On a train journey across England I take a trip into my past

I take an early morning train from Norwich to Liverpool, a five-hour trip through an interesting set of historical cities, towns and landscapes. In the last few weeks, I have made this journey twice: once to speak at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference, and then to speak at a conference about the work of Michael Marmot that got a good spread in a recent Big Issue. During both visits I attempted to explain the need to have joined-up thinking around bigissue.com/social-justice and social opportunity. 

The train passes through Thetford, a small town surrounded by a man-made forest created after the First World War to address the stripping of wooded England in the war effort. It is the birthplace of Thomas Paine, who was a campaigner for democracy and a key figure in the American Revolution. A man I liked when I first saw a picture of him because he had a big nose – an appendage I grew by the fights in my early years – but henceforth I loved him as I found myself drawn into the political maelstrom of the late 1960s. 

Ely, next, has the most beautiful of cathedrals that sits above the small city and its marina on the river Cam that flows south to Cambridge. It is a place untouched by modernity, apart from the Tesco by the station which, until recently, had a great cafe. Walk the streets of Ely and yes, you’ll find your chain shops and charity shops, but what a vibrant and lovely town. 

Then Peterborough, also with a fine cathedral, but it is a Midland city full of the grim reminder of homelessness and street drinking that has spread outward, seemingly from London, in the 34 years of Big Issue’s life. Here, wretchedness and poor mental health are found in among the shoppers and tourists. 

Read more:

• The number of homeless deaths is an entirely preventable tragedy. What are we doing?
• The only way forward is to split the poverty atom
• How government inaction is radicalising Britain

If you get off the train at our next stop, you will find a relatively lifelike sculpture of a woman who, in many ways, has had the biggest postwar influence over our lives. Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham above a shop where she learned much of the thinking that she took into government.

In some ways Thatcher, humble of birth but ascending into mock aristocracy, was one of our cleverest leaders. Yet she was, in my humble opinion, corrupted by that great institution Oxford university to become a philistine. That is, someone who never quite, in spite of appearances, rises above a moralising about all things. Oxford, like its sister Cambridge, is full of unique opportunities to ‘get on’; whether that’s to become PM – 21 of the last 29 PMs were Oxford-groomed – or leading lights in the media, acting or the civil service. Stupendous wealth can be assured in some cases, like Sir Tony Blair, from a political life. 

But as well as stopping our children’s school milk, closing down our industries and winning the Falklands War, Thatcher regularised the health service so much that managers and clerical staff made it more bureaucratic. And of course, she left the mentally ill to work out their problems on the streets by closing mental institutions, replacing them with the almost invisible ‘care in the community’. 

Nottingham next, which when I first went there in 1970, was a vital, hard-working town with factories like the great bike makers Raleigh. In 1960, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, about a truculent young seducer who worked at the Raleigh factory, showed a new side of working-class England. With the demise of factories and the exportation of work to the Far East, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is now a wonderful historical document. 

Then to Sheffield, which treated me well when, as a nervous southerner, I came north with my ancient history-studying girlfriend to live in an ex-miner’s cottage as she attended the university. Tess and I later married and she ran our international work when we started Big Issue. Back then, I was nervous because of the things I’d done which required the police to apprehend me. A glistening city with a fine but modest cathedral, Sheffield was a place I loved for the two years we lived there. 

The train now passes through the Peak District, through Edale where, as a 16-year-old, I walked in the company of other wrongdoers doing time in a young offenders institute. Brought north to toughen us up, climbing and trekking through what seemed like a permanent winter in midsummer, it gave me a love of rain, damp and mist. Enriched me, as was the intention of the Home Office who had run the youth correctional service not just to warehouse you, but to improve you. 

Next, Manchester, where I hitched to aged 18 from London and was picked up by a very drunk driver, which meant I had to take the wheel on a few roundabouts else a crash would have occurred. What a city is Manchester: dynamic and impressive in its Victorian way. Full of grand buildings – and at that time a potential girlfriend, who lived in Burnage where Oasis were later to live. 

We started the Big Issue in Manchester the year after we started in London. It seemed the right thing to do. And then Glasgow and Edinburgh soon after. 

I love Liverpool and arriving at Lime Street after passing through five hours of history, personal and political, is like arriving at the end of a Shakespeare play (just don’t ask me to explain that). 

Social justice awaits. I rush to my venue to wax lyrical on why we need to end the tyranny of ‘the inheritance of poverty’.

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