Yosser died yesterday. Well, Bernard Hill who embodied Yosser in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff died yesterday.

Yosser would have died long ago, prematurely, in poor health, raging against a world that didn’t give a damn for Yosser and the countless men like him.

It would have taken no great sense of empathy to be moved by the moment in the television series when Yosser Hughes, accompanied by his three children, goes to a building contractor and says, ‘gis a job’. ‘I can do that,’ says Yosser, and grabs a bag of bricklayer’s tools. The resultant wall is uneven, irregular, unsound and the contractor is enraged.  Yosser stands his ground and says, ‘I did my best’.

Of course, Yosser shouldn’t have attempted to build the wall, but all he asked was work, dignity, self-respect.

The odd thing about Margaret Thatcher was that she never understood conservatism. So imbued with neo-liberal ideas, she could not comprehend what it meant to be a true conservative.

Social cohesion, an attitude of responsibility, an ethic of community, a respect for others, all were undermined by a mindset that declared ‘there is no such thing as society’.  The very values that are necessary to conserve a society were eroded in the creation of a world safe for individualism and greed.

The irony of the times in which Yosser Hughes lived is that the focus was not upon creating things, manufacturing things, building things, instead the focus was upon using money to make money.  The yuppies were not men who built businesses, they were men who worked for financial institutions.  Red braces and bespoke tailoring would never recreate a workshop of the world.

The old fashioned Tories, patrician in their attitudes, and conservative in their inclinations were dismissed as ‘wets’.  The Thatcherite man was incarnated in Norman Tebbit who declared that people would find work if, like his father in the 1930s, they got on a bicycle and cycled around.  Tebbit failed entirely to recognize that reality was represented by Yosser Hughes.

Perhaps it might be hoped that Yosser had not protested in vain, but the world of Yosser Hughes has been superseded by the even worse world of Daniel Blake.  It is no longer just the Conservative Party that doesn’t care about working people, the Labour Party shows little more empathy for those who work for minimum wages on zero hours contracts depending on foodbanks for their survival. Yosser would have shouted at such a world.