"Who said in a 1981 speech ""I grew up in the 30's with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work""?"
Premiership of Margaret Thatcher Deputy Prime Minister, William Whitelaw. His moral authority and support allowed her to resist the internal threat from the Heathite wets. After the Brixton riot in West London in April 1981, Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit, responding to a suggestion that rioting was caused by unemployment, observed that the unemployment of the 1930s was far worse than that of the 1980s—and that his father's generation never reacted by rioting. "I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father", Tebbit said. "He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he
Norman Tebbit memoirs Tebbit said that the 1982 Act was his "greatest achievement in Government". In the aftermath of the 1981 riots in Handsworth and Brixton, Tebbit responded to a suggestion by the Young Conservative National Chairman, Iain Picton that rioting was the natural reaction to unemployment: I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it. As a result, Tebbit is often misquoted as having directly told the unemployed to "get on your bike", and he was popularly referred to as