'So many like Yosser Hughes have been thrown on the scrapheap as the rich just got richer'

Bernard Hill in his famous role as Yosser Hughes in Boys From The Blackstuff

I’ve been thinking a lot about Yosser Hughes this week following the death of the great actor who brought him to life.

Bernard Hill’s haunting depiction of a family man being crushed by unemployment in Alan Bleasdale’s era-defining Boys From The Blackstuff struck a deep chord with millions of us because it signified a change in how people were treated.

Before the 1980s many firms viewed their workers as part of their family and nurtured them. They built social clubs and sports pitches, handed out Christmas bonuses, held kids’ parties and took pensioners on coach trips.

They believed in the dignity of labour. That belief in community was brutally ripped up by Thatcherism.

Overnight, workers were treated no better than unit costs who needed to be cheapened and culled in case they impacted the dash for higher profits and bigger shareholder reward.

Workers were no longer seen as part of a family but a drain on growth.

The dignity of labour, like the notion of society, was mocked and erased from the national psyche.

Unemployment rocketed, communities died, crime soared, inequality went off the scale, the rich became unimaginably richer while those like Yosser Hughes, made poor through no fault of their own, were marginalised and demonised. Since the 1980s – as hard-fought for workers’ rights have continued to be trampled into the dust – the rich have never looked back.

It’s why, on Tuesday, the boss of P&O Ferries Peter Hebblethwaite, who earned £505,000 last year after successfully sacking 786 workers in a video call and replacing them with agency staff on £4.87 an hour, was called before MPs.

Liam Byrne described Hebblethwaite as a “modern-day pirate” and asked him if he could live on £4.87 an hour.

He said he couldn’t, before offering what he believed was a defence for him earning 100 times more than the people who make his company’s ships tick: “All we want is a level playing field with our competitors.”

There in a nutshell is the race to the bottom that has seen the living standards of ordinary people decline while those at the top soar. There is vampire capitalism in all its ugliness. There is the ideological justification for the rampant inequality that screws this country in so many different ways.

Two years ago, the then Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told the Commons that Hebblethwaite “will have to go” as he has “knowingly broken the law”. He’s still there. Laughing at the lawmakers.

He’s not alone.

Our railways are a laughing stock not because unions strive for better conditions but because the privatised firms who own them have, since 2017, dished out £1.5billion in dividends.

To see where this ends up look no further than Google which recently reported £65bn annual earnings, taking the company’s value to $2.1trillion. That is £1,700,000,000,000.

When extreme free-market capitalism came into vogue in the 1980s, throwing the likes of Yosser Hughes on the scrapheap, we were told that as the rich became richer their wealth would trickle down and raise up those from below.

Last week an Oxfam report showed that, in the UK, dividend payments to shareholders increased by 13% between 2020-2023, while average wages stagnated. Human progress, eh. Isn’t it wonderful?