The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (109 page)

Most western European governments took a more pragmatic view of the Soviet Union’s actions than the United States, believing the invasion of Afghanistan was a defensive measure against Muslim fundamentalism, which was threatening Russia’s southern borders. But Reagan and his far-right supporters insisted that there should be a new arms race. Thanks to his imposition of sanctions against Russia, the growing exchange of information and technology between Iron Curtain countries and western Europe came to an abrupt halt.

When the Reagan administration announced out of the blue that it was extending the arms race into space by embarking on a ‘Star Wars’ programme to create a defensive nuclear shield over the American continent, European peace movements mushroomed. The Russians pulled out of arms-control talks, talks which American conservatives were threatening to stall anyway. Europe seemed to be on the edge of nuclear war. By 1981 more than 200,000 people in Britain had registered as members of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization which had sunk from view after the Aldermaston marches in the 1960s.

The United States stationed the latest generation of nuclear missiles in western Europe to protect the west from 300 Russian SS-20s. But large numbers of European protesters became convinced that, with American conservatives in the driving seat bent on confrontation with Russia, their countries would form the theatre of nuclear war, while Americans remained safe 3,000 miles away. Women from all over Britain, young and old, built camps round the US airfield at Greenham Common in Berkshire when it was decided to locate cruise missiles there.

By the spring of 1982 Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism were thus faced with a rising tide of unpopularity which threatened the whole experiment with early extinction. Abruptly and unexpectedly, in April that year she was rescued by Argentina’s invasion of the tiny Falkland Islands. Although the islands are 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, the 1,800-strong population is entirely British and has continued to be British since it became part of the empire in 1833. On the orders of the military dictator General Galtieri a small force of Argentine soldiers overpowered the seventy-nine Royal Marines on the main island. With the governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Rex Hunt, they were flown to Montevideo. Twelve thousand Argentinean troops were then landed on the islands, which were claimed for Argentina as Los Malvinas.

Britain had a choice of either giving in to Argentina or defending British nationals, even though they were 8,000 miles away. Under the warlike Mrs Thatcher, who was now compared by admirers to Boudicca, Britain chose to defend them. In a last gasp of imperial power a hundred ships of the Royal Navy steamed to Argentina accompanied by two aircraft carriers, one of which contained the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, a daring helicopter pilot.

By the end of June the Argentineans had been defeated (their military dictatorship was later overthrown as a result) at a cost to Britain of hundreds of millions of pounds. Mrs Thatcher said that what had been at stake was the safety of British nationals abroad. Nevertheless Britain no longer had the power, money or effectiveness to wage colonial wars in this fashion. It would have been impossible to go to war on such principles over Gibraltar or Hong Kong. Nor could Britain have won a war in the distant southern hemisphere without the support of the American administration in tackling the many logistical problems that arose.

The Falklands War made Mrs Thatcher a popular heroine at home. A fever of patriotism and traditional British xenophobia killed the beginnings of a revolt against her methods. At the June 1983 election, the ineffectiveness of Callaghan’s successor as Labour leader Michael Foot, and by a left-leaning Labour manifesto later described as the ‘longest suicide note in history’, the Conservative party’s majority rose from 43 to 144. As if to celebrate, a month later, £500 million of public spending cuts were announced.

Labour’s share of the vote shrank to just over 25 per cent, a record low for a main opposition party. It had been split by the formation of the Social Democrat party in 1981 by four prominent members of the Labour shadow Cabinet, in protest against the influence of the hard left and the destruction of independent opinion within the Labour party. They included the former Labour foreign secretary Dr David Owen and Roy Jenkins, the former home secretary and chancellor. They believed that Labour was no longer a party dedicated to achieving its programmes through Parliamentary means. New rules allowed the deselection of sitting MPs if they offended grass-roots members, and gave trade union and other organizational blocs 40 per cent of the vote in the electoral college to choose the party leader. Labour had become backward looking and primitive in its anti-Common Market views and irresponsibly unrealistic in its adoption of nuclear unilateralism, the decision to rid Britain of nuclear weapons without asking others to do the same. A dramatic series of by-election wins parachuted the SDP leaders, known as the Gang of Four, into Parliament and made it clear that the Social Democrats were a force to reckon with.

But history was still with Mrs Thatcher. With such huge electoral approval, by 1984 Mrs Thatcher had begun limbering up to take on the miners. Having failed to close twenty-three unproductive pits in 1981, this time she was determined to win the war to reform the coalmining industry, whose subsidy cost the government £800 million a year. In some pits coal cost £20 a ton more to extract from the ground than it could be sold for. Since its heyday in the 1920s, when the industry employed a million and a quarter miners, British coal had been rapidly declining as a source of power and was being replaced by alternative methods that were cheaper and cleaner–nuclear-powered electricity stations, Middle Eastern oil, and now oil and gas from the North Sea. By the 1980s only 300,000 miners remained, 400,000 having taken advantage of excellent early-retirement deals to leave voluntarily in the 1960s and retrain.

In March the government announced that twenty pits had to be closed and 20,000 jobs lost. The leader of the National Union of Mineworkers Arthur Scargill, an old-fashioned Marxist, was determined to prevent it. For a year he kept the miners out on strike, but he did so without a national ballot, so he never had the entire industry’s support. Moreover, under a new Trade Union Act in July, unions lost their legal immunity if they struck without a ballot. By October 1984 the High Court had ordered the sequestration of the NUM’s funds. The NUM was penniless, and it was not going to be able to keep the strike going for long without money.

Despite the anti-union feeling among many Britons after years of being at their mercy, there was a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the miners and their families facing unemployment in areas where whole communities centred round the coal pit. At the same time the level of violence and intimidation on the picket lines against miners who wanted to work–in one incident a taxi-driver was killed by a concrete block being dropped on his cab–disgusted many. So did Scargill’s financial links with the pariah terrorist state of Libya. That very year Gaddafi’s diplomats had horrified their British hosts by firing at and killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher when she was escorting a demonstration against the People’s Bureau of Libya in London’s St James’s Square.

Determined not to repeat Heath’s mistakes and resort to a three-day week the Thatcher government stockpiled coal at power stations and made plans for non-union drivers to deliver it. It had also arranged for the mechanisms of many power stations to be adapted so that they could fire on oil as well as coal, and it organized the police so that they could be sent at a moment’s notice to any trouble spot. Support for the strike within the mining industry itself was never unanimous: less than two-thirds of the pit supervisors voted in favour. Productive pits in the Nottingham area created a breakaway union, the UDM, whose members wished to continue to work.

By March 1985 the year-long strike was over. Under Ian McGregor, a Scot who had emigrated to Canada and who promised to re-examine decisions on pit closures, the National Coal Board succeeded in bringing the strike to an end. Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who, after Labour’s poor showing at the polls in 1983, had replaced Michael Foot, weakened his public standing by not condemning the picket-line violence. In fact he personally believed that Scargill was doing more to destroy the coal industry than the Tories were. Many pits, once closed, would cost too much to reopen. The strike cost the British government £3 billion, but the Labour party conference and the TUC had both backed it.

The miners’ strike epitomized the conflict between old industries and the Thatcher government’s determination to modernize British industry, between old-fashioned, obstructive unionism and progress. It had ended in a definitive victory for Thatcherism. It was followed the next year by the global tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s successful defiance of the print unions in moving
The Times
and his other newspapers from Fleet Street to Wapping. There he established union-free presses using the new technology and indirectly paved the way for the
Independent
newspaper, which was set up by journalists reluctant to cross the picket line. Thatcherism had begun to seem like the norm.

The defeat of the miners caught Labour at a low point in their electoral fortunes. The resounding Thatcher victory of 1983 was a sign that many in Britain were turning their backs on the trade union movement, partly because the working class (in the sense of manual workers) had shrunk to a third of the employed population. Though Mrs Thatcher’s methods seemed insensitive at first, it was hard to deny and would become harder to deny that they were also very successful. She had broken the stranglehold of the unions and had made slimmed-down British industry an example to the rest of the world. Her success made it increasingly difficult for Labour as the client of the trade unions to be taken seriously as an electable party. Few people believed any longer that the trade unions could be relied on to create a viable wages policy. State capitalism had proved too expensive to work. Mrs Thatcher, who had drastically reduced government borrowing and inflation seemed to be proof that the free market first enunciated 200 years before by Adam Smith was the cure for Britain’s ills.

The left-leaning progressive thought that had dominated the values of educated Britons was beginning to look obsolete. Yet left-wing extremists’ control over Labour in the mid-1980s ensured that the party continued to insist that the way forward was through higher and higher spending. Each Labour party conference demanded more rather than less nationalization–though where the money was to come from was not discussed. As the British economic miracle took hold, it became as fashionable to hold right-wing views as it had been odious since the 1960s. Public schools and conspicuous consumption came back into fashion. The generation known as Thatcher’s Children did not seem to have one atom in their bones of the old British yen for social reform that had been such a powerful legacy of the nineteenth century.

The final blow for all varieties of left-of-centre opinion seemed to have been dealt when Thatcherism contributed to the demise of Russian communism. Mrs Thatcher’s success in privatizing state industries, in replacing stagnant state monopolies by economic competition, made the state planning of Warsaw Pact countries look old fashioned and ridiculous. Known in the Soviet Union as the Iron Lady, Mrs Thatcher was to achieve fame abroad comparable to that of Winston Churchill. For she continued on a roll. Her courageous conduct of the Falklands War cemented her warm personal relations with President Reagan. The special relationship with America sought by so many British post-war premiers genuinely existed in the 1980s thanks to the personal chemistry between Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan. She was a key player from 1985 onwards during the extraordinary period in east–west relations when under Mikhail Gorbachev the Cold War was ended and the Iron Curtain dividing Europe was put aside.

Gorbachev came to power as general secretary of the Soviet Communist party at a time when the economic and political contradictions of Marxism–Leninism were reaching crisis point. Given overwhelming moral force by the backing of the Polish pope John Paul II, the Solidarity movement in Poland was demanding greater autonomy, as were other Soviet bloc countries. Russia herself desperately needed European and American capital if she was not to sink into the dark ages just when the advances in telecommunications were remaking the modern world. Gorbachev understood that the almost bankrupt Russian state needed to be opened up to the same market forces that had benefited Britain under Mrs Thatcher. Russia no longer had the resources to compete in an arms race in space with America and maintain her increasingly ramshackle Iron Curtain empire. Twenty-five per cent of her national income was going on her armed forces. What had become known as the Brezhnev Doctrine of armed intervention in Warsaw Pact countries was no longer practicable.

Both superpowers agreed to arms reductions. Gorbachev allowed Mrs Thatcher to talk about democracy and human rights on Soviet television, which had never been done before. Mrs Thatcher’s force and conviction were greatly to the taste of the Russian people (rather more by now than to that of her fellow countrymen) and she attained iconic status in many former Iron Curtain countries. In 1988 President Reagan’s visit to Moscow was followed by a profound shakeup in Russia’s institutions. A Parliament was elected and Gorbachev became president instead of general secretary; in 1990 the seventy-year-old communist dictatorship came to an end when the Soviet Parliament removed the party from the constitution and multi-party democratic politics were allowed. Gorbachev had also allowed free elections in the Soviet bloc countries. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall was torn down by the East Germans with disbelieving joy–not a tank moved to stop them and German reunification began.

But there were still more astonishing things to come. At the end of 1991 the Soviet Union was abolished after an attempted coup against Gorbachev by Russian conservatives. The new president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin forbade the Soviet Communist party from continuing in Russia, and the fifteen Soviet republics led by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus announced that they were forming the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev was no longer Soviet president because there was no Soviet Union.