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| The future seems a bit grim, but you've got to buckle down. You've got to work and see what can come of it. The darkest hour is before the light. Perhaps that light will come when I'm a bit older. |
In the late summer of 1981, when 600,000 teenagers were on the dole, two young men from Widnes gassed themselves with a pipe connected to a car's exhaust. Their joint suicide note began: 'What have we left to live for, now there is no work for anyone?' The Coroner called it 'a clear result of the economic situation in the country'. Mrs Betty Rathbone, the mother of one of the dead boys, was interviewed for Radio Merseyside. She said:
"I noticed a change in my son, Graham, during the last three months. He became very withdrawn and he used to sit in the kitchen with his head in his arms, you know? And I used to ask him, I used to say 'What's wrong, Graham? Why aren't you going out?' He said 'Well there's nowhere to go, Mum. There's no jobs, no money, there's nothing to do. You just walk up and down the street. It's the same every day.' I mean, to me, Graham and Sean... their lives were just beginning at nineteen years of age. I'll always think of Graham as a flower just beginning to bloom, and it was just snapped off." |
In October 1981, The Times warned:
"The nub of the problem is that there are almost no jobs at all for the academically unqualified and those best-suited for manual work. The lesson seems to be that if Britain doesn't do something drastic about this very soon, in months rather than years, it will be saddled with an unemployed and unemployable lumpen-proletariat, capable only of causing social problems." |
| Young people reacted in their different ways to the dwindling of their prospects: some were irrationally optimistic: some refused to entertain the minimum of hope that would allow them even to try. When, in the autumn of 1983, a punk apprentice at Rolls Royce, Bristol, opted to be sacked rather than cut off his superglued hair-spikes ('a danger to workmates') his moral stand, which in many previous generations would have seemed unremarkable, obsessed the media for weeks. Interviewed by David 'Kid' Jensen ('How do you actually get super-glue in your hair?' 'Very carefully'), the punk in question, Peter Mortiboy, insisted that: There's a lot more to it than a hair-style, and these things - to me anyway and to a lot of us - are more important than money.' |
| I do not want a job. Well, I want to work for myself, that's the sort of job. I don't want to work for anyone else and have some old man telling me what to do. I don't want that. I want to tell other people what to do. |
| If you're intelligent, I think you're much more likely to get a good job. But if you're not and you're in an underprivileged background like Moss Side, I mean it's just awful. The place they live is enough to drive anyone up the wall. I'm surprised they don't all commit suicide. I would. |
| I'd give an arm and a leg for a good job, you know. 'Cos my Mam's working at this chippy and I don't like her working. She can't stand the woman there and she says to me 'If you get a decent job, I'll tell her to shove the job up her arse.' But it's money coming in the house, innit? |
| Yeah, there is a problem, but it really can't be helped I don't suppose, at the moment. |
| I mean, I can't even find a Saturday job. I've looked everywhere. Then I got desperate and went to Woolworths and British Home Stores and they're looking for qualifications! |
| There's nothing really to get depressed about. I know I say 'Oh, I get depressed', but it's not really depression. It's just being totally pissed off. |
| The Government adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to the problem. The carrot was a programme of subsidised on-the-job training for school-leavers, known at first as the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOPS) and from 1983 as the Youth Training Scheme (YTS). It offered slightly more money than they would have received on the dole to youngsters who spent a period of months learning 'core skills' (though some trainees wondered what was so skilful about sweeping up and stacking shelves). Fewer places were taken up than were available, and the Government threatened to withdraw unemployment benefit from those who had turned down the offer of a place. They opted instead, however, for abolishing the minimum wage for people under twenty-one, with the aim of allowing them to 'price themselves into work'. |
| In April 1984, Professor Frank Coffield addressed a conference in Cardiff, the theme of which was 'Stress on Adolescents'. He made the point that most eighteen-year-olds were not politically aware, and therefore blamed themselves rather than the economic situation for their failure to find work. They've no idea of the cause of unemployment', he said. 'It doesn't connect with their lives. They end up thinking they should have worked for five O Levels if they have three, or nine if they have seven.' |
| The difference between dropping out and being dropped is the difference between LSD and cannabis on the one hand and glue and heroin on the other. The problem drugs of the eighties were not the drugs that enhance perception, they were the drugs of oblivion. |
The short-term effects of inhaling solvent fumes are dizziness, euphoria and hallucinations. The longer-term effects are addiction, lung damage, heart damage, liver damage, brain damage and boils. The media panic about glue-sniffing peaked during the winter of 1983-4. Deaths attributed to solvent abuse (choking on vomit, suffocation, accidents while intoxicated and burns from ignited vapours) had risen from thirteen in 1980 to sixty-one in 1982. One report estimated that 10% of teenagers were regular glue-sniffers and that one in three children under fourteen had experimented with it. A Cumbrian girl, interviewed on the radio, said in chilling tones of slurred belligerence:
- When you're in the glue you're just in perfect peace, you know.
- What's wrong with normal life?
- Well, because you've got people getting on your nerves and that, and you've got all sorts of problems and things like that.
- And you think glue can get you out of it?
- Well, you're getting out of it for the time you're sniffing it.
- What do your parents think?
- If I knew my parents I'd tell you.
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| By the end of 1984, the problem appeared to be diminishing due to greater adult vigilance, including that of shopkeepers who now refused to sell glue to young teenagers. |
| The more intractable problem was the growing abuse of heroin by teenagers in certain parts of Britain, chiefly council estates with high levels of unemployment. In 1984 it became clear that the number of registered addicts, which had increased from 2,441 to 5,864 in two years, was only a tiny proportion of the true total of regular heroin users which was now estimated at 50,000. These were not, however, the traditional mainlining junkies. Rather than tinker with the frightening paraphernalia of droppers, syringes and rubber tubes, they preferred to 'chase the dragon'. |
| This is a bag of smack. It cost me three pounds. To someone who doesn't know what it is, it just looks like a brown powder wrapped in a piece of paper. What I do is I just tip a certain amount of the smack onto a piece of silver paper, and then hold a match underneath the silver paper so that the smack burns, and I suck up the fumes through a tube. |
| Taken in this less dramatic way, and available at a price which put it in the same bracket as glue and alcohol, heroin was 'normalised'. The Government responded to public concern with tougher sentences for 'pushers' and a campaign of anti-heroin advertising on posters and television. In Liverpool and elsewhere, those who reckoned the police were ineffective in the matter formed vigilante squads and roughed up suspected heroin dealers. The media hysteria eventually subsided, leaving the problem, as far as anyone could tell, unchanged. |
| I wouldn't take drugs. At least, I say I wouldn't. I don't think I would. Mind you, I am only fifteen, so there's plenty of time... |
| The most widely-abused drug among teenagers, as among the population at large, continued to be alcohol. Little was said about this, and less done. |
| With unemployment and drugs at numbers one and two in the teenage problems Top Ten, the sexual behaviour of young people did not give rise to quite so much heavy breathing on the part of the media as had that of their predecessors. The one major battleground was the question of whether doctors should be allowed to supply contraceptive pills to girls under sixteen without their parents' knowledge or approval; a survey in 1984 showed that a third of youngsters had their first experience of sexual intercourse below that age. Caroline Woodruff, General Secretary of the Brook Advisory Centres, was quoted in the News of the World as saying 'Young people are pushed into sexual activity by the pressure of the pop music industry, advertising for cosmetics and the prevailing "Everybody does it" attitude.' The issue was fought through the courts, the two sides taking it in turn to claim victory, but in the end it was left up to the doctor in question to make the decision, which was as it had been to begin with. |
| As far as the over-sixteens were concerned, the heat seemed to have gone out of the issue of sexual permissiveness, partly because more of them now felt that mere promiscuity is undesirable, and partly because parents were now less insistent on strict chastity in their daughters. Perhaps surprisingly, permissive attitudes among teenage girls seemed to increase as one moved up the social scale. A survey of fifth-form girls in 1985 showed that a third of those at comprehensive schools were opposed to sex before marriage; at grammar schools the figure was 17% and at independent schools a mere 8%. (This may be because sex is most alluring when least available.) |
Pop stars, who in their public pronouncements tend to say what they think teenagers want to hear but say it more loudly and crudely than teenagers would care to express it for themselves, are a useful barometer of the public mood. In the mid-eighties, to judge by this measure, we were back to the attitudes of such responsible fifties spokesmen for their generation as Cliff Richard and Adam Faith. In July 1985, the Mail on Sunday said:
"Nowadays, the pop world is pervaded with puritanism... Pop stars are the new Moral Majority. If they're not campaigning for the Labour Party, they're raising money for Africa or the unemployed. Your average eighties pop star makes your average bank clerk look raffish and irresponsible." |
| It quoted Paul Weller of Style Council as saying 'This year I've picked three issues - new trade union rights, CND and International Youth Year.' |
The teenagers' response to all this varied from massive approval for the efforts of Bob Geldof and his friends to raise money for starving Africa, to sullen indifference when they were addressed in headmistressy tones by Toyah Wilcox on the Gloria Hunniford show:
"I think physical fitness is the greatest form of self-respect you can have, and I think it also keeps your mind in tune, and I always try to preach to young people not to become a slob, and it doesn't take money to run round the block every day, it takes mental discipline... And nothing is stopping you from learning, and I think the one reason we're on this planet is to learn." |
| The theme of self-respect for the unemployed through the pursuit of physical fitness (Joy through Strength, to invert an earlier statement of a similar idea) was heavily promoted for a while. It represented an extension down the social scale of the middle-class self-concern which Tom Wolfe had labelled 'the Me generation'. As the bulge-babies struggled - through squash, jogging, aerobics and the purchase of tracksuits - to become less so, there were many latter-day Marie Antoinettes whose message to the poor was 'let them eat muesli'. |
| In New York, the black culture of 'Hip-hop' - 'rapping' disc-jockeys and break-dancing - was quite consciously promoted as an alternative to gang violence and drugs. When break-dancing spread to Britain, the media made a great fuss of it; kids on the dole were encouraged to waggle their arms about and execute back-flips, rather as prisoners serving life sentences are invited to take up weight-lifting. Nobody ever actually said that while these sinuous youths were spinning on their heads on pieces of lino in shopping arcades they were not breaking into other people's houses, but the craze was smiled upon nonetheless. |
| Pop celebrities of previous generations now remade themselves in the image of the eighties. Mick Jagger was a jogger and Pete Townshend a born-again anti-heroin campaigner. The heavy metal bands threw their considerable weight behind the 'Band Aid' and 'Live Aid' famine-relief campaign, producing an all-star single under the collective name 'Hearing Aid'. |
| And whereas the end undoubtedly justified the means, nobody seemed to think it patronising that the young actors who starred in the children's soap-opera 'Grange Hill' should release a record exhorting teenagers to 'Say No' to drugs. The right of television stars to sermonise to their less privileged contemporaries seems to have become part of Britain's unwritten constitution. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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