At the 1981 Conservative Party Conference, Norman Tebbit famously said that his father ‘got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it’. Now that industrial Britain was in meltdown, this was what the swelling ranks of the unemployed were supposed to do. ‘Get on your bike’ became a national cliché, summing up Thatcherism in a nutshell: that the unemployed (among others) must take personal responsibility for the problems that the government had foisted upon them.
