Broken Barnet, the movie, or - A Tale of Two Barnets

The Phoenix in East Finchley is a fabulous old cinema: its history spans an era from the age of silent film and the first talking pictures, to a later role as an independent 'art house' cinema, which still retains its individual character, and period atmosphere.

This year marks the hundredth year of opening, in fact, and sitting there last night, remembering all the great films that have been screened there, it was rather odd to see the theatre being used now for such a different type of film, a community project, watched by a packed audience of local residents brimming with discontent over the political direction of their borough.

Helen Michaels, cafe owner from North Finchley

This was not an audience of agitators, or union members, or members of a political party. It was a broad range of local people from all sorts of backgrounds, and there for all sorts of reasons.

Most were what you might describe as of a certain age, and perhaps unlikely activists.

Some were there because they were local traders desperately trying to reverse the calamitous new parking policy which is causing such damage to their businesses.

Others wanted to draw attention to the terrifying future facing those depending on support from services which are been outsourced to the private sector.

Some were there because they fear they are about to lose their jobs, and see the security of their livelihoods taken away.

There are so many issues now, here in Barnet, which are engaging residents in a new political reality, in a way I can't recall before: without meaning to, you might conclude, the new realities of life in this borough are doing what the Tory council pretends it is providing, through its perverse form of local authority admininstration: by default, it is regenerating the borough, and creating community where perhaps there never was one before.

Last week Barnet Council managed to publicise 'A Tale of Two Barnets by (temporarily) banning the poster from all libraries. The pretext for this was that the flyer contained an asterisked word in a comment made by Philip Rackham, a resident with physical and learning disabilities, who had said:

“As a user of social services my view is that Barnet Council don’t give a sh*t about disabled people and their carers.”

Philip Rackham, resident

Mrs Angry met Philip last night, and he is a delightful man, and told her some very silly jokes, but she is absolutely sure that he is quite right, and that Barnet Council does not give a shit about disabled people, and that he is perfectly entitled to say so.

*Updated Wednesday

Today in the Barnet Eye John Sullivan, one of the residents featured in the film with his daughter, who has a disability, has a guest blog. You can see it here As he says:

"A Tale of 2 Barnet's was an eye opener and perhaps in this year of a diamond jubilee and the Olympics , where once again local and central governments will pretend to the world that all in the garden is rosy, A Tale of 2 Barnets should be distributed more widely because it tells a story for the whole country as well, including a copy to Buck house, so that the reality of what is happening in Barnet and across the UK is not deliberately covered up to portray a false image of Great Britain, a Britain that was great because it was once a caring society, a Britain that has become in just 2 years a completely uncaring society.

The question A Tale of 2 Barnet's raised for me is, when did right become wrong and when did wrong become right, when did it become right to denigrate disabled children and adults as did Cllr Coleman at a recent transport meeting and still be considered fit for office. When did it become right to ignore the plight of the seriously ill, the disabled and those with a disability and deny them succour, and right to devastate their lives to make a profit from their misfortune?"

In the audience last night there were the Labour party GLA candidate Andrew Dismore, Labour councillors and supporters, there were also Green party candidate A M Poppy and other Green supporters - there were even, Mrs Angry would guess, quite a few disaffected Tory voters. There were no Tory councillors, however, no doubt because 'leader' Richard Cornelius, the comic relief in the film to be shown, had cast aspersions on the production, after agreeing to be filmed, but without seeing the end production.

I should add that there was no intention by the producers of the film to portray Cornelius as a clown: as we know, he performs that role with consummate mastery, without any need for direction or editorial sleight of hand.

Consider for one moment the comment he made about his own role: he observed that as leader, there was very little that he could do ... 'I'm not sure there is much that I can change about Barnet' ... and that he therefore had set himself 'quite low' expectations. Clearly.

Tory 'leader' Richard Cornelius

The footage with Cornelius, and also Chief Executive Nick Walkley, who combines a misleadingly naive appearance with a love of hollow, weasel worded corporate speak, produced a reaction of hisses, heckling and a smattering of disrespectful jeers whenever they spoke.

The film itself is unpretentious, unsophisticated, perhaps even naive: and these are its strengths - it is a documentation of the state of things now in Broken Barnet, told through the words of those who live here, and are living it, day to day.

Incrementally, as you sit and listen, the weight of testimony provided by the speakers leads the viewer to the inescapable conclusion is that something has gone horribly wrong somewhere here in this borough, and no doubt elsewhere in Cameron's Big Society experiment, and that a terrible price is being paid by those members of our community who are least able to negotiate the terms of contract by which they now find themselves caught fast.

Most people in this borough simply do not understand what is about to happen to their local services, and on such massive scale.

When the One Barnet programme is complete, and you find yourself having to find care for a relative with dementia, or support for a child with learning difficulties, and have to deal with an unaccountable private company whose only interest in the borough is based on an appetite for profit, at your cost, you will realise what your council has done. Some of the people in this film already know from their own experience what the effect privatisation is on the provision of council services: listen to them, and understand what is coming.

In the film you hear from some of these residents, or, as John Sullivan reminds us, those whom our favourite councillor Brian Coleman memorably described as 'these people'.

Here they are, then, these people, who so annoy him with their need for subsidised transport -for example, a quadriplegic resident - now officially, ridiculously, a job seeker, the parents of two middle aged residents with severe learning disabilities whose care provision has been affected by privatisation.

We also hear from a pensioner's representative, a parish priest, both of whom have seen enormous social changes here in the last few years, a local shop owner and a cafe owner, the first almost incapable of expressing his fury over the consequences of the crazy parking scheme which is seeking to exact further revenue at the cost of local business, the latter a previously unpoliticised trader, now brilliantly articulating her contempt for the Tory council which has so badly betrayed the very people it relies on for support in elections.

Which brings us to the question raised by many taking part in the film, and by Ken Loach, whose introduction reminds us to consider the wider issue: what do we do about all this? What can we do? Ken has made several films about the miners strike and he chose a familiar motto to quote - unity is strength. If residents pull together, and fight against the things which are undoing our community, piece by piece, perhaps one day we will be able to put Broken Barnet back together again.



Oh, I forgot to mention a couple of mouthy Barnet bloggers who are also in this production. Mrs Angry slid to the floor in horror at the sight of some woman who looks like her mother pretending to be her in a dark pub in Edgware, and can't remember exactly what she said, but it made some sort of sense, something about a culture of bullying.

Which reminds me, thankfully all the compliments she and other people made about Brian Coleman landed on the cutting room floor, and it was a refreshing change to be able to talk about Barnet without any mention of the old fool. Not mentioned, but present all the same, you can be sure.

Early on in the film when Mr Mustard was talking about his blog, he told the camera that he was only half as funny as Mrs Angry. Mrs Angry yelled behind her in the direction of where he was sitting (in the cheap seats) words to the effect that he was not even half as funny. See, Mr Mustard, even that got a laugh. It's a gift. Stick to the adding up.

There will be more showings in the borough in the next few weeks - see websight for details, and one at the House of Commons. Mrs Angry will try to behave herself, and not break any doors.

Independence Day in Broken Barnet

Independence Day in Broken Barnet

Updated: see below ...

Mrs Angry has not always been Mrs Angry, you know.

She has had many past lives, before reaching a state of perfection in her present earthly incarnation. During one of these previous existences she even worked for the London Borough of Broken Barnet, as she was reminded at a council meeting recently, by a certain senior officer whose blushes she will save. He remarked archly, as she entered the committee room, that of course she knew her way around, being a former employee. Goodness me, said Mrs Angry, slightly disconcerted: you have a good memory, Mr L oops Mr X ... yes, he said, dreamily - I remember it well ... I happen to have a very long memory, you know: don't be alarmed - I'm not stalking you, I promise ...

Well, thought, Mrs Angry, having a horrible flashback -that is a relief. (Has she told you the story about the man in the dry cleaners with the apron fetish? (Boy, did he choose the wrong stalkee in Mrs Angry. Apron? Mrs Angry?)

And when Mrs Angry was employed by Barnet, she was the union convenor for Libraries & Museums. Hmm. Management would visibly quake in their boots at our regular meetings, and in fact we ran rings around the numpties. Such fun. The union once sent Mrs A on a three day negotiating course. On the role playing session, when playing the part of a hardline, Thatcherite manager, Mrs Angry, experimenting with the method school of acting, reduced the poor man playing the role of a union rep to tears. (She must have an inner Tory in her somewhere: ought to have that seen to, maybe.)

Mrs Angry also sat on a council staff committee, where she first met, sigh, smooth tongued lothario Councillor John Hart - (what's happened to him, btw? Has he been re-educated and rehabilitated, or is he still locked in the potting shed?) This has given her a deep and lasting aversion to the thought of ever being a councillor and sitting through years of committee meetings, And then look what happened: Mrs Angry became Mrs Angry and is being punished for her sins by having to sit through endless tedious streams of committee meetings, on behalf of the citizens of Broken Barnet.

Anyway, while she was convenor, the trouble maker now known as Mrs Angry was one of the organisors of a massive, boroughwide strike, part of a national strike in fact. All libraries and most council services were shut down: oh and yes, it was an effective and a successful strike. We won our case, and it was a very satisfying experience. Why did we win? Because we were well you know, united, and angry, and organised.

I remember standing with colleagues on a picket line one morning, and being harangued by a foul mouthed, elderly Tory lady passing by, who told us we were a bunch of villains for daring to strike: 'I'm eighty five years old, and I've lived through two world wars, and I think you are a f*cking disgrace!' One of the striking librarians looked at her and yelled back: 'Madam: you're eighty five years old, you've lived through two world wars - and you've learnt NOTHING!'

Union activism is enjoying a resurgence, now. Funny to see it all come around again. And, to use Councillor Coleman's phrase: cometh the hour, cometh the man. The going is tough, and the tough have got going too. Barnet Unison secretary John Burgess cares desperately about the future of this borough, and the terrible threat to the security of his members' jobs and wellbeing. He cares desperately, as do all Unison members and all staff members, about the future of the services that this council has always provided to residents. He has worked tirelessly to organise this strike, after fruitless negotiation with Barnet managers.

With the encouragement and support of Unison, council staff about to be outsourced and dumped with private contractors, which will mean loss of any long term employment security, or income, or pension , or protection of conditions of service have voted to take strike action today to protest about their treatment. John Burgess, Unison and all staff members who took part are to be commended for their courage in the face of petty intimidation from Barnet's management team: threatening letters, poster campaigns - and the last resort of a lock out for half a day as a punishment for daring to take industrial action. The truth is that the senior management team and the Tory Cabinet are rattled, and don't know how to deal with the situation - especially when the big outsourcing companies are sniffing about, and watching how things are, in the state of Broken Barnet.

To the many council staff who read this blog: your colleagues deserve your support and respect for taking this action today. They have stood up for what they know is right, and they have shown the cynical merchants peddling the One Barnet twaddle that the staff in this borough are not going to just roll over and die, so as to facilitate the profits of the private sector companies waiting at the gates, and their friends in the citadel of Broken Barnet. If you are not already a member, you need to think about joining so that when your time comes, and your job is on the line, you have a way of fighting back.

The Barnet strike today has been mentioned on BBC news, at the TUC conference, and a film crew is on its way here now. It's a big deal: the beginning of the end of easycouncil.

And now Mrs Angry is off to a lobby at the Town Hall. More later.

*Updated 9.00pm

So anyway ... lobby outside Town Hall: big crowd, banners, speakers ... talking of banners, Barnet Alliance members were there with no 2 banner, looking about nervously for anglican vicars with evil intent in their eyes ... speakers: Unison speakers read out messages of support, including, rather touchingly, an expression of solidarity from an Egyptian union, whose struggle against repression has taught them to feel compassion for the benighted workforce of the Tory regime here in Broken Barnet ... then the speaker was back on the megaphone, thanking the Barnet bloggers for their 'sterling efforts', and fixing Mrs Angry in the eye suggesting ...'and not looking at any one in particular, if she would like to come up here and speak ... ' 'NO ...' mouthed Mrs Angry in dismay, shaking her head ...' She would NOT, thank you all the same ...'

Unfortunately Mrs Angry was unable to stay for the full council meeting tonight, so hopefully one of the other bloggers will fill you in on the details. As she left the Town Hall, she got into conversation with a Barnet social worker who had been at the lobby, whose job was was due to be outsourced in January: already working under extreme difficulty as a result of Tory budget cuts which have real impact on the lives of vulnerable residents, and expected to work alongside 'volunteers' rather than properly trained professional workers: his own future was uncertain: the TUPE arrangements that Barnet like to pretend safeguard the jobs of outsourced workers is simply balls, and no worker facing this prospect has any long term security.

The residents of this borough really are largely unaware of the scale of what One Barnet is going to mean for them, and their families, if allowed to proceed, but we must tell them, because we have to fight this, if we want to preserve any real hope of a decent standard of service for those most dependent on local authority support.

Over the last few weeks one glaring truth has become horribly clear to Mrs Angry: the Tory leadership and councillors of Broken Barnet are largely an irrelevance. This borough is run by the senior management team, and they are determined to push the One Barnet outsourcing programme through, regardless of the consequences to the residents of this borough. If the full scale of privatisation proceeds, as soon as they can they will clear off onto pastures new, and when everything falls apart they will be a million miles away, and they won't give a f*ck. It is we who will be left to deal with the damage caused, and the shambling, idiotic Tory councillors who have allowed this to happen will be history. There is a lesson in there, somewhere, Tory councillors of Broken Barnet, if you have the brains to work it out.

Go on, surprise Mrs Angry, work it out, and do the right thing, for once: you have the power, if you only knew it.

Big Brother in Broken Barnet: CEO Walkley loses the plot

If you ever doubted the dystopian vision of Broken Barnet brought to you in this blog, or in any other Barnet blog, be prepared to set those doubts to one side now.

Today has been an extraordinary day in the history of Barnet council's increasingly bizarre attempts to impose its will on the thousands of employees it is trying to sell off to the highest bidder, along with around one billion pounds worth of service contracts.

As you may know, the senior management team of Broken Barnet has, over recent years, persuaded the Tory administration to commit to a large scale outsourcing of council services in the guise of the easycouncil/futureshape and now One Barnet programme. Whatever you call this pile of shite, it is still a pile of shite: a hastily conceived, ill designed project with no viable business plan, and based on a fundamentally flawed, unworkable concept, one which has still to provide any savings and is in fact costing millions of pounds to create.

Barnet's employees are expected to go along with this idiotic plan, meekly, like lambs to the slaughter, facing the loss of their jobs, or at best, re-employment on worse terms and conditions with none of the legal protections they deserve and have rightly received - as council workers. The fact that the services they will provide, if they are lucky enough to retain a post, will deteriorate under the pressure of market forces, will only serve to make their jobs more precarious, and inevitably many services will have to be returned in house to the local authority, in a predictable sequence of events already witnessed where massive outsourcing has been applied.

Here in Barnet council employees are feeling more and more inclined to stand up to the self interested management team which is trying to force through the One Barnet programme, despite all doubts raised about the practicality of the programme, emphasised by the toxic findings of the MetPro audit report, and everything it told us about the leadership and management of this authority.

On September 13th, workers in one section of the council have decided to take a half day of industrial action: their union Unison have called this 'Independence Day': the motive behind this action is explained in a press release issued yesterday:

6 September 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

On Tuesday 13 September up to 400 UNISON members working across the following services will be taking strike action

Trading Standards & Licensing, Land Charges, Planning & Development, Building Control & Structures, Environmental Health, Highways Strategy, Highways Network Management, Highways Traffic & Development, Highways Transport & Regeneration, Strategic Planning & Regeneration, Cemeteries & Crematoria; Parking Services, Revs & Bens,

The Trades Dispute concerns the identity of the employer. Barnet Council is promoting the One Barnet programme which is just a ‘remix version’ of the ‘contracting out’ ideology from the 1980’s. There are already several contracts out for consultation with the private sector. The value of the contracts (fast approaching almost £2 billion) has already attracted the big Private sector FAT CATS.

Up to 70% of the council workforce could be transferred to the Private sector in little more than 16 months time.

Dave Prentis general secretary message to Barnet UNISON.

“To the 400 UNISON members taking strike action: UNISON members across the country are standing shoulder to shoulder with you as you challenge this council – a council that refuses to listen to its workforce, a council that refuses to listen to logic or sense, a council now embarking on a reckless gamble”

“Last week our union commissioned a report on the impact of outsourcing on the council’s pension scheme. The report gave a damning assessment of the serious financial risks to the pension scheme as a direct result of One Barnet programme.

Heather Wakefield UNISON's head of local government,

'The widescale privatisation at the heart of One Barnet should be placed under the severest scrutiny by Government, Barnet's scrutiny committee and the people of Barnet themselves. The council's failure to ensure procurement procedures and the obvious detrimental impact on the Local Government Pension Scheme of privatisation of local services are just two good reasons for challenging the path that Barnet has chosen. The third is the waste of public money involved in the procurement process through payments to consultants, procurement costs and payments to shareholders - money which should be invested in local people and local services.'

John Burgess Barnet UNISON Branch Secretary said

“The Council need to recognise that ‘political dogma’ also known as One Barnet programme cannot be allowed to continue to expose residents, services and staff to a high risk strategy and expect them to pick up the bill.

What we mean by ‘independence’

A recent article “Greensquare Field – Planning to Outsource Planning posted on the local Barnet Eye Blog encapsulates conflict of interest’s issues:

“At the moment Barnet Council is in the middle of tendering to outsource a number of services, one of which is the planning service. In the running are a number of companies: Capita Symonds, Atkins, Jacobs and E C Harrison. The planning consultants who represent Higgins Homes plc, and have done through 2 planning applications, 2 planning appeals, a village green application and the draft LDF, work for Capita Symonds. If Capita win the tender, they will decide any future planning applications.”

As council services for Barnet as a place to live and work, our decisions must be 100% independent and free from any ‘conflict of interest’.

Barnet Alliance have recently published a newspaper their front page spells out the dangers of the One Barnet here

Barnet UNISON is asking for the One Barnet programme to be put on hold.

This morning, Mrs Angry received a statement from Unison which referred to:

'a letter written by the Chief Executive which has been distributed by hand to all staff who have been currently legally balloted for industrial action. In the letter he states the “council are presenting an injunction application to the high court” this is a serious matter and UNISON will be responding in due course.'

By lunchtime today it was reported that, in an extraordinary move, giant billboard posters with some of the contents of this letter by the Chief Executive, Nick Walkley, had been installed, in Big Brother fashion, all around the council offices at North London Business Park.

Just to make the situation even madder, a second version of the letter was sent to employees this afternoon, in which the threat of High Court action is withdrawn.

How very interesting: why is this, do you suppose?

Clearly there is a concerted effort by the senior management of Broken Barnet to 'persuade' employees that all their fears about the future of their jobs is misplaced, in a campaign which is both misleading and intimidatory. As the Chief Executive's letter clearly states, terms and conditions for any staff members transferred to external employers will be protected for only one year: experience in similar situations has proved that after this period, employees are at the mercy of their new masters and face the real prospect of lower pay, longer hours, loss of leave entitlement and more. And they know that the services they will be offering the residents of Barnet will inevitably be affected by a sharp deterioration in standards.

Council staff are right to be concerned at the effects of externalising services: while the overpaid senior officers of this council, and their friends in the fat cat companies, have everything to gain from throwing business into the hands of the private sector, ordinary employees - and the residents of Barnet - have everything to lose.

Unity is Strength

For some peculiar reason, more often than not, whenever I go away from home, there is some sort of terrible event, usually on an international scale: an invasion, a war, sometimes the death of some iconic figure. Perhaps, far worse than merely being a dangerous anarchist whose movements must be monitored and filmed by our council's secret police force, I am also some sort of angel of destruction, and if I leave London, something is dislodged in the order of the universe, and chaos inevitably ensues. Or something. Curse of Mrs Angry, see?

The list is endless, I'm afraid. The Falklands: my fault. Gulf war: my fault. Worst of all: 9/11 - my fault. I killed Elvis, and Mao Tse Tung. As a schoolgirl, I was responsible for the invasion of Cyprus, and I can even (just about) remember a particularly gloomy birthday when I was a child, sitting on a beach in France, under an iron black stormy sky, surrounded by thousands of dead jellyfish, while my father told us about the invasion of Czechoslovakia. (This was in the bad old days, before it was considered necessary to enjoy yourself too much, and long before parents started taking their children on holiday to Eurodisney, or Centerparcs).

So it was with some trepidation, as usual, that I went up to the north east last week, and waited to see if the inevitable happened. And inevitably, it did, and of course, I sat and watched David Cameron tell us all about the necessity of a military action in Libya, followed by all the violence on top of violence which has consequently been unleashed.

The events of 9/11 will be forever connected, in my memory, with another, particularly dark visit back to the North East, where my mother's family were from, because on that day she and I were travelling up to Durham for her sister's funeral. When we arrived, there already was the sort of highly charged atmosphere you only get at such gatherings: the reunion of estranged relatives, the guilt, the sense of loss, the unspoken and unspeakable feelings, but all of this was intensely magnified by the depth of horror we all felt at the sequence of events unfolding in front of us on the antiquated tv, in what was once the rarely used front parlour of my grandparents' old house. Parlours in those days were to be kept for best, or more commonly, for funerals and wakes: a fitting venue then, for another wake, and to witness second hand what my father, in his confusion, thought was the beginning of the end of the world.

The next day, at the funeral, we stood silently, still stunned by the previous day’s events, in the town cemetery, appropriately enough at the foot of the discreetly contoured and grassed over slag heap that once belonged to one of the mines where my grandfather used to work. There was another ominously dark sky above, and a gale howling around us, in a suitably apocalyptic manner. And as the priest stumbled his way through the prayers it seemed that we were all saying goodbye to quite a lot more than the troubled life of my poor aunt.

It was impossible not to think about that day, standing in the same graveyard last week, thinking about, and missing, all the other members of my family who have gone now, and reflecting on all the changes that have happened since they died. The former slagheap is no longer an open space, but has been built on. Unless you know where to look, in fact, you would be hard pressed to find any trace of the mining industry on which the town, and indeed the whole of County Durham, once depended. The slum terraces where my grandmother was born, near Gateshead, have, like many others, been airbrushed out of the landscape: now the Angel of the North stands there, holding out her wings in a wide embrace, an industrial sculpture in an area where heavy industry no longer exists.

Where once there were pitheads, and slag heaps, and the oddly sweet smell of soot, and a shamelessly scarred landscape, there are green spaces and clean air, and boring, neat little housing estates - and even, in some lucky areas, a few small scale enterprises, trading estates and modest size factories. These commercial developments are mostly in the more fortunate parts of the county, however, where, in many areas, the smaller coal seams began to run out after the war, and the local authorities did all they could to encourage businesses to invest in their districts and provide alternative forms of employment for families who had worked exclusively in mining for generations.

Towards the eastern coastal side, the mines were deeper, and larger, and even extended miles under the sea. After Margaret Thatcher's war of attrition on the mining unions, it was these areas which saw their communities destroyed almost overnight by the retaliatory, merciless programme of pit closures. No time to prepare, to bring alternative employment and investment: the Tory government was interested only in market forces, and laissez faire economics - the survival of the fittest, and to hell with the rest.

You might have seen the film Billy Elliot: that was filmed in Easington, a town which has never recovered from the pit closures. It was created for mining, and mining was its life blood; when that was taken away, the town died. It has been described as the unhealthiest town in England and listed as fourth in the national index of of multiple deprivation: economic and social deprivation, blighted by the effects of unemployment: a generation of working men left dependent on benefits: a second generation without work, inclined to drug and alcohol abuse, the sort of social exclusion and welfare dependency the current Tory government is so quick to condemn without wondering who put them in that position in the first place.

Mr Ian Duncan Smith, another over privileged Tory minister who has probably never used public transport in his life, has stated that the unemployed in this sort of situation should simply get on a bus and travel miles in search of the plentiful work he thinks exists elsewhere. Anyone who has not been in this sort of area, and experienced how poor public transport is, and how isolating the effects are, how difficult it is for someone on a low budget to become economically adaptable, and find employment at long distance should, in my opinion, learn to keep his honourable mouth shut.

If he were to walk around some of the villages in this area, where many of my mother’s uncles and cousins once worked, he might begin to understand what a terrible thing it is to sacrifice the life of a community to an ideological show of strength. Deserted streets, boarded up shops, the few remaining businesses and services shuttered at night against vandalism and crime. It reminds you of a place under siege, like Northern Ireland, except that here the enemy is not republican or loyalist terrorism, but rather economic terrorism: a war against the poor.

Ironically, since the last mine closed five or six years ago, and almost all traces of the pits have disappeared, there has been a resurgence of interest in Durham mining history: there are dozens of books on the subject, and the Big Meeting, the annual Gala, has been reborn - with record attendance. Nostalgia is more potent than you might expect, and a commodity more commercial than the black stuff itself. You might think nostalgia for such times, and a way of life that was so dangerous, and so hard, is sentimental, and misplaced. If you want to see a miner talking pitmatic, anyway, or a canny housewife pretending to bake bread for her pretend husband and sons working down a non existent mine, you go to the Beamish open air museum, and see actors performing such roles in houses rebuilt, brick by brick, after being removed from the back streets of places like Hetton le Hole, just along from Easington. (The faux miner's wife's real partner probably works in a call centre, if he is lucky).

Why is there such interest in the grimy, safely distant past, and a way of life that has gone forever? Because, without sounding too trite, it is true to say that along with the hard times there really was a real sense of community, and mutual support. Many of the mining lodge banners have 'Unity is Strength' as their motto: and rightly so. Every pay increase and improved working condition that the miners ever gained was through solidarity with each other and the unions, and the support which the individual communities gave each other throughout the history of the mining era was intense, and unbreakable. Even after the defeat of the '84 strike, miners in Durham marched back to work with heads held high, and often with the colliery bands playing. Playing a requiem, as it turned out.

Social mobility is an interesting issue, isn't it? I was thinking a lot about this last week, about how people are trapped by economic circumstances by the constraints of class and lack of equal opportunity. My grandfather, handsome, vain, confrontational, a man of few words, a heavy drinker, an archytypal character straight out of D H Lawrence, was the sixth generation in his family to work as a miner. Ironically, he was the one that was expected to escape this fate, and, due to extraordinary family circumstances that would read like a particularly awful Catherine Cookson story if I bored you with it, he was sent by his foster family to a private school in Durham city, receiving an education few working class boys of his time could ever have hoped to have. After his time in the trenches, the return to 'no jobs for heroes' and a pregnant wife sent him to join his Irish brothers in law down the pit, where he stayed for forty years. I think that there he probably found his knowledge of Latin and Greek was of little benefit. In the crowd at one miners' Gala, in fact, he bumped into an old teacher, who asked him what he was doing, and was stunned to hear that he was now a miner, blurting out that he thought he would be a headmaster by now.

The humiliation of this encounter stayed with him forever. It wasn’t his fault: the limits of his life were defined by poverty, and the struggle for survival, and he could not escape. Worse still, he lost two children due to the ravages of ill health directly caused by the appalling living conditions they lived in, in slum housing and a lack of access to affordable healthcare. The fact that his standard of living eventually improved, over the years, was entirely due to the improvement in wages and working conditions gained by union campaigning and the unity of the miners, throughout the decades in which he worked. And then some of his children were able to escape the deprivation and constraints of his life thanks to new opportunities of a new society: education, healthcare, the welfare state.

Many people today would probably think that although there are areas of social deprivation, poverty, as it used to be measured, and as my family experienced it, no longer exists. This is not true, or not exactly. Poverty is relative, and mutable. It means being at the lowest economic and social level, an untoucheable caste, excluded from the mainstream, stuck in a trap. This is not something which has magically disappeared, and it is an indictment of our political system that it still imprisons so many people: and now looks set to trap even more.

The effects of Margaret Thatcher's governing years were far reaching, of course, and in many ways are still being felt, but the changes being wrought on our society by posh boy and his public school chums are surely going to be far, far worse. Thatcher, coming from a less than privileged background at least had some experience, stifled though it was, of the economic realities of the disadvantaged classes. Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and their coalition colleagues understand nothing about what it is to be so distanced from the opportunities they take for granted.

The policies of the present government are striking at the roots of everything we have taken for granted for several generations now: access to free education, healthcare, welfare support. Families at the bottom of the social scale will be left isolated in ghettoes of increasing deprivation, with the failing schools, the worst healthcare, and savagely reduced benefit support. Many young people from such backgrounds who might have aspired to something better and work towards a more prosperous future will be held back by the prospect of the loss of EMA and, thanks to the treachery of the LibDems, by the burden of a grossly unfair rise in tuition fees. Our public schoolboy government does not understand and if they did, they wouldn't give a shit anyway. They have never had to rely on these support systems, and simply don't see them as the rest of us do: something precious, hard won, and part of our heritage.

If these escape routes are taken away, we are, once again, going to see generations trapped in new forms of poverty, in new variations of a class limitation that we might have thought had been thrown away forever.

The theoretical opportunities that this government likes to pretend exist for people to get out of a life of deprivation are as fake or useless as the industrial heritage artefacts and installations in an open air museum.

While the tourists go down a toy mine at Beamish, of course, they probably don't realise the grim irony of there being still hundreds of years of supplies lying untouched in the Durham coalfield. We still use enormous amounts of coal imported from abroad to make energy, and we have become a hostage to the fortunes of the oil rich nations of the world. Which brings us neatly back to Libya, and Iraq, and all the wars, death and destruction that have ensued in the struggle to protect our oil interests: maybe not entirely the fault of Mrs Angry, after all.

The miners ultimately lost their battle to save their industry, but there are still lessons in the long history of their struggle to survive and prosper which we ought to remember and reconsider, now that we are faced with another Tory government set on an agenda of radical social engineering as ideologically fanatical as anything that happened in the 80s. And how gratifying it is to see people being unified again in opposition, as they were yesterday on the streets of London, unified both locally and nationally, to what is happening here and now, in the country as a whole, and here in our borough, and on such a catastrophic scale. The truth is that if we don't want to see the whole country turned into an enormous open air museum, with acting roles only for the privileged few, we have to do something now to preserve what is left of our living heritage, before it is too late.