and created a cynical and vulgar non-society in its place – and as a writer I have to write about what I know.

This article originally appeared in CFUK Magazine Autumn 2006