The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (111 page)

The sentimental British public harked back to the old consensus politics; they did not like feeling that their country contained what some American sociologists were happy to call an underclass. The Conservative government actually increased the amount spent on the National Health Service each year, but ministers managed to give the impression that the NHS too would soon be a thing of the past, partly because they had introduced the internal market as a way to allow competition to make healthcare more efficient.

At the April 1992 general election, a Labour victory was widely expected. Middle England had had enough of tax cuts. It felt that the cherished infrastructure of the country was decaying under the Conservatives, and was dismayed by long hospital waiting lists (so many wards were being closed), potholes from underspending councils, poor social services and decaying schools. But ill-advised remarks by John Smith, then shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, made many people fear that the punitive taxation of the 1970s would be reimposed should Labour return to office. The upshot was the fourth Conservative victory in succession, with a modest majority of twenty-one seats. But a shadow still hung over Labour.

Neil Kinnock bowed out of the Labour leadership after his defeat, leaving the leadership to John Smith. Smith improved the voting system in the electoral college, while warning the unions they could expect no pay increases without productivity. But he died unexpectedly in 1994, and the leadership jumped a generation to the telegenic Anthony Blair, who was then under forty.

Blair, a former barrister and devout Christian with a formidable QC wife and three young children, (a fourth, Leo, would arrive in 2000, the first baby to be born to a serving British prime minister in 150 years), further modernized the party with the help of Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown. They believed that people were still frightened of Labour and that it was their job to reassure them that the party had abandoned what had been known as the ‘politics of envy’, its commitment since 1918 to the redistribution of the nation’s wealth by taxation. Blair excised Clause 4 from the Labour constitution, which promised ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. The unions were kept at arm’s length and Labour embraced the European cause with fervour. Blair and Mandelson believed that New Labour, as they called the party, had to reach out to a wider audience.

On 6 May 1994, as a sign of closer relations between Britain and Europe, the Channel tunnel was opened. For the first time since the Ice Age Britain was linked to the continent. It had been dreamed of more than a hundred years before, but it was not until the late 1980s that Britain and France had the technology to build the tunnel, which runs 150 feet below the sea. The three tunnels, north, south and a service facility, required the removal of seventeen million tons of earth and cost £15 billion. It now takes just three hours to reach the centre of Paris from the centre of London.

But the triumph of the Eurotunnel and the excitement that it generated did nothing for the Tories’ reputation. Labour was climbing higher and higher in the opinion polls, while the Tory government was slowly sinking into a self-inflicted mire of sleaze, lying ministers, illicit arms sales and money for votes.

The Tories even seemed unlucky on the question of Ireland, where by the beginning of the 1990s Mrs Thatcher’s Hillsborough Agreement was having very positive effects. Although some Unionists saw the agreement as a form of betrayal, the Irish government reaffirmed that political union would come about only if the majority of citizens of Northern Ireland wished it. There was a change of attitude within the Sinn Fein leadership, who recognized that many of its supporters were exhausted by the war. By August 1994 the IRA had agreed a ceasefire, and this was followed by a loyalist paramilitary ceasefire in October. It was a great moment after twenty years of war. But decommissioning the IRA’s weapons was the sticking point for the Unionist parties, which insisted that Sinn Fein could not participate in the political process until the Provisional IRA had destroyed their weapons.

In January 1996 the Major government turned down a proposal from the former American senator George Mitchell, President Clinton’s adviser on Irish affairs, who headed the independent International Body to examine the process of decommissioning paramilitary arms, that the decommissioning should take place in tandem with all-party talks. Instead it began the election process without Sinn Fein. By way of response the following month the IRA bombed Canary Wharf in the Docklands. It was clear that the peace process had been derailed.

But it was the crisis over the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) from cattle to humans that finally finished off the Conservatives. The public could just about accept ministerial prevarication over the Matrix-Churchill affair revealed by the Scott inquiry into the trial of three businessmen prosecuted by Customs and Excise for illegally exporting arms to Iraq, whose report was published in February 1996. This showed that several Tory ministers had been willing to let three innocent men go to prison rather than reveal that the defendants had been working for the British secret services. But when the Whitehall culture of secrecy endangered the nation’s health, for Conservative ministers refused to come clean about how safe beef was to eat at a time when the television news was filming young people dying of CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, thought to be a human variant of BSE), it was the end. As 4.7 million cows were slaughtered at a cost of £3 billion, after British beef had been banned round the world, eighteen years of Conservative rule collapsed. Unlike the Tories, the fluent and sensible Tony Blair, who had moved Labour far from their socialist roots towards the acceptable middle ground, looked like a man who could be trusted.

In May 1997 the people of England uttered a resounding no to the Conservatives. Labour won 419 seats, 101 of which were held by women, the so-called Blair Babes, and the Conservative vote was wiped out in Scotland. Blair swept to victory with a huge majority of 179 seats and proceeded to carry out extensive constitutional reform. John Major resigned as leader of the Tory party and was replaced by the thirty-six-year-old William Hague, a Parliamentarian of considerable gifts who had been secretary of state for Wales. But despite Hague’s down-to-earth manner, as befitted his Yorkshire ancestry, the Tories failed to make any headway in the polls despite much soul-searching. After another landslide win for Labour at the election in June 2002 (a majority of 167), Hague too resigned, to be succeeded by an ex-soldier, Iain Duncan Smith.

The Labour government soon showed itself to be a modern administration. It incorporates a Women’s Unit, though not yet a Women’s Ministry, and provided the machinery since 2000 for an elected mayor of London, the capital’s first, who took the place of the Greater London Council that Mrs Thatcher got rid of in 1986. The Bank of England was made independent in 1997 as soon as Labour took office and was given the sole power to decide interest rates, a power previously vested in the Treasury. Interest-rate decisions have thus been taken out of the political arena to avoid the boom and bust of the Lawson years and to create the economic stability required for economic growth.

After 120 years of delay, in 1999 the House of Lords began the first stage of being modernized when hereditary peers–other than ninety-two elected to oversee reforms–were excluded. This brings Britain well and truly into the third millennium. The reformed Lords will incorporate the best of its ancient traditions as a council of non-partisan professional experts and wise men who act as a delaying and revising chamber in the face of over-hasty legislation passed by the House of Commons. However, four years later, in July 2003, no decision had been reached on the construction of a reformed, representative second chamber which would not be a rival to the elected Commons.

Labour had promised regional assemblies to Scotland and Wales. After two referendums produced a vote in favour of devolution, the year 2000 saw both the opening of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Reflecting Scotland’s long history of independence and her separate legal system, the Scottish Parliament has powers to alter taxes raised at Westminster by 3 per cent and to legislate over internal affairs–the environment, social services, education and health. As befits a smaller country with a far longer history of being attached to England, the Welsh Assembly does not have the power to make laws though it may alter some designated Westminster legislation. The same number of Welsh and Scottish MPs will be retained at Westminster, leaving some commentators to wonder whether England should not, in fairness, have her own regional assembly too.

Labour came to power determined to end social division and chronic underinvestment in the public sector and manufacturing sector. Britain no longer has the absolute poverty with which Booth and Rowntree appalled middle-class consciences at the beginning of the last century. Nevertheless the respected charity the Child Poverty Action Group in 2002 estimated that nearly a quarter of the population, including almost four million children, are living in what is defined internationally as ‘income poverty’. That is too high a figure for a civilized country to tolerate. Britain’s infant mortality rates, once the lowest in the world, are on the rise, a sign that conditions among the poor are deteriorating and need to be improved.

Labour believe that the government has a social responsibility to foster growth in the economy by fighting unemployment, not just to let the market rule and the devil take the hindmost. But the lessons of the past have convinced them that government investment in industry cannot be afforded without the help of the private sector. Guided by the Scottish chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the Labour government displayed a fiscal prudence that gained it a formidable reputation. Its auction in 2001 for licenses for the third generation of mobile phones raised the colossal sum of £22.5 billion. The City of London, traditionally a Tory stronghold, was reported, temporarily at least, to have become a Labour bastion. Labour also ended the internal market in hospital care, gave help to pensioners with heating bills and to the poor with tax credits, and introduced their New Deal intended to get people off benefit and into employment as soon as possible.

In July 1997 one of the last great outposts of empire was relinquished when Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese. The lease on part of the Crown Colony had expired, but the whole of it was handed over following an agreement negotiated by the Thatcher government in 1982. Communist China undertook to allow Hong Kong considerable internal independence and leeway as a Special Administrative Region where capitalism would be permitted for the next fifty years at least, and it would continue to be a free port. In addition, the Basic Law for Hong Kong envisaged a freely elected legislature, and that has been honoured.

In August 1997 the former wife of the Prince of Wales, the beautiful Princess Diana, was killed in a car crash in Paris aged only thirty-six. For the previous sixteen years her sympathetic nature, youth and spontaneity had given her a considerable hold over the nation’s affections. There was a great outpouring of sorrow at her death and for her bereaved sons, the fifteen-year-old Prince William and the thirteen-year-old Prince Harry.

Continental Europe of the 1990s was racked by the spectacle on the nightly television news of a vicious civil war between members of the federation of Yugoslavia in the wake of the changes in eastern Europe. The brutal massacres of around 250,000 Muslims and forcible expulsion of another two million from the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbs, who resisted their fellow Yugoslav republics’ demand for independence and recognition by the European Union, generated a new expression that had echoes of the Holocaust–ethnic cleansing. In 1999 NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade to put an end to the Serb cleansing of the province of Kosovo of ethnic Albanians: 800,000 of them, many of them with babies and with their possessions in carts, were dying in the mountains. Although the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevíc was deposed and handed over to a special tribunal set up by the UN at the Hague to be tried for war crimes, the refugee crisis caused by these dispossessed peoples continues to pose great problems for the EU.

But in Northern Ireland at Easter 1998 the twenty-six-year war finally came to an end. It was decided to allow the decommissioning of weapons to run in tandem with the devising of a new government. The only thing that Sinn Fein and the other political wings of paramilitary groups like the loyalist UDA had to do to participate was to get their paramilitaries to restore the ceasefire of 1994. The IRA had begun the process in July 1997.

On Good Friday 1998 an agreement was signed by all shades of opinion in Northern Ireland that set up a power-sharing Assembly whose creation had been deferred for over twenty-five years. Once more it was reiterated that it would be the will of the people of Northern Ireland, not those of Eire or Britain, that would decide their future. The withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland put an end to the most dangerous tour of duty in every British soldier’s career.

The peace process could have been derailed by a bomb set off at Omagh in August 1998 by a nationalist terrorist group beyond the control of the IRA. But Sinn Fein and the IRA condemned the tragedy in the strongest terms and the Assembly survived. Decommissioning remained an issue. However, the effect of the 11 September 2001 outrage in New York when the Twin Towers were destroyed by Islamic terrorists was to make Americans understand at first hand what terrorism does. So the IRA, despite its traditional American support, found that it had to alter its tactics, and in October that year a new effort at decommissioning began. Punishment beatings by both sides and mutual distrust continue to cause problems in Northern Ireland, however. Sadly, in October 2002 the Assembly was suspended (and remained so as at July 2003) and direct rule reimposed. After allegations of an IRA spy ring at Stormont, other parties refused to continue in government with Sinn Fein.