posted on 28 Feb 2019

All Together Now? by Mike Carter

On the 1st May 1981, 500 unemployed people set out to walk from Liverpool to London to highlight the devastation that Thatcherite monetarist policies were wreaking in Britain’s industrial towns and cities. This was the People’s March for Jobs. It echoed the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 which saw 200 of the poorest and most impoverished workers of the north-east march from Jarrow to London.

Mike Carter’s All Together Now? is no simple retracing of the 1981 marchers’ footsteps, although on the surface he does of course do this. It swiftly becomes apparent, however, that his intention is far greater than that, and that this is really four books in one. It is a retracing of the 1981 march; it is a ‘state of the nation’ book – an exposé, a taking of the nation’s pulse, an examination of what we have become after a decade’s austerity and forty years of unfettered neoliberal capitalism; it is a personal memoir, a consideration of Carter’s own roots and the decisions that have seen him – inevitably, but not without guilt and sometimes even shame – leave his working class origins behind; and it is the story of his estranged father, Pete Carter, one of the architects of the 1981 march, a communist, a trade union organiser, a man who saw himself as giving his life to working class struggles, and who died from cancer in 2011, impoverished, alcoholic, and estranged from a family he had done much to hurt and too little to enable reconciliation with.

It should also be said that it is a book with local interest too. Mike Carter was born and brought up in various parts of the Black Country and inner city Birmingham. His father, born in Tipton, was one of six children born to alcoholic parents and was illiterate when he left school at fifteen. He lived for a time on a narrow boat moored on a Smethwick canal. He was a prominent figure in Birmingham and Midlands political and trade union circles, serving as an organiser for the Young Communist League in the late-60s, and subsequently as an industrial organiser for the construction workers’ union, UCATT. Some thought him one of the most effective working class orators and organisers in generations. He campaigned successfully against the demolition of Birmingham’s grand Victorian Head Post Office, in Victoria Square, and led a hugely successful campaign against casual labouring and working ‘on the lump’ in the building trades, at one point leading an occupation of offices in the Rotunda building in central Birmingham.

At each leg of his journey, Mike Carter talks about what he sees, the people he meets and what they discuss. In lonely rooms in grotty pubs and cheap B&Bs he ponders the poisoned relationship he had with the father whom he idolised. And he considers the particular problems or symptoms – homelessness, mental ill health and drug addiction, food banks, the gambling explosion, migration, Brexit, rising racism, poverty, privatisation, buy-to-let landlordism, globalisation, student loans and the marketisation of education, pay day lenders, bookies and pawn shops – that characterise many of the places he passes through.

All Together Now? is not an uplifting book. Yes, Mike Carter completes his lonely march but he sees relatively little on the journey that offers hope: the pride and class conscious optimism of the People’s March and the hundreds of thousands who rallied to greet the marchers as they entered London are just a distant memory. And the country he passes through is a bitterly divided one where inequality is reaching increasingly obscene levels. Perhaps the most that can be said is that he does appear to reach some kind of accommodation with his memories of his dead father.

But as regards himself, he is unforgiving. “On some level,” he writes, “I had always tacitly known that there would be winners and losers in post-industrial Britain, and I knew that the price for my upward social mobility was being paid in places like Stoke-on-Trent, had secretly accepted it as a price worth paying for the benefits that capitalism had delivered to me. I was part of the problem. This was no pilgrimage. It was beginning to feel more like a penance.” Those of us who have not challenged the immiseration of post-industrial Britain, he says later, cannot be “absolved of blame”.

If you dislike political books, or books that come from a left wing perspective, then you will not enjoy this. But if you do read it, I think you’ll find your expectations confounded, because it is a much more sophisticated and accomplished book than any short description of its raw subject matter can convey. It is without doubt directly in the lineage of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and its lucid, bitter impassioned prose and its often cutting insights and observations strike me as distinctly Orwellian.

“I might have been thirty-five years late, but finally I’d got there,” he writes of the day he walks into Trafalgar Square, just as the People’s March had – except that he is alone. He is met by a friend who says: “I just wanted to come and say well done. I knew your dad. He’d have been proud of you.” Now, I’m not one for redemptive endings – it's a devalued currency – and Carter doesn’t commit himself one way or the other, but I closed the book hoping that he believed his friend. This has the makings of a Brexit Britain classic and will be read for years.

 

Alun Severn

February 2019