In Europe

‘England calls on all British consumers to do their duty: don't buy French meat.’
    Upon arrival at Plymouth, a storm is brewing. The wind whistles at the windows of the Winston boarding house, and in the communal living room a robust English girl is warming her backside before the glowing electric coal-effect fire. The BBC reports that several islands are experiencing electrical blackouts.
    The next morning the wind is still blowing hard. My van shudders in the gusts, leaves chase across the fields. Completely illegible signs beginappearing along the road, as though a cat has been walking across a typewriter. The rain washes across the asphalt. It is Saturday afternoon and the hours pass slowly, village after village, cement-grey, deserted streets, satellite dishes. All the hotels are fully booked; in one of them, a wedding reception is being held, the women dressed in bright silk, the bridesmaids draped across the steps like white napkins, exhausted even before the big dinner begins.
    In the village of Llangynog I wash ashore at the Wern Inn. I collapse into a deep sleep, but a few hours later I am wide awake again. Blasting from the pub downstairs are the strains of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Mrs Robinson’, followed by ‘Oh, Boy’, and everyone's singing along. I get dressed. Downstairs, in the bar, the whole village is rinsing away defeat: Wales has lost to England at rugby. The regulars are singing karaoke; ‘Oh here's to you, Mrs Robinson …’
    This is South Wales, the backyard of England, the site of desperate strikes in the 1980s. In March 1984, almost 200,000 British miners, led by Arthur Scargill, walked out in protest against the government's plans to reorganise the state mines and ‘destroy the mining communities’. It was a last-ditch attempt to breathe new life into old-fashioned workers’ solidarity. Scargill succeeded through intimidation and social pressure in keeping his miners in line, but his National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) did not dare to have things brought to a vote. The Conservative government of the time stressed that fact again and again. As the mining families’ financial situation became more acute, the panic and violence increased, effectively putting an end to the public's sympathy for the strikers. And when it was revealed that the NUM had accepted money from the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, it was all over. By February 1985 half the miners were back at work, and a month later the strike ended. It was a trauma: for a year, tens of thousands of miners’ families had lived in dire poverty to save a world that was long-since obsolete.
    I notice soon enough that my pub is filled with those same miners and their wives, couples who went through the whole thing. The men stopped working in the mines long ago, they have become older and stouter, but most of them still live close to their mine. Some of them have started little farming businesses, others are still unemployed. I strike up a conversation with Thomas Frigger, a big man in a bright red jacket.After the mines closed he went to work on a drilling platform, nine months on, three months off. ‘The only thing I knew was mining, and oil is the closest thing to that. What else can you do?’ I ask whether his life has improved in the long run? He has to think about that. ‘I earn the same as I used to, but now it's tax free, so that makes a good difference. But nine months a year away from home is not something you do for fun.’ An old comrade comes over to bid Thomas farewell: he works on a platform too. ‘See you in six months, you old bastard!’ Then the music blasts out again, new lyrics appear on the screen, and everyone sings along. The men get drunk, one of them jumps up onto a table and starts stripping, the women screech, the men hang on each other's shoulders. ‘Oh, Boy! Oh, Boy!’
    And then there is the other side of the story. In the mid-1980s, the only thing these same men and women talked about was politics and the workers’ struggle. Their great foe was the Iron Lady, the nickname given to the cocksure prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Born in 1925, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the provincial town of Grantham, Thatcher brilliantly succeeded in combining classic English conservatism with the ideology of the New Right, and an unshakeable faith in the power of market mechanisms. She used the past failures of her Labour opponents to great advantage – ‘Labour Isn't Working’ was