Thank you, Maggie Thatcher
remembering seaniar, capel celyn, the flats.
On the phone to Phoebe and I am writing down some of the things she says, because I miss her; the cleverness and her patience. As perpetual outsiders querying our rights to be in the places we are, our thoughts – shared via whatsapp calls and voice memos, and sometimes BeReal comments – have naturally trended toward gentrification, displacement and the right to belong.
Under what pretences and with what prerogatives are communities removed and replaced? How are those communities economically sequestered and manipulated to deliver for the wider economy and society? There are many methods and motivations. I’m thinking about the saga of the Flemington flats back home, and the bulwark of family history and shared memories that impedes me from objectively criticising the public-service degradation of Thatcher’s Housing Act. Bear with me.
West Wales, Cymru. In the company of family and my three-year-old cousin Lexi, who I could write a whole other essay about.
This land looks west to the Republic of Ireland over the horizon. Pastoral hills and waist-high stone drywalls. No rain, but each day I am here it sheds a couple of degrees. Through the year’s first sun and some tardy clouds, we see dairies, distilleries and many farms. When she drives me home from the bus stop, Aunty V slows her already cautious driving to a snail’s pace as we drive through the hedgerows she planted on a council job, many years ago.
Red dragons on the green and white: the Welsh flag. There’re black flags with a yellow cross that appear even more frequently around the villages – this pocket is Welsh-nationalist heartland. Someone makes a passing comment about a provocative flyer pasted up in the street in recent months. There were illustrations of a rifle and some iteration of ‘Brits Out’. The comment is not made lightly, but in a low voice strung with minor tension.
We make a driftwood fire on the hamlet beach late afternoon Monday; a wee burn down, Aunty V calls it. After, we drive into the tiny seaside village of Llangrannog (ll is welsh pronounced like chhhech, some movement of the throat and the tongue I was not moulded for) for a pint at the small, low-ceilinged pub with a perfect window to the sea. Near the pub, a white-painted brick wall webbed by green sea-spray lichen hosts a piece of stark political art – it must be two metres high and four wide. To call it graffiti would be a mistake; the font is so oblique it could be one of my own childhood attempts at writing block letters, one where I realise I have started the letters too big for the page and have to crimp them down on the fly. These are big white letters on a deep bloody Welsh red.
‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ the mural declares. The only way the message could be missed is if you don’t speak Welsh (guilty). So Cousin Connie explains: Cofiwch Dryweryn translates to ‘Remember Tryweryn’.
In the 1950s, Liverpool City Council faced a resource deficit that limited their ability to service and their growing population (inclusive of four little music-men who’d enjoy some later success, so maybe all I am about to explain is actually righteous). Believing Liverpool was running short on water and in an effort to circumvent planning processes that would have required engagement with Welsh authorities, a private members’ bill was introduced into UK parliament to enable the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley in Wales to make a new reservoir supplying Liverpool. The valley was home to an entire village: Capel Celyn, one of the last exclusively welsh-speaking villages in Wales. It had a post office, a chapel, a cemetery and 67 welsh-speaking residents. Despite 8 years of local opposition, the valley was flooded in 1965 to create Llyn Celyn. Everything, including twelve houses and farms, disappeared under the water that would one day feed and bath the English over the border. 48 out of the 67 people who were living in the valley lost their homes. The brute force of Liverpool’s greed smudged away Cepel Celyn in service of a bigger idea, a bigger ideal and a bigger city.
There are many ways to cut a people off, often through the co-option of crisis. There’re many ways to remember them.
The first appearance of the Cofiwch Dryweryn slogan was in 1963, on a ruined cottage. It was created in direct response to the flooding by local scholar and author Meic Stephens, who later claimed the two words as his ‘most famous statement, [his] best-known poem, [his] most eloquent speech, and [his] most influential political act.’ Now, when you google news articles about Cofiwch Dryweryn, breathless BBC headlines trace its resonance and stilted reappearance across continents after the original piece was vandalised with a swastika in 2019: a welsh museum in Nebraska painted it on their wall; a banner was hung on the London marathon course. There is even a short film being crowdfunded as we speak, which has raised £355 so far.
Remembering Tryweryn means recalling the brutal statecraft England practised against its neighbours. The Welsh in Capel Celyn were not considered important, they were not considered a meaningful polity; despite their presence in UK parliament, they were not offered the dignity of choice. In this post-war period, with the determined expansion of the welfare state and public works projects, what all was washed away and replaced? In Maggie’s financially tenuous 1980s, the question isn’t what was washed away on the tide, but what vessels were stripped back to their timbers and left barely floating, close to keeling over.
Seaniar’s house, Tobar Mhoire, Isle of Mull. Returning with Connie and Lexi after many years.
My Seaniar (Scottish Gaelic for old man/grandfather) passed away in 2017. For many reasons – including a fire in my uncle’s caravan and that Seaniar’s children that live in three different countries – his house is only now about to sell. Yesterday, I said goodbye to the big white house on top of the hill. I shared the front bedroom with both my siblings for almost nine months when I was 10-years old, and for a few months alone when I was 18. That bedroom looks out over the front lawn Seaniar so meticulously cared for, which is now spongy underfoot and slightly unkempt. Here, as a four-year-old on the morning of my Mum and Dad’s wedding, I tore a bunch of Seaniar’s tulips from the garden, bulbs and soil still attached, because to my mind, a bride needed flowers. Jesus wept, I can still hear Seaniar moaning. Jesus wept.
The lounge where we watched soaps and westerns before bed. The coal fire and the view over the park and the harbour. The sliding cabinet with wine for him and whisky for me. 2 Creagan Park, the former council house that has five decades of McRory family history – and Maggie Thatcher with some part to play.
In the 1979 election, Maggie Thatcher and her Tories rolled into Westminster on a popular tide of working class votes. I like to think her legacy in Scotland is summed up well by local woman Cathy Rutherford’s reaction to her death in 2013, when asked if she did anything good:
A signature piece of the Thatcher agenda was the Housing Act 1980, which enabled council house tenants of more than three-years the ‘right to buy’ their house at a significant discount. This dramatically increased home ownership rates in the short–medium term, and was a piece of popular policy that embedded the notion of a ‘property owning democracy’. Legislation also prevented councils from reinvesting the proceeds of those sales into building more housing; 75% of sale receipts was used to pay down all council’s debts (the Thatcher government was determined to rein in public spending, sound familiar?). Home ownership increased from 55% of households in 1979 to 71% in 2003, but the policy engineered a huge dent in the public housing stock from which the UK has never recovered. Many years down the line, critics will point to this legislation as the original underwriting of the UK’s housing crisis.
In the midst of a contemporaneous Australian housing crisis engineered by a political imagination lacking what is required to quit licking the UK’s boots, I find discussing right to buy with my relatives a strange conversation. My slick rational lefty brain, crowing about Thatcherism’s evils and championing public housing provision is beaten into submission by the coal fire, the drinks cabinet and the view of the front lawn from the upstairs room. 2 Creagan Park was bought for £8,000 (source: Nana; dubious) under Thatcher’s right to buy. This took a public house away from someone who ‘needed’ it more than my grandfather, who by this time was living in it alone. When I think of Scotland, I must think of this house. I literally cannot imagine this country without it; the image is incomplete. Would another house have made the memories as vivid? Would these memories have urged me back here, to a place in the comfort of distant family? Who’s to say.
‘Thatcherism, in some ways, was a highly skilful exercise in feigned egalitarianism – as indeed is capitalism itself” (Beckett). Capel Celyn was given no choice. Seaniar was given a choice.
The Victorian Government (plz don’t fire me) are on a mission to get rid of every public housing tower from the Melbourne skyline, and have just confirmed that when the lads in high-vis take the sledgehammers to the Flemington and North Melbourne flats, there won’t be a single new unit of public housing built in its place. Control of the new Flemington estate will be handed over to a private consortium; North Melbourne is fielding developer’s offers. The residents have been given a choice to relocate to another public or affordable house (I’m not getting into the affordable housing thing now), which will not be available for them to purchase. As a way of reducing public housing stock, Thatcher sold to residents and built fewer new homes; Jacinta Allan conveniently loses public housing during the Big Build renovations, and leaves the door ajar for consortiums and middle-men.
I have been lent a book, where Sarah Schulman writes about New York’s gentrification during the AIDs crisis, when the residents of bohemian neighbourhoods began dying, and whole apartments and neighbourhoods were snapped up by incomers, while victims of a public health failure died out of sight in hospital corridors. Schulman quotes performance artist Penny Arcade, ‘there is a gentrification that happens to buildings and neighborhoods and there is a gentrification that happens to ideas’. When the towers fall and the residents are scattered out of sight, the Flemington community will face a gentrification of ideas. I hope the towers are remembered.
You have until March 31 to make a submission to the inquiry into the redevelopment of Melbourne’s public housing towers - Parliament of Victoria.
MP Tim Read has some useful tips here for making submission: Inquiry Submission Writing Guide
Further reading
Tryweryn: The stories behind drowned village Capel Celyn - BBC News
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/social-landlords-reflect-on-thatchers-legacy-35272
https://neweconomics.org/2022/05/the-damaging-legacy-of-right-to-buy
https://theweek.com/culture-life/property/margaret-thatcher-right-to-buy-legacy
Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination 2012