If you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst's After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers' money) has allowed an insurance company to take over and manage a large part of the town's shopping centre. In the interests of 'safety', this company now patrols the area with security guards, whose job it is to exclude the more 'undesirable' elements of the local population. How these 'undesirables' in prosperous Hampshire are to be recognised is not entirely clear. But bouncers in Basingstoke probably operate much the same as bouncers anywhere and pick on the usual targets: dirty clothes, ghetto-blasters, cans of lager peeping out of the pockets and all the other outward signs of nuisance or just nonconformity. If your face doesn't fit, no entry - and, in this case, no shopping.

LRB 26 October 1989 | PDF Download