Elizabeth II (1952–)

Wind of Change (1952–1964)

To have Winston Churchill as prime minister gave the new queen Elizabeth’s reign a wonderful beginning and sense of continuity. Elizabeth had been popular with her subjects ever since the war. In the service tradition of the British royal family she had gone into uniform and served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, enabling her to change vehicle wheels with the best of them. In 1947 she had married her Greek cousin Prince Philip Mountbatten, and they soon had two children, Prince Charles (born in 1948) and Princess Anne (born in 1950).

A few days before Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Westminster Abbey in June 1953, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest. A year later the Briton Roger Bannister became the fastest man in the world when he ran the mile in less than four minutes. It seemed that an age of New Elizabethans had begun, ruled over by a new Gloriana who was photographed looking radiant and regal by Cecil Beaton. On the South Bank of the Thames a huge arts complex was rising like a strange modern city to house the nation’s astonishing creative output. It would eventually contain the Royal National Theatre and the Hayward Gallery. The opening of its first building, the Royal Festival Hall, in 1951 had been the highlight of the Festival of Britain, organized by the Labour home secretary Herbert Morrison to demonstrate British cultural achievements a hundred years after Prince Albert had arranged the Great Exhibition to celebrate Victorian invention.

The 1950s would be a prosperous decade for Britain, as Japan’s and Germany’s industrial muscle would take another decade to rebuild and the British could export to their former markets. Britain continued to be an important world power, despite the increased acceptance that the days of the largest empire in the history of the world were coming to an end. There were bases and British administrations from Gibraltar to Malta, from Egypt and west Africa to Aden and Malaya. Educational and trade links reinforced a sense of common belonging between the far-flung countries of what was now called the Commonwealth. Britain was one of the three countries in the world to be sufficiently advanced to have built an atom bomb. As one of the Big Five on the Security Council she was able to veto the proposed actions of the United Nations.

Nevertheless the lands over which the young Queen Elizabeth II ruled were greatly diminished from Queen Victoria’s day and about to diminish further. Under Labour, India had become two independent republics, the British mandate for Palestine had become the State of Israel, and the 1950s and early 1960s would see a speeded-up process of decolonization in the face of independence movements throughout the old British Empire in Africa. Britain simply could not afford to maintain what had become a very reluctant empire.

Even so, from the late 1940s she had to fight a jungle war in her colony of Malaya, which held two-thirds of the world’s rubber plantations, and which had been badly battered by the Japanese invasion during the war. Now communist guerrillas from the native Chinese population threatened Britain’s hold on the country. By 1956 the communist threat had been defeated but local antagonism to Britain made it pointless to delay independence. In 1957 Malaya became an independent state but remained within the Commonwealth.

But it was in 1956 that it was brought home to Britain how altered her position was in the post-war world. British power had been so substantial and so long-lived that the prime minister Anthony Eden–who had succeeded Churchill the year before–had assumed that Britain could continue to use military force if her interests were threatened. Eden was a conscientious, gentlemanly, Conservative politician of great integrity who had resigned over Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators of the 1930s. Unfortunately the need to stand up to later dictators in case they should prove to be another Hitler obsessed him. When the new leader of Egypt, Colonel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal–which was still owned by France and Britain–Eden decided that the move had to be resisted by armed force, at the risk of war with Egypt.

The Arab nationalist Nasser had seized the Suez Canal zone when America and Britain had withdrawn an offer to fund the construction of a dam at Aswan on the Nile. In the midst of the Cold War America had become alarmed by the Nasser government’s carelessness about its finances and about an arms deal it had agreed with the Soviet Union. Nasser seized the Canal zone declaring that its income would pay for the Aswan Dam. But Eden and much of the British public could not accept this. Although it had been agreed between the two countries twenty years before that British troops would leave the Canal zone in 1956 and that British influence over Egypt was at an end, Eden made plans to retake it with the connivance of the French government. The latter was closely involved with Israel, which had been buying French arms in quantity and saw this as a good opportunity to expand her territory at Egypt’s expense. France was especially keen to see Nasser deposed because he was the chief source of arms for nationalist rebels in the French colony of Algeria.

Nasser was a dictator, yet he did not, as Eden believed, threaten the whole of the Middle East. However outrageous it was to seize the Canal, which had been built with British and French funds, it would have been wiser to accept it as a hazard of the post-colonial world. Though America warned Britain to hold herself back when dealing with Egypt, Eden was soon deep in a complicated plot with the French and Israelis to attack Egypt.

On 29 October Israeli troops marched into the Sinai Desert in Egypt, and a day later the French and British issued a pre-agreed call for both sides to withdraw ten miles from the Canal zone. When this was not done within twenty-four hours, French and British forces bombed Egyptian airfields. Four days later, to the world’s amazement, French and British soldiers parachuted successfully into Egypt and captured Port Said. But within a further twenty-four hours, to France’s fury, the Anglo-French action had been halted: the Canal zone had not been seized by the French and British paratroopers as planned because Britain had decided to withdraw from the operation.

Eden had been taken aback by the strength of world condemnation. Russia had threatened to launch rockets at the Anglo-French force, Australia had refused to back Britain’s action, and Britain and France had been condemned in the United Nations by sixty-four votes to five. American pressure on Britain to withdraw from Suez, which she could not ignore because she needed another large loan from the US-controlled International Monetary Fund, brought the episode to an ignominious end. Eden ordered a ceasefire and a UN force took the place in the Canal zone of the British and French troops.

‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role’, was the former US secretary of state Dean Acherson’s much quoted epithet six years later. Britain and France were both humiliated by Suez, which had underlined the fact that they were not the great imperial powers they had been for two centuries and could no longer interfere in other countries’ affairs when it suited them. Meanwhile the Soviet Union had taken advantage of the world’s attention being focused on Egypt to move her tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising against communism prompted by Moscow’s relaxation of controls over Iron Curtain countries after the death of Stalin. Britain’s international reputation had been damaged because she had lost her moral edge. Arab countries were bitterly angry, and Nasser’s stock had risen. Anglo-French diplomatic relations took two decades to heal, with the French feeling that they had been betrayed by Britain, which they saw as having become a poodle of the United States. This breach contributed to France’s decision to veto Britain’s application to join the Common Market in 1963.

The European Economic Community, or Common Market, had developed out of schemes in the late 1940s in the three Benelux countries and France to find a way of integrating German industry into Europe. Its forerunner was the Schuman Plan devised by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, which in 1951 became the European Coal and Steel Community. By this treaty France and Germany were to produce their iron and steel under a joint higher authority. Despite the parlous state of Germany at the beginning of the 1950s, Schuman and the French statesman Jean Monnet believed that a country as large and resourceful as Germany would always revive. It was therefore important to absorb her within a federalist Europe.

Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were all attracted by the scheme, and so was Germany. Its very successful implementation for iron and steel was followed in 1957 by the Six (as they had become known) creating the European Economic Community (EEC) in order to include an agricultural policy. Although Britain was approached about joining, she regarded the insistence of the Six on the imposition of a single tariff towards the rest of the non-European world as incompatible with her preferential tariffs with the Commonwealth. Although Britain had been satisfied with the OEEC (the organization set up to implement the Marshall Aid plan) as a forum for communication between European countries, in 1960 she became a founder member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Austria and Switzerland. This was a loose customs union between those countries which left all of them free to regulate their external trade.

At the beginning of the 1960s, however, the British government’s attitude to the Common Market underwent a sharp about-turn. The ties linking the Commonwealth had been very much weakened by the independence that many colonies had gained from Britain in the previous decade, and statistics demonstrated that trade with the Common Market might offer a great deal more to Britain than trade with the Commonwealth. The catastrophe of Suez had been a salutary experience for Britain. Unlike France she had neither the political will nor the money to fight wars in order to keep her colonies.

Since the turn of the twentieth century much of the Colonial Office in London had tended to the view that Britain governed the colonies in trust for the indigenous populations until they were ready for democracy after a western-style education. But by the 1950s an elite in most of the countries had taken the same higher exams of English boards and the same courses at British universities as the colonial administrators. They had just as much knowledge of western political ideas. They also had experience of Parliamentary democracy, since every British colony (with the exception of the recently acquired Somaliland) featured an elected legislative assembly.

After India led the way there was considerable agitation in Africa for independence. The leader of the independence movement in the Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah, was at first imprisoned for his activities. But in 1957 Britain had bowed to the inevitable and he became prime minister of Ghana, the ancient African name of the country. In 1960 Nigeria also became an independent republic. Both elected to remain members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, as they are today.

This was the beginning of a widening process of decolonization that began under Harold Macmillan. Macmillan succeeded as prime minister when Eden resigned after Suez in January 1957. In 1960 in a speech made in South Africa Macmillan spoke of the ‘wind of change…blowing through the continent’. Britain should yield to the strength of African national consciousness, he said. Thereafter, a stream of African countries obtained independence–Sierra Leone in 1961, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Uganda in 1962, Kenya and Northern Rhodesia in 1963, Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1964, the Gambia in 1965, Basutoland (now Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1966, Aden (now South Yemen) in 1967 and Swaziland, the last, in 1968. In all these countries black majority rule took the place of the white colonial administration. This was not true, however, for two former British colonies in Africa: in Southern Rhodesia (see below) and the Union of South Africa.

In 1948 the Boer Nationalist party defeated General Smuts’s United party and began governing South Africa. To the consternation of the rest of the world they instituted a policy of separating citizens of African and Indian extraction from those of European, the white minority, by a system known as apartheid. Segregated schools, public lavatories, even swimming pools, were brought in to create a completely separate existence within one country. In 1961, as the apartheid system became increasingly barbaric and inhuman, South Africa was forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth and became an international outlaw, her goods boycotted for thirty years. Not until after the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994 did South Africa rejoin the Commonwealth.

Other former British colonies outside Africa also achieved rapid independence as part of the dismantling of the empire: in 1962 Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago; in 1965 it would be Singapore’s turn, in 1966 Barbados and British Guiana, in 1968 Mauritius. Most of them paid Britain the compliment of remaining members of the Commonwealth. In Cyprus, which had been a British colony since after the First World War, a long war against the British began in 1954. Despite the presence of a large Turkish minority on the island the majority Greek population led by Archbishop Makarios desired enosis, or union with Greece, but Britain was loath to grant their wish and thereby lose an important base in the eastern Mediterranean and also upset Turkey, a no less important ally in the Cold War. But in 1960, after the rights of Greek and Turkish Cypriots had been guaranteed by both Turkey and Greece, Cyprus was given her independence. Since 1974, however, after an attempted coup by the then military government in Greece, the island has been divided into two.

Harold Macmillan has been compared to Disraeli, on account of his robust romantic patriotism and his historical sense of Britain’s destiny. His wit and élan helped restore Britain’s self-confidence at a time when she was still feeling her way in the post-war world. Despite his aristocratic languor and mournful-bloodhound looks, he was a ruthless personality. When he sacked most of his Cabinet, including his chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd, in July 1962, his action was dubbed the ‘night of the long knives’ after Hitler’s assassination of the Brownshirt leaders in 1934. When his first chancellor and two other Treasury ministers had damagingly resigned a few years before Macmillan had laconically called it ‘little local difficulties’, but this time he was considered to have panicked.

The 1950s saw real growth in the British economy. With much of the rest of Europe still in ruins, for the present Britain had few competitors, and the retreat from empire and overseas responsibilities greatly reduced her costs. Like Disraeli, Macmillan never underestimated the importance of the nation’s comfort; his government built hundreds of new houses with the end-of-empire dividends. By 1959 Harold Macmillan’s boast that the British people ‘have never had it so good’ was evidently felt to be accurate. The Conservatives increased their majority by a hundred seats in the general election of that year.

Macmillan also addressed himself to defence options for Britain herself in a post-imperial age. Now that the atomic bomb had been invented, nuclear missiles offered a far cheaper way of defending Britain than conventional forces. Not having to support men and their families on military bases would save a great deal of money. It would end the unpopular and un British conscript ‘national service’ which had been in operation since the Second World War. But, although there was some experimentation in Britain with nuclear warheads, it became clear that America had perfected nuclear weapons to a higher degree than Britain could afford.

Britain’s abandonment of her own nuclear-weapon research and the Nassau Agreement of 1962, which signalled her dependence on America for such weapons, alarmed France. When Britain decided to apply for membership of the EEC in 1963, President Charles de Gaulle felt that Britain–and through Britain, America–would try to dominate the organization. The proudly nationalist de Gaulle did not accept France’s reduced role in the world and feared British power at the centre of Europe. He had no wish to encourage America as a superpower. Britain’s application was accordingly vetoed by France.

The humiliation inflicted by the EEC’s rejection as well as the mockery made by Labour of the much vaunted ‘independent British deterrent’, which was ‘neither independent, British nor a deterrent’, was the beginning of the end of thirteen years of Conservative rule. At the height of the Cold War there was one spying scandal after another. Britain’s security seemed deeply compromised in the early 1960s: there was the Portland spy ring, the Admiralty clerk William Vassal, as well as the intelligence officer George Blake who got forty-two years in prison for spying for the Russians. Questions were still being asked about the identity of the third man involved in the defection to Moscow of the high-ranking British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. Then the Profumo affair in 1963, when the secretary of state for war John Profumo was accused of sharing a call-girl mistress Christine Keeler with a Russian naval attaché, confirmed a growing suspicion that there was a careless decadence at the heart of the upper-crust government.

Although Profumo initially denied the relationship in a statement to the House of Commons, he eventually was forced to admit it and resigned. The senior judge Lord Denning’s official report into the affair exonerated Profumo of espionage, but confirmed the sensational press stories surrounding Lord Astor’s country home Cliveden. The affair sounded the death knell for an increasingly unpopular government. The trial for living off immoral earnings of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who had introduced Profumo to Keeler and seemed to have provided mistresses for many Tory politicians, provided an unfavourable contrast with the situation in the country, where sterling crises prevented pay increases in the public sector. Since 1959 the Conservatives had put through little domestic legislation. Four new universities had been founded in 1961 and six more were planned in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report, as were a number of new hospitals. Nevertheless the government gave the impression of being unwilling to put money into the maintenance of Britain’s public buildings, not least her schools. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which restricted immigration from Commonwealth countries, looked racist. Hugh Gaitskell denounced it in the House of Commons as ‘a plain anti-colour measure’. The Rent Act, which allowed far more competitive pricing, produced ruthless landlords like London’s Peter Rachman, who terrorized innocent bedsit-dwellers in the then run-down area of Notting Hill.

Thanks to Macmillan’s good relationship with President Kennedy, Britain became closely allied with America. Yet during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 it was quite obvious that, however special the ‘special relationship’, so often said to exist between the two countries, Britain was not accorded the status of a partner by the United States. When an American spy satellite orbiting over Cuba spotted Russian missiles apparently pointing at the United States, a world crisis of terrifying proportions threatened. Though America belonged to NATO, John F. Kennedy, the youthful and charismatic American president, opted to play a lone hand against the Russian threat.

He put a blockade round Cuba and brought the world to the brink of a third world war without telling his allies, not even Britain. British civil servants and politicians began to see that an alliance with America did not really offer a solution for post-imperial Britain, for evidently there was to be no discussion among equals. Therefore, in spite of de Gaulle’s rebuff, Britain began to revive her interest in the organization of European states. In terms of combined populations and of industrial and economic power, they made up as large a unit as America.

As a result of his theatrical abilities and his gift for presentation, Macmillan had become known to cartoonists as Supermac. But by the end of 1963 even his ability to convince the public was wearing thin. Although employment was high during the 1950s, the government’s economic policy had never been very smooth. In order to prevent inflation, the Conservatives had resorted to ‘stop-go’ policies: if prices rose too sharply, tax was suddenly increased; if they fell, interest rates were reduced. All in all, Macmillan’s administration was looking increasingly tawdry. At last, in 1963 illness forced him to resign dramatically in the middle of the Conservative party conference.

From his hospital bed Supermac made sure that it was a compromise candidate, the effete-looking fourteenth Earl of Home, who succeeded him as party leader and prime minister. Home gave up his peerage and became an MP as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Had his principal rival, the multi-talented progressive R. A. Butler become prime minister in his stead, as many in the party wished, the 1964 election might have had a different outcome.

Unfortunately Sir Alex was a completely unreconstructed aristocrat, more interested in shooting on his grouse moor than in managing the House of Commons, which as a member of the Lords he scarcely knew anyway. Macmillan in a lordly way might pretend that the grouse moors were his natural habitat, but in reality he was a furiously energetic party politician beneath the apparently effortless superiority.

As the 1964 election approached the world was dominated increasingly by new scientific discoveries, symbolized by America’s plans to put a man on the moon. The old certainties about Britain’s role were vanishing. Who was more fitted to lead Britain into an ever more competitive future where new industries must take the place of the old and obsolete? A cadaverous and faint-voiced lord who said that he used matchsticks to count with, or an energetic young economics don who promised to introduce Britain to ‘the white heat of technology’? Although it was a close-run thing there was not too much trouble deciding. Harold Wilson led Labour to victory by five votes in October 1964.

The Sick Man of Europe (1964-1979)

With the arrival of Labour in power in October 1964, the Swinging Sixties, as this progressive period is popularly known, really began. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was determined to modernize Britain. Her historic stability meant that the weight of tradition had a tendency to stifle change. The Ministry of Technology was created to thrust Britain forward into the modern age. By the late 1960s British and French engineers in happy collaboration trounced their American rivals by producing the Concorde aeroplane, which flew faster than the speed of sound. Consideration was even given to the amazing feat of submarine engineering to link the two countries which was finally achieved thirty years later, the Channel Tunnel.

Wilson’s government coincided with a seismic shifting of the historical templates, with revolutions in thought in both Britain and abroad. In July 1964 Winston Churchill retired from Parliament after almost sixty years as an MP; the previous year the last young men had emerged from doing national service, marking a full stop to the era of wartime austerity and to the habit of clean-cut conformity among the nation’s youth that the army required.

Youth’s rejection of the older generation had been announced by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger in 1956. By the mid-1960s ‘angry young men’ with long hair and outrageous clothing fresh out of university were not only the gadflies of the state, they set the tone for Britain. They became known for being ‘anti-establishment’, but in fact they were a new establishment whose allies were pop stars like the Liverpool group the Beatles, actors, photographers and models. With satirical TV shows such as That Was the Week that Was, and the satirical magazine Private Eye, which all made jokes not only about politicians but about the royal family, people in public life could no longer expect to escape criticism. The proliferating new universities–Sussex opened in 1961, Kent and Warwick in 1965, then eight more in 1966–gave Britain a far larger undergraduate population. Since many students were the first in their family to experience tertiary education, the universities became hotbeds of radical thought.

The impresario and anarchic director Joan Littlewood had already challenged the notion that all plays should take place in drawing rooms with her championing of working-class dramas and actors in her Theatre Royal in the East End. One kitchen-sink drama, A Taste of Honey in 1963, unblinkingly showed the trials of an unmarried mother. Littlewood’s 1963 musical Oh What a Lovely War! encapsulated the mood of the time in the scorn it poured on the officer class, an image from which they subsequently found it hard to escape.

The 1960s were the heyday of ideas and idealism and, paradoxically, of affluence. The young bought tellies, modern-looking furniture and bizarre fashionable clothes whose skirts were so short that only their generation could wear them. In 1966 young Britons began a consumer spree which has still not ended, and which their parents could never have enjoyed. Britain’s first credit card, the Barclaycard, transformed the notion of credit, which hitherto had hardly been taken further than paying in instalments for a three-piece suite bought on hire purchase. It paved the way to what has today become a leisure explosion of clothes, household appliances and the package holiday, all of which could be put on the credit card. By August 2002, some 49 per cent of all Britons had credit cards and were using them to spend £540,000 a minute–a total of £285 billion in 2001 alone.

The 1960s opened with the trial of Penguin Books for publishing an obscene book, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They were acquitted, a verdict which brought the notion of literary censorship to an end. The jury’s decision heralded an era of experimentation in all areas of life, with sexual permissiveness now made easier by the invention of the contraception pill. Under a great reforming home secretary, Roy Jenkins, the brilliant son of a miner MP, Labour moved Britain forward into a gentler, more humane society. Abortion was made legal in 1967 and thus safe for the poor (it had always been safe, though illegal, for the rich). This was part of an increasing sense that women were taking control of their destinies, the movement known as women’s liberation, which flourished from the late 1960s onwards and reflected the growing number of young women being educated. In 1951 only one-quarter of the student population were women; by the end of the century it would be over half.

Prodded by the popular new disciplines of psychiatry and psychology at the more modern universities, the old British private educational system of repressive boarding schools began to seem barbaric. Public schools were now laughed at for producing an unimaginative kind of imperial administrator who was made to seem redundant with the end of the empire. Indeed, education was undergoing huge changes at all levels. Labour, with their commitment to social reform, were determined to break a vicious circle of a tiny number of the population being creamed off at eleven by the eleven-plus exams, which separated the gifted few and packed them off to grammar schools. The rest mainly sank in the secondary moderns laid down by the Butler Education Act of 1944. Labour embarked on a programme of building comprehensive schools so that children of all abilities would be educated together, in the belief that this would take care of the problem of late developers or children from disadvantaged backgrounds who were eternally condemned by the eleven-plus to the outer darkness of the despised secondary moderns.

After the 1967 Plowden Report, teaching at primary level entered an experimental and imaginative phase in which understanding the child took precedence over the rigorous discipline with which British schooling had previously been associated. A whole generation of schoolchildren grew up of whom it was said that they were very happy and superb at creating things out of yogurt pots but could scarcely read. Nevertheless, initially it seemed that a new heaven on earth was being created by enlightened people which had done away with the problems, mainly class-ridden, of the past. The bowler hat vanished, and young Etonians spoke mockney (mock cockney) to imitate the argot of young working-class photographers. It was a romantic age: hairdressers were working-class heroes and ran off with heiresses, pop stars ran off with countesses. Stiff British society swung; the idea of class was turned on its head. Money was uncool; upper-middle-class people gave up sending their sons to their old prep schools and sent them to the local primary school. The Labour MP Tony Benn, who had been educated at Westminster public school and had renounced a viscountcy, made Holland Park Comprehensive famous when he sent all of his children there.

In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was made legal, ending years of misery for men (homosexuality among women had never been a criminal offence) who had previously been liable to imprisonment. The painful procedure of divorce was made less cruel by removing the question of guilt and providing that after two years of separation a marriage could be ended on grounds of irretrievable breakdown. Perhaps most important of all, in 1965 Britain abolished the death penalty, though it was too late for many innocent victims of prejudiced trials such as Derek Bentley.

That same year Labour, by the Race Relations Act, set up the Race Relations Board to tackle racism. A growing number of Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants from the old empire had been encouraged since 1945 by successive governments to fill employment gaps in factories, hospitals and on the railways. In the mill towns of the north they were forming sizeable communities and cultural differences were being exploited by those who feared that immigrants would not adapt to the British lifestyle. The act made the incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence. In 1968 a second Race Relations Act rendered racial discrimination in employment, advertising and housing illegal, created new immigration-appeal procedures and gave the Race Relations Board power to act directly in the courts.

By now America was not only conquering space ahead of Russia by sending men to the moon and back, she was heavily involved in the former French Indo-China fighting communism in the shape of the North Vietnamese, who, backed by communist China, had invaded South Vietnam.

The Labour government supported the American presence in Vietnam, though it declined a US request to send British troops. But as the war dragged on it became extremely brutal in its methods. Not only the left of the Labour party–which hitherto Wilson had been regarded as part of–violently disapproved of what they regarded as neo-colonialism, but millions of young Americans were outraged by it. One of the most important effects of the American anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was that protest movements became mainstream. By 1968 all over the world the young had gathered for revolution.

In Paris a student protest against poor teaching under the conservative Gaullist government turned into a massive strike, while in Prague behind the Iron Curtain there were the first attempts to break up the monolithic communist system. In what is known as the Prague Spring the Czech Communist party leader Alexander Dubček attempted to introduce ‘socialism with a human face’ by abolishing censorship and introducing multi-party elections. But it ended in August 1968 with Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Prague to restore what was effectively Soviet domination. There were photos in all the world’s newspapers of a despairing young Czech student named Jan Palach who burned himself alive in 1969, five months after the Prague Spring had failed to make it into summer.

Though British society was undergoing revolutionary change at all levels, Britain escaped revolutionary violence. Her problems were financial. Harold Wilson’s TV persona–he liked to be seen pipe in hand wearing a raincoat–was intended to reassure the viewer of his down-to-earth British credentials, but he seemed always to be fighting a losing battle against economic instability, having found himself in the middle of a balance of payments crisis when he took office, set off by Tory fiscal irresponsibility. He and his chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan staved off a devaluation crisis for long enough to win another election in 1966, massively increasing Labour’s majority to ninety-seven. But the British economy was failing. Industry was threatened externally by the rapidly reviving post-war economies of Germany, France and Japan and internally by the damage done by industrial action and strikes and soaring wage claims. The 1965 Trade Disputes Act made the strike weapon easier as it gave union leaders full legal protection to use it where there had been a threat of redundancy.

Wilson established the Prices and Incomes Board to investigate prices and wage demands with representatives from business and the trade unions, but when rising inflation necessitated giving the board legal powers to suppress soaring wage claims this angered the left in the Labour party as well as the trade unions themselves. Many felt that a Labour government with its roots in the trade union movement should not be in the business of preventing claims for higher wages. But Wilson had seen the figures: Britain could not afford the sort of claims which the unions were putting in. When he announced a statutory wage freeze to be put through Parliament to avoid devaluing the pound, there was uproar on the Labour backbenches. It would only get louder as the decade progressed.

Wilson’s novel weapons of wage freeze and wage restraint did not stop Britain arriving at another sterling crisis by the autumn of 1967, precipitated by her renewed desire to enter the Common Market. Strikes threatened, and confidence in the pound fell to a new low, with gold reserves rapidly diminishing. In November the government was forced to devalue the pound, having been unable to raise any further foreign loans to prop up its value. This was a traumatic moment for Labour, who had been desperate to avoid further association with this drastic remedy after its deployment by the Attlee government in 1949. Although Wilson, the cunning communicator, insisted the next day that this did not mean ‘the pound in your pocket’ was worth less, no one believed him.

The new $1 billion loan arranged for Britain by the International Monetary Fund had the usual conditions of curbing government spending for what was becoming a cap-in-hand nation. Harold Wilson in the late 1940s had himself resigned from government when charges for spectacles were introduced by the Attlee administration. Twenty years later he was presiding over prescription charges on the NHS, building fewer council houses and putting off (until 1973) that key improver of children’s lives, raising the school leaving age to sixteen.

Labour did not want to abandon all reforms, but they had to rely on emergency budgets to raise money. Worldwide, markets were in turmoil. Under Roy Jenkins, who replaced Callaghan as chancellor after the devaluation, there were price hikes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes intended to control inflation. Austerity ruled at the gloomy Treasury. Once again, as in the late 1940s, Britons were allowed to take only £50 out of the country on holiday. It was not until the autumn of 1969 that economic recovery and a trade surplus put an end to a financial regime which Britons today would find unacceptable.

Meanwhile industrial action and the millions of days lost to industry were destroying the economy. Laws were needed to prevent wildcat unofficial strikes by left-wing shop stewards. Wilson and Barbara Castle, the secretary of state for employment and productivity, tried to use legislation to bring the trade union movement to heel, and in a famous White Paper entitled In Place of Strife they proposed that all strikes should first be approved by a ballot of the members. But MPs such as Jim Callaghan, who in a job-swap with Jenkins was now home secretary, were extremely unhappy at the idea of introducing laws of which the Conservative party might have been the author. A backbench revolt combined with the TUC’s refusal to accept fines or legislation against strikes ensured that by 1969 Wilson and Castle had to accept that the government had no chance of putting anti-strike legislation through Parliament, despite its enormous majority. They were forced to rely solely on the TUC’s word that it would use its influence to prevent unofficial strikes.

Britain’s revived attempt to join the Common Market was vetoed, for the second time, by de Gaulle shortly after the devaluation in 1967. Some comfort was derived from the resignation of de Gaulle in 1969, which suggested that next time it would be easier to be accepted into the Common Market. Britain therefore persisted with her negotiations for membership. Although Labour had set up a Ministry for Overseas Development to help the newly independent Commonwealth countries find their feet, the dynamics of nationalism had loosened ties between the old colonies and Britain. The increasing volume of trade with Europe made joining the Common Market seem inevitable.

Labour pressed on with relinquishing commitments, withdrawing what troops remained east of Suez. Under pressure from the African Commonwealth countries in 1965, the government imposed sanctions against the white Rhodesian politician Ian Smith when he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence to evade the transition to black majority rule. Commonwealth pressure chimed in with Labour’s natural idealism to stop Britain selling arms to South Africa in 1967, though many argued that this would lose thousands of jobs in the UK and that South Africa would obtain arms anyway from the French and the Israelis. Nevertheless Labour believed that they should not be seen to approve of a pariah nation. However, the support of the Wilson government for the Nigerian authorities when they refused to allow Biafra to break away and fought a bloody war (1967–70) angered many on both sides of the House.

During the campaign for the 1970 general election Labour seemed bound to win again. The government had been responsible for a remarkable quantity of improvements to the fabric of modern Britain. Establishing a Parliamentary Ombudsman to look into failures in Whitehall departments made the process of government more accountable to the people. But in 1970 it seemed Britons were dissatisfied by the rising tax demands and attracted by the Conservatives’ patriotic reminders of Britain’s great-power past. Despite all Labour’s reforms their choppy financial record made the electorate turn to the more grandiose Conservatives, who denounced Labour’s economic ‘plans’, higher taxation and incomes policies as interference in people’s personal affairs.

The Conservatives presented a united front under their new leader Edward Heath, with his bright-blue eyes and booming voice. Heath came to power determined to succeed where Wilson had failed: he wanted to cut government spending and see off the unions. The millions of days lost in unofficial strikes continued to run down British industry and lose international markets, despite the TUC’s vow of self-regulation. But the Conservatives came to grief in the epidemic of inflation which gripped the world at the beginning of the 1970s. There were enormous rises in world food prices and commodities which badly hit British shops.

The Conservatives were forced to devote large sums of taxpayers’ money to saving some of Britain’s most famous industries such as Rolls-Royce aero-engines and Clydeside shipbuilders. But the Heath government’s decision to enforce a nationwide wage freeze when the TUC and the Confederation of British Industry together failed to reach a self-restricting wage limit outraged the unions. Their members were watching the price of milk and butter rise by 25 per cent a year. Heath set up two national organizations which were even more far-reaching than Wilson’s: the Price Commission and the Pay Board which had to approve all pay rises affecting more than a thousand people.

The subject nearest Heath’s heart was joining the European Common Market. This had always been one of his great enthusiasms (the others were yachting and music–he had been the organ scholar at Balliol College, Oxford). And fittingly it was under his government that Great Britain became part of the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973. To prepare for joining Europe, in 1971, the Conservatives brought in decimalization, the conversion of the British pound into a system based on tens to chime in with the continent. To a fanfare of national protest, the pound now comprised 100 new pence instead of 240 old pence; the sixpence was replaced by two and a half pence, and the shilling by five pence. Although Britain was also supposed to have converted to European kilometres, the majority of the population regardless of their age continue to talk about that ancient unit brought to Britain by the Romans, the mile. Nevertheless, kilograms and millimetres are now Britain’s official units for weights and measures.

The Market’s common external tariff ended Britain’s very close relationship with Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand, which sent almost 90 per cent of her dairy products to Britain and in return received over half of her imports from Britain. Nowadays most of New Zealand’s dairy trade is with Asian countries. The rupture of the former empire’s trading links angered many politicians. They feared the end of cheap food from the empire and the effect on Britain’s fishermen of not being allowed to fish at will in the seas surrounding Britain, given that each EEC country has its quota. The left wing of the Labour party began to turn anti-marketeer. So did some Conservatives who felt that the Commonwealth was being too swiftly abandoned for Europe.

Relations with the Commonwealth were made dramatically worse in 1971 when the government attempted to implement a harsh new Immigration Act. This would have prevented any further automatic immigration into Britain from former Commonwealth countries, while making it easier for EEC nationals. The bill aroused outrage on all sides of the House. MPs were still sensitive about the Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 in which he had proposed voluntary repatriation for Asians and West Indians. The legislation was altered: members of Commonwealth countries who wished to immigrate into this country who had a ‘grandpatrial’ connection, that is whose grandparents were from Britain, had preference over citizens of European Community countries. By accepting all 40,000 Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, in 1972 without a quibble, the Conservative government did something to restore good relations with the Commonwealth. So did the continuance of sanctions against Rhodesia.

As traditional supporters of the British arms industry, it was to be expected that under the Conservatives arms sales to South Africa would be resumed. That did not stop the increasingly assertive Commonwealth from condemning the move. In 1971 the Conservatives showed a return to a sort of mini-imperialism east of Suez by setting up a mutual defence pact with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Diplomatic relations were opened with Maoist China, which had been severed since 1949, an event memorialized by Beijing’s gift to London Zoo of two giant pandas named Chi-Chi and An-An.

Not content with changing the currency and the country’s trading orientation, the Heath government massively remodelled local government to reflect population trends. In six conurbations outside London new metropolitan counties came into being–Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.

The Heath government also saw the intensification of a civil war in Northern Ireland which had erupted in the last year of the Wilson administration. Stormont, the local Parliament for home affairs established in 1920 on the edge of Belfast, had ruled Northern Ireland in the interests of the two-thirds Protestant majority. Protestants controlled everything, including housing and employment, leaving Catholics with very few civil rights. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, the province’s police force, was Protestant to a man and discriminated against Catholics.

For forty years the Catholics of Northern Ireland had endured being treated as a lesser race. However, at the end of the 1960s the example of black people successfully asserting their civil rights in America inspired them to revolt. Civil rights organizations began to flourish in Northern Ireland, helped by a liberal reforming prime minister, Captain Terence O’Neill. The Royal Ulster Constabulary outraged world opinion by using violence against demonstrators, but no policeman was punished for this brutality and no attempts were made at government level to get Stormont to be more responsive to the needs of the Catholic community. So serious did the situation become, with clashes between Protestant and Catholic rioters and the burning of hundreds of mainly Catholic homes in Belfast, that in 1969 Wilson sent British troops to the province.

At the same time a deadly new splinter group called the Provisional IRA, or the Provos, started murdering Protestants in Northern Ireland. They believed that the only way things would ever improve for the Catholics was to obtain the unification of Ireland. The bombing campaign waged pitilessly by the Provos was answered just as bloodily by Protestant terrorist groups. When the British government insisted on introducing internment without trial, the prejudice against Catholics seemed to be confirmed even in the treatment of suspected terrorists, as no Protestant terrorists were being interned.

The watershed came one day in January 1972 that became infamous as Bloody Sunday, when thirteen members of a peaceful group of Catholic demonstrators were shot dead in Derry. With the province in uproar the Conservative government concluded that the fifty-year-old Stormont Parliament should be closed down. Direct rule would be imposed for twelve months while plans were drawn up for a fairer assembly and a power-sharing executive created from that assembly with equal rights for Catholics and Protestants.

The Heath government understood that one of the most important factors in obtaining peace in Northern Ireland was to involve Southern Ireland or Eire. At Sunningdale in 1973 the Council of Ireland was created, a body with members from both north and south. In return for gaining some say in the north’s affairs, Dublin agreed to give up its fifty-year-old claim to Northern Ireland. Dublin also accepted that the province would never change its status and be reabsorbed into the south unless the majority of its citizens wished it.

Despite the importance of these exchanges, the sectarian hatreds of Northern Ireland prevented the assembly’s rule of the province from getting under way as planned in January 1974. All the successful candidates in the elections to the new assembly, except one, were opposed to sharing power with the Catholics. Strikes took place all over Ulster in bitter protest against the Sunningdale agreement. The British government was forced to suspend Stormont and retreat to direct rule once more, with 20,000 soldiers now stationed in Ulster.

As Heath’s initiatives in Northern Ireland ground to a halt, by the beginning of 1973 his industrial strategy was also being violently rejected. A series of massive strikes had been directed against his pay and price initiatives. Even normally restrained civil servants went on strike as the price of food soared and unemployment rocketed. The American dollar was devalued with knock-on effects on the pound. So ruinous and uncontrollable was the rate of inflation that Heath’s chancellor Anthony Barber was forced to make emergency payments to those on social security and to subsidize the price of butter. He also handed over no less than £15 million to the mortgage companies to make sure they kept their interest rates down because the cost of living was rising too fast.

Unlike Labour, the Conservatives had not been divided among themselves over legislation to restrict the powers of the trade unions. They pushed through industrial relations laws and set up the National Industrial Relations Court. But this policy of confrontation did not stop the strikes. In 1972 the Conservatives had been humiliated when an inquiry awarded striking miners a pay rise three times the amount the government was offering.

In October 1973 the already spiralling inflation spun out of control, as it did all over western Europe, as a result of the Arab–Israeli Yom Kippur War. Enraged by western support for a victorious Israel, which had once again defeated the Arab nations, Arab revenge had been hardhitting. Countries which had supplied arms to Israel were boycotted, and oil prices were quadrupled. This pitched the economies of western Europe into recession. At this time of crisis it was more necessary than ever to keep a ceiling on wages and prices. But the miners rebelling against Heath’s price controls realized that the moment gave them unique leverage. With fuel at a premium, they refused to work overtime unless they were given a pay increase above the government’s norm. They were joined in fraternal solidarity by the electricity power engineers and by ASLEF, the Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen; this disrupted not only the running of power stations but the movement of coal.

As the icy winter of 1973 drew on the country began grinding to a halt. Heath felt he had to stand by his inflation strategy, but the result was deadlock. Once again the government was forced to employ emergency measures. British industry was rationed to working a three-day week to save electricity. A sense of despair pervaded the country. A government-imposed speed limit took the place of petrol rationing, but the effect on morale was the same. Television stations were forced to close down by government order at 10.30 each night. When the TUC stepped in to offer to negotiate a one-off settlement with the miners outside Heath’s pay norm, the newspapers asked ‘Who governs Britain?’ But the miners refused to enter into further negotiations. They wanted a dramatic increase in wages, even though Britain could not afford it. When that was refused the miners declared that on 9 February 1974 they would strike. In response Heath called a general election for 28 February.

Heath had only been pursuing policies which Labour had pursued more cautiously. But, just as he had been defeated by the miners, he was defeated at the election–though so narrowly that he could approach the Liberals and ask them to form a pact with him. There was not enough common ground between the two parties, and so Harold Wilson formed a minority government, returning to power for the third time. In October that year he went to the country again, in search of an overall majority; he succeeded, but his majority was only three. Heath was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative party in February 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, his former education minister. With right-wing support she succeeded in replacing him.

In theory, an agreement known as the social contract between Labour and the TUC that had been reached before the February election should have made industrial relations less fraught. In return for the Labour government repealing Heath’s anti-union legislation, the TUC promised once more to lean on the unions and dissuade them from demanding from the country more than it could afford. The miners’ strike was indeed soon settled. Nevertheless, the rate of inflation ensured that the unions were not inclined to restrain themselves. By 1975 annual wage increases were averaging a grotesque 25 per cent a year, in line with inflation. Over the previous five years, the PSBR (the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement–the total borrowing of the government and of nationalized industries) had gone up by £8 billion. Once again in July 1975 the Labour government fell back on a statutory price freeze and a statutory prices and incomes policy, so that those earning over £8,500 a year were not allowed more money.

Labour fought a losing battle to keep down the cost of government. Mammoth amounts of money were still borrowed by the government and poured into British industries such as British Leyland Cars, Rolls-Royce and Ferranti. By 1976, once again, to the outside world Britain under Labour seemed to be sinking. In March Wilson retired without warning as prime minister. He was succeeded by James Callaghan, who had held the offices of home secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer in previous Wilson administrations and had been foreign secretary since 1974. He and his chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey’s immediate task was to negotiate another vast loan of £3,900 million from the International Monetary Fund in Washington to prop up sterling. Once again, the conditions dictated to the British government by the IMF were to reduce public spending.

Denis Healey would implement deep cuts in health and education. But the Labour government was already committed to higher taxation as part of their policy of wealth redistribution. Healey’s frappant remarks about soaking the rich could not be forgotten when supertaxes came in, with the highest rate pitched at a colossal 83 per cent. Many high earners chose to leave Britain now that they were only receiving seventeen pennies for every pound they earned. The new administration could not counter the widespread feeling that the unions ruled Britain. The weakness of the government was shown at every level.

A series of dismal by-elections had cut Labour’s overall majority down to one. Only an agreement with the Liberals, the Lib–Lab pact, allowed them to continue in office, as Callaghan did not want to call an election. The Liberals under the youthful David Steel, ‘the Boy David’, made it a condition of their support that they should be able to veto every new Labour law. As ever the Liberals were hoping for electoral reform and proportional representation: in February 1974 they had polled six million votes out of a total of twenty-seven million, almost a quarter of the voting population, and yet had won only fourteen seats out of 635 in the House of Commons. But owing to an upsurge of Celtic nationalism, the Liberal vote started falling. When the Liberals decided to withdraw their support Callaghan was forced to turn to the newly powerful Scottish Nationalists, who had eleven seats by October 1974. The Scottish Nationalists demanded devolution and a Scottish Assembly in exchange for their support. The discovery of oil in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland in the late 1960s had given the Scots confidence that ‘their’ oil could finance an independent government. Their demands for Scottish independence obliged Labour to speed up an inquiry into the possibilities of devolution and regional assemblies for Scotland and Wales.

Sunny Jim, as the burly, commonsensical Callaghan was known, had begun his reign full of optimism and with the support of the unions. He was determined to unite left and right within the Labour party. But by the beginning of 1979 the unions were no more inclined to obey him or the TUC than they ever had been. They simply refused to be tied to the wage increases the government had asked for to keep down inflation. Almost all asked for double–and got it.

And the way they got it was by strikes. There was endless industrial action by transport workers and a reckless strike mentality spread into every industry in Britain. When in late January 1979 over a million workers in the public services, dustmen, ambulance drivers and water engineers, went on strike for a day it seemed that Britain was collapsing into its own filth. The dead could not even be buried. It was Britain’s ‘Winter of Discontent’.

In marked contrast to Callaghan’s constant and ultimately feeble remonstrations with the unions was the voice of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the new leader of the Conservative party. She did not mince her words as she watched the government’s guidelines on incomes and industrial policies being destroyed by the unions. Increasingly most of the country agreed with her as the rubbish mounted outside their windows during a three-and-a-half-month dustmen’s strike. At the end of March 1979 the Labour government had run out of deals. On a no-confidence motion in the House of Commons, it was brought down by one vote and an election was called for 3 May.

The Thatcher Legacy (1979–2002)

In a dramatic reversal of fortune the 1979 election gave the Conservatives 339 seats, against Labour’s 268. With an overall majority of forty-three the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher took office. With her elegant blonde coiffeur, her high court shoes, flowing skirts and handbag she looked no more threatening than the wife of the company director she was. But Mrs Thatcher’s sedate appearance disguised the fact that she was a revolutionary, a revolutionary of the right.

By 1979 British industrial productivity had reached dramatic new lows. Britain was known as the Sick Man of Europe and was being held to ransom by the unions, whose legendary union-sponsored tea breaks made the country a laughing stock all over the world. The Labour government’s stormy attempts to curb the unruly unions weakened Britain’s international standing and undermined sterling. Restrictive union practices–for example, that such and such a worker could only do the job his union permitted–were holding back Britain from the sort of technological innovation without which industries die. The print unions were preventing the British newspaper business from using the computer technology that would have made their papers far cheaper to produce, because it would put the compositors out of a job–the people who each day pasted up the type for the hot-metal printing process invented in the fifteenth century. Japan and Germany were forging ahead because they had rebuilt their industries from scratch after the destruction of the Second World War, unimpeded by obstructive unions.

In 1979 the state not only owned practically every large industry from Vickers shipbuilding to British Steel, from Jaguar to British Gas, from British Airways to Rolls-Royce. It owned and maintained all the nation’s council houses; it paid the salaries of the whole of the civil service and its myriad subdivisions which took care of tax collection and parking fines; its employees also included all the nurses and doctors employed in NHS hospitals and the cleaning staff too. It had to meet gigantic welfare bills. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the British state had been expanding its remit until it was the biggest employer and provider in the country. And yet Great Britain plc was going broke. She could not afford to run all the businesses she owned; she was constantly having to bail out many of the older industries like shipbuilding and coalmining with subsidies, because other countries could produce those products more cheaply. The spectre of mass unemployment in the communities that had grown up round shipyards and mines kept them open.

Mrs Thatcher was adamant that Britain could not go on borrowing immense sums from the International Monetary Fund to save failing state industries for what she considered to be sentimental reasons. She believed that Britain had drastically to reduce the overwhelming Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, and also to bring down the terrifying inflation rate, not by agreements with the trade unions but by controlling the money supply. Mrs Thatcher became famous for making Britain balance her books, for only paying what she could afford, and for a campaign to replace the culture of benefit scrounging with a nation of responsible home owners.

Though the Conservative party was traditionally a party of pragmatists who distrusted ideology, the Thatcherites were known for their slogans. They believed that they had a hard road to travel to rid Britain of the creep of socialist ideas, those post-war consensual assumptions Mrs Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph called ‘well-intentioned statism’. Their most celebrated slogan summed up everything about the Thatcher Revolution. It was ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. Privatization of numerous state activities was the Thatcher government’s most significant contribution to British politics; in the process they invented what they called ‘popular capitalism’ through a ‘stakeholder democracy’. British politics were turned on their head.

Almost all of the nationalized industries, most of which had become unprofitable monoliths, were sold off to private companies, or privatized, starting in 1980 with British Aerospace and British Airways. Private sector involvement was heavily encouraged in the public services. In the process Mrs Thatcher for most of the decade succeeded where her predecessors for the previous thirty years had failed: she broke the power of the trade unions once and for all and slew the dragon of inflation. By ridding the government of responsibility for inefficient and expensive state-owned industries, by the late 1980s she had raised £20 billion for the Treasury, and still more was raised when her creation of a deregulated, free-market economy helped spark a consumer boom.

By giving ordinary people who had never bought a share in their life a stake in the privatized industries and utilities of Britain, Mrs Thatcher intended to strengthen the bulwarks of the democratic process against socialism, by restoring people’s pride in their independence. She believed that a dependency culture was eating away at Britain–too many people expected everything to be provided by the welfare state instead of by their own efforts. She was determined to create an enterprise culture instead where the sort of people who supported her were rewarded, not those who depended for everything on what she called the nanny state. In some ways Mrs Thatcher’s convictions were simplistic. One of her favourite slogans was that Britain must return to ‘Victorian values’, when the state had been kept at arm’s length by the self-reliant ethos which had made Britain great. She believed that if people owned their houses they would become more upright citizens and take greater care of their environment. Her Council House Acts of 1980 and 1984 which enabled council-house tenants to buy their own homes with large discounts helped swing the working-class vote her way.

Mrs Thatcher had read chemistry at Oxford in the late 1940s, at that time a considerable achievement for a woman. As prime minister she stood out against her all-male Cabinet, as she did against the 635-strong House of Commons, for in 1979 there were only nineteen women MPs. She had shown similar robustness as education minister under Heath and had given some hint of the shape of things to come when she ended free milk in schools, gaining the nickname ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’. Some of her keenest supporters were self-made British Asian businessmen whose values of frugality, hard work and self-sufficiency were so similar to hers. But her followers came from a wide spectrum: they were not only bankers and financiers, they were small businessmen, shopkeepers and ordinary people fed up with the culture of Labour which seemed to be epitomized by inefficiency and the closed shop. The advertising slogan accompanying a posed photograph of a snaking dole queue which had helped win the Conservatives the 1979 election, ‘Labour isn’t working’, said it all.

The arrival of the new government was overshadowed by two IRA assassinations, spectacular even after a five-year Provisional IRA campaign to get the British troops out by bombing the mainland. There had been bombs on the M62, and at pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, but when the IRA succeeded in penetrating the House of Commons car park and blew up Mrs Thatcher’s mentor, the MP and Colditz escaper Airey Neave days before his protégé was elected prime minister, there was consternation over the threat to state security. It was followed at the end of August 1979 by the no less shocking murder of Earl Mountbatten and members of his family in a fishing boat in Ireland.

In its first months in office the Conservative government scored a remarkable diplomatic success. The seemingly intractable problem of the fifteen-year-old war in Southern Rhodesia yielded to the formidable foreign secretary Lord Carrington when he decided to deal directly with the guerrillas. Under the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 Smith and the guerrilla leaders agreed to a ceasefire and democratic elections. The guerrillas handed in their guns in an orderly fashion at collection points, and free elections were arranged on the basis of one man one vote. Black majority rule brought the former guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to power in February 1980. He became prime minister of the independent nation of Southern Rhodesia, which took the African name Zimbabwe.

The same year the amount of oil flowing from Britain’s North Sea oilfields took a quantum leap five years after coming onstream and solved Britain’s fuel crisis. Cushioned by oil income–Britain in the early 1980s was extracting close to one-tenth of the world’s production–Mrs Thatcher reinvented the British economy. Under her chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe, Labour’s swingeing taxation of the wealthiest was ended, the supertax of 83 per cent was cut to 60 and income tax reduced. A few years later the highest tax band would be 40 per cent. Mrs Thatcher believed that the pounds saved from the taxman would create a consumer boom. At the same time indirect taxation such as VAT was almost doubled, which (as some commentators noted) put the tax burden back on to those least able to bear it.

As the work of freeing the state of its vast burden and dismantling the enormously top-heavy public sector got under way, inflation fell towards single figures. Life slowly began to improve for many Britons as Mrs Thatcher and her team embarked on breaking up the state monopolies. Control over telephone equipment, for example, was removed from the Post Office in 1980. Once the telecommunications industry had been opened up to competition, the bad old days of a quarter of a million people waiting for phones, as they had done in the 1970s, were over. British Telecom, the new name of the privatized industry, was obliged to compete in the market. Overall Britain became far more efficient.

But the Thatcher success story and the Thatcherite mantra that the market must rule and the government not interfere had social drawbacks: massive unemployment and the contraction of the United Kingdom’s manufacturing base. As a result of the new government’s determination not to pour good money after bad, many state-owned and private businesses started to go bankrupt. In September 1980 the steel works at Consett, County Durham, which was the main source of work in the area, closed down. In historic manufacturing centres like Leeds, where engineering, textiles and printing had provided employment for more than a hundred years, the unprofitable, in the Thatcherite jargon of the day, had ‘to go to the wall’. Manufacturing slumped from 52 per cent of the British economy to 32. All over the north, the centre of heavy industry, unemployment rose by leaps and bounds.

By the spring of 1982 more than three million people were out of work, figures which were worse than those seen in the great depression. Helped by the harsh economic climate, Mrs Thatcher’s war against the unions was dramatically successful. She outlawed secondary picketing, reduced the scope of the closed shop and made it easier for employers to sack inadequate employees, which previously would have brought the unions out on strike. Unions could also be fined for unlawful industrial action. As unemployment climbed in the recession of the early 1980s the unions lost much of their power as a result of huge redundancies. They were not able to come out on strike because their membership had decreased so rapidly, and the TUC no longer encouraged strikes as they had in the past. In 1983 a newspaper publisher from Manchester named Eddy Shah paved the way for the computerized newspapers of our era when he launched a paper called Today without unionized labour.

In a failure of imagination born of her own comfortable circumstances and her own strong character, Mrs Thatcher could not visualize the plight of the poor or unemployed who through no fault of their own were living on benefit. To discourage reliance on the welfare state and force the unemployed into looking for jobs, her government deliberately set benefits to be increased at a rate 5 per cent below inflation. This was a saving at the expense of those least able to afford it, but Mrs Thatcher believed that harsh measures were the only way to break what she thought of as a vicious circle.

Mrs Thatcher’s pronouncements to the effect that she did not believe in ‘society’ infuriated many of Britain’s institutions–the universities and Churches, local councillors and the caring professions. The government’s reputation could not but be dented by the unprecedented unemployment figures. The complaints that Thatcherism was cold and unfeeling began to be heard even among Tories, many of whom were of the One Nation Disraelian variety. They believed with Peel and Disraeli that Conservatism must not be the rule of the haves without reaching out to the have-nots. Mrs Thatcher herself divided her party into wets (One Nation Tories) and dries (her sensible followers). Britain’s greatest asset in many people’s eyes was that she was a uniquely caring society, the jewel in whose crown was the safety net of the National Health Service. But Mrs Thatcher and her brilliant Cabinet, whose grasp of the mysteries of economics could reduce opponents to silence, believed that this was the sort of talk that had driven the country massively into debt. Yet no matter how much hard men surrounding Mrs Thatcher suggested that the unemployed ‘got on their bikes’ and out of the social security offices to find work, too many areas had unemployment levels approaching 50 per cent.

In the spring of 1981 the tension in Britain suddenly exploded into inner-city riots. Brixton in south London was out of police control for several days. Although they were called race riots, the motive seems not to have been racial so much as the reaction of disadvantaged inner-city people who saw no future for themselves. Lord Scarman, a distinguished law lord who was chosen to chair an inquiry into the riots, was of that opinion. In Scarman’s view the underlying problem was not criminal elements but unemployment and social despair in the decaying inner cities. Mrs Thatcher, however, refused to believe his evidence. Scarman also recommended that larger numbers of the police be recruited from the ethnic minorities and greater efforts be put into community policing.

Though Mrs Thatcher personally continued to believe in ‘criminal elements’, other members of the government nevertheless accepted that there was an urgent need for some state involvement to accelerate urban renewal. Grant-aided schemes for the unemployed were produced to help them start up their own businesses. The environment secretary Michael Heseltine launched a big northern initiative to help Liverpool’s Toxteth district where there had been rioting for three days.

A few months after the Brixton riots the social fabric of Britain was strong enough to revive for the marriage of Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, to the enchanting blonde nursery-school teacher Lady Diana Spencer, in July 1981. She was a nineteen-year-old member of an old aristocratic landowning family with strong links to the court. Princess Diana’s youth and spontaneous charm took the popularity of the royal family to new heights, as did her warm-hearted espousal of many difficult causes. She was admired for insisting on shaking hands with AIDS sufferers at a time when many thought that it was like leprosy and spread by touch. She would go on to do much to discredit the use of landmines throughout the world. The wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral was watched by millions of people round the world and there were celebratory street parties all over the country.

Meanwhile Mrs Thatcher’s success curve continued onwards and upwards: she moved from setting Britain’s financial house in order to clawing back the nation’s surplus contribution to the European Community budget, and by 1983 she had achieved a £450 million EC budget rebate to the UK. Nevertheless her revolution continued to antagonize many sections of British society, as did her close relationship with the ultra-conservative Republican administration in Washington. The election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, restarted the Cold War after a promising period of détente which had seen work begin on a gas pipeline between Siberia and western Europe.

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.

These momentous events sounded the death-knell of the Marxist system and heralded a new post-ideological age. They have had endless international repercussions, not least of which is that they have left the United States the only superpower in the world. America immediately agreed a series of arms-limitation treaties, as there were around 27,000 warheads in the new republics. Many eastern European countries applied to join the European Union, and ten who were accepted as members after signing the Treaty of Accession in 2003 are set to join the fifteen existing members on 1 May 2004. Former Soviet-bloc countries also joined NATO, the organization originally set up to counter the threat they presented as members of the Warsaw Pact.

In Britain the break-up of the Soviet system only underlined to the small group of Labour modernizers the desperate need for change if the party wanted to avoid becoming a dinosaur like the Soviet Communist party. Neil Kinnock saw that Labour must become more moderate if they wanted to return to office. Alarmed by the success of the SDP, whose electoral pact with the Liberals began eating away at the Labour vote in the mid-1980s, he spent the rest of the decade cleaning out the hard left from the Labour party. With the help of a communications director of genius, a young television producer named Peter Mandelson, grandson of the 1945 Labour home secretary Herbert Morrison, Kinnock began changing Labour’s image. In 1986 at the party conference the outmoded revolutionary Red Flag was swapped for a softer red rose as the party’s emblem. The next few years would see Labour abandon CND, nationalization and punitive taxation.

Kinnock’s greatest challenge was the Trotskyist organization Militant, which had become entrenched within the Labour party. Militant believed in permanent revolution rather than Parliamentary democracy and were especially powerful in local government. They would prove extremely difficult to dislodge. Kinnock found an unexpected ally against Militant in Mrs Thatcher. In her second term of office, she embarked on her great experiment of controlling expenditure at local government level.

Militant had given town-hall funding a bad name by insisting on giving money to increasingly esoteric projects which suited their extremist beliefs, and this began to infuriate taxpayers. In 1984 with the introduction of rate-capping–enabling central government to ‘cap’ the rates if it considered them to be too high–Mrs Thatcher hoped to put an end to Militant’s activities. Councils which overspent had their grants reduced, while those which kept within their limits would also have their grants reduced–it was a late-twentieth-century version of Morton’s Fork and just about as popular. Although Britons were getting tired of strange projects belonging to what was now being called the loony left, they also disliked the way rate-capping limited local services. School buildings suffered, as did social services, housing and homeless shelters. In 1985 Faith in the City, a report by a Church of England commission, urged emergency action by the government to relieve the plight of inner cities.

In areas like Liverpool where many of the councillors were members of Militant, they refused to accept rate-capping and went on spending. This had been made illegal so that council leaders would be personally liable for costs, but Liverpool Council elected to go bankrupt when central government withheld its funds. The council had to borrow the unheard of sum of £30 million from a foreign bank to cover its debts. But the council still could not pay many of its workers. Militant’s irresponsible behaviour enraged ordinary Labour supporters.

In June 1987 Mrs Thatcher won her third successive election with a reduced but still substantial majority of 101. Her final push to control local expenditure demonstrated that she had rather lost her political touch. She had already outraged liberal opinion with an attack on local freedoms in the form of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act which forbade the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. This provision was her response to media reports that local councils were promoting the idea of families with two gay parents.

Moreover in the late 1980s the gilt had begun wearing off the economic miracle of Thatcherism which had so mesmerized the world, with inflation reduced to 2.5 per cent in 1986. What had been boom was turning to bust. In 1987 the pro-European chancellor Nigel Lawson slashed interest rates as the economy soared. He was shadowing the European Monetary System, the first step on the way to a single currency for the whole of Europe. At the same time a huge tax cut took the basic rate of income tax from 27 per cent to 25. Lawson believed the boom would last forever but low interest rates, low tax rates and double tax relief sparked a property-buying frenzy and house prices suddenly started rising by 34 per cent a year. Interest rates had to be sharply raised to cool the overheating economy as retail price inflation rose to 10 per cent in 1990–and the Lawson boom was over.

In an excess of centralizing zeal Mrs Thatcher had abolished the Greater London Council in 1986 when it refused to reduce its expenditure. Now as Labour councils carried on raising the rates to counter the squeeze from central government, she decided that the only solution was to abolish the rates. In their stead she introduced the poll tax–poll being an ancient world for head. This tax had caused a revolt in the time of Richard II. It would have the same sort of effect in the reign of Elizabeth II.

Like many aspects of the Thatcher Revolution, the poll tax made logical sense to the Thatcherites but was hard for unbelievers to grasp. This time the Thatcherites’ proud reputation for thinking the unthinkable was simply unthinkable, and a public-relations disaster. Mrs Thatcher and her researchers had hit on the fact that only a minority of the population were paying local taxes, less than half of the electorate of thirty-five million. Every man and woman able to vote would pay the one-off poll tax (its formal name was actually the community charge). That would soon keep council taxes down as voters hit in their pockets would vote for lower-spending (and so no doubt Conservative) councils.

Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet believed the poll tax would unleash the angry citizenry on the town halls determined to curb their spending. But the government had badly miscalculated: instead the angry citizenry turned on the government in widespread poll-tax riots. The message which the British people picked up on was that the duke and the dustman were going to have to pay the same tax, and their sense of fair play was outraged.

Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher would not draw back. Her motto, she had once said, was ‘This lady’s not for turning.’ But many in the Conservative party began to worry about her increasing inability to listen to the electorate or to the Cabinet. In 1989 Nigel Lawson resigned, chiefly because of Mrs Thatcher’s reluctance to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, or ERM, although she had signed the Single European Act in 1986 which provided for greater European Community economic and social integration from 1992.

The poll-tax riots took place in March 1990. In August that year the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, thus threatening Europe’s oil supplies, and despite a UN Security Council resolution, failed to withdraw. Mrs Thatcher was at her courageous best encouraging the new United States president George Bush to lead a multinational coalition under UN auspices to war against Saddam when he refused to obey the UN. But disaffected Tories were worried by the way their party’s lead was dropping in the opinion polls. The Thatcher revolution was running out of steam, even for her followers. Three months later Mrs Thatcher was to find herself stabbed in the back by a challenge to her leadership. That November John Major became British prime minister.

Mrs Thatcher had been in power for eleven years. There is no disputing her lion heart. Not only had she changed Britain almost overnight. Under her education minister Sir Keith Joseph, who was responsible for much of her regime’s intellectual daring, she had paved the way for the greater testing and standardizing of education which began with the introduction of the national curriculum system in 1988. Tests for children at seven, eleven and fourteen, designed to show where schools were failing, signalled the end of thirty years of progressive teaching that had derailed into an undisciplined belief that it was more important for children to explore or ‘find themselves’ than to take in information.

Mrs Thatcher’s Hillsborough Agreement in 1985 setting up an experimental inter-governmental Anglo-Irish Council was the beginning of the political solution that Catholic leaders had warned was the only way of ending the civil war in Northern Ireland. When half of the British Cabinet only just escaped death when their hotel was blown up in Brighton at the party conference in October 1984, Mrs Thatcher accepted that Britain could never win a war against the IRA. She was extremely shaken by the explosion. Even so she insisted that the local Marks and Spencer open early to provide outfits for ministers who had had to leave the hotel in their nightclothes. She was determined to chair a Cabinet meeting that morning. ‘Business as usual,’ she said, though two of her friends were dead and the trade and industry secretary Norman Tebbit’s wife badly injured.

Despite protests from republicans and loyalists, the British government began to consult the Irish government on an official and regular basis about the administration of Northern Ireland and to hammer out a common policy for border security and justice. Eight years of Anglo-Irish co-operation would lead in 1993 to the Downing Street Declaration by the Irish and British premiers Bertie Ahern and John Major that welcomed Sinn Fein to all-party talks and ushered in an IRA ceasefire.

But, for all Mrs Thatcher’s great gifts, by the early 1990s members of the Cabinet desired it to be more collegiate, for she had become increasingly dictatorial. There was also bitter disagreement over Britain’s relations with Europe. The Thatcher years coincided with a movement in France and Germany to accelerate the process of ‘ever closer union’ within the European Common Market, transforming it into a European superstate. The movement was led by Jacques Delors, the French president of the European Commission, and assisted by Chancellor Kohl of Germany and President Mitterrand of France. All three were on record as hoping that 80 per cent of legislation would soon be made by the European Parliament instead of at national level.

Mrs Thatcher fought Britain’s corner on the principle of subsidiarity–a piece of EC jargon proclaiming the belief that all decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level, but used by the British as a euphemism for national decision-making. In October 1990, however, anxious not to lose her new chancellor of the Exchequer John Major and the equally pro-European foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, she took Britain into the ERM, a preliminary to joining the European Monetary System, itself the first step on the way to a single currency for the whole of Europe. The ERM was a system set up to create currency harmonization between EC members at the level of their national banks, and required national governments to intervene in foreign exchange markets to make sure that their currency kept its value within the system.

With Mrs Thatcher gone, a month later it was left to the new prime minister John Major and his chancellor Norman Lamont to weather the vicissitudes of the ERM. Unfortunately neither man had Mrs Thatcher’s genius or political luck to ride out the two stormy years that followed. The high interest rates of the bust after the Lawson boom had already begun to strike at the heart of the enterprise economy that Mrs Thatcher had brought into being. But after Britain joined the ERM with the pound pegged to the German Deutschmark, the strongest currency in Europe, British interest rates started to go through the roof, with the British economy in deep recession. Germany’s interest rates had to be kept high because of her economy’s problems arising out of the reintegration of impoverished East Germany. By August 1992 her interest rates were forcing Britain’s into double figures, way beyond what the economy could sustain. The economic miracle of the 1980s was on its way to becoming the economic disaster of the early 1990s. And on 16 September, Black Wednesday, Major and Lamont were forced into the ignominious decision to pull sterling out of the ERM immediately. At a stroke Britain’s economy and European strategies were in tatters.

Despite the débâcle Lamont saw no reason to fall on his sword. But Black Wednesday had not only convinced Eurosceptics that Britain could never flourish in a single currency, it lost the Conservatives the reputation for being the safe managers of the economy which had been their greatest asset. From September 1992 Labour began to overtake the Conservatives in the opinion polls, while the Tories began a civil war over Europe which slowly tore them apart. In fact, after the initial shock, the effects of pulling out of the ERM were beneficial. Britain went on to enjoy ten years of low inflation, steady growth and falling unemployment, her economy grew faster than those of France and Germany, her inflation was lower and her jobless figures were lower.

Half the Conservative party had become violently anti-European and embarked on an internecine war in the media against pro-European Tories who composed much of the Cabinet. Nevertheless John Major did not pull back from his insistence on having the Treaty of Maastricht, which he had signed that February, approved by Parliament. The treaty revised the European Community’s founding Treaty of Rome and turned the EC into the EU, the European Union–a further step towards ‘ever closer political union’. But Major won the concession that Britain need not ultimately substitute the European single currency for sterling nor need she accept Delors’ social charter (or Chapter, as it became known) guaranteeing minimum EU working standards, which it was believed would increase Britain’s labour costs.

John Major was the son of an impoverished trapeze artist. He had reacted against his exciting origins and, as one wit said, ran away from the circus to join a bank. Perhaps memories of poverty in Brixton made him more compassionate than his old boss. Benefits were raised in line with inflation, and the poll tax was transformed into a council tax banded according to property values. The radical Thatcherite principles of privatization and reform of vested interests continued as before. But after Black Wednesday many felt that the Conservatives’ day was drawing to an end.

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.

On 1 January 1999 eleven of the fifteen member states of the European Union abandoned their currencies for the euro, or single currency, which is managed by the European Central Bank. The eleven were Finland, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Belgium, and they were joined in 2001 by Greece. To date Britain remains outside the euro zone; opinion polls show that around 60 per cent of Britain’s businessmen are in favour of jettisoning the pound in its favour, but a similar portion of the public are opposed. Tony Blair promised Britain a referendum before sterling is abolished and Britain joins a single European currency. But in principle his government was in favour of joining the euro, and in February 1999 the prime minister published a national changeover plan outlining the steps being taken in preparation.

Britain’s ancient democratic institutions mean she cannot view a European superstate without protest. The EU headquarters, where one man one vote seems irrelevant compared to the powers of appointed bureaucrats, appears to some to be a threat to British freedoms. From earliest times observers like Tacitus noted that the inhabitants of these isles have an obsession with their liberty. Today it may translate as a desire to preserve national sovereignty over matters like taxation, and to halt further attempts to harmonize national laws through the EU. On the other hand it might be argued that until the (European) Romans came there was much that was uncivilized about Britain, and that that remains true today. Britons interested in their freedoms will have noted that Europe is not short of liberties herself. The European social chapter, which Labour signed up to in 1998, has made Britain bring in legislation to ensure that the workplace is protected by far greater health and safety requirements and to set a minimum wage that she seemed incapable of introducing on her own. Successful appeals to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, whether over the UK’s harsh treatment of her children or over gender equality, show that there is much to learn from Europe. The Human Rights Act that Labour implemented in 1998, which incorporated into UK law the European Convention on Human Rights, is bringing Britain into line with a more humane way of life. Women, many of whom have not shared British liberties until recently–the Church of England only allowed women to be ordained vicars in 1993–can especially look forward to the benign influence of Europe, which is committed to enforcing equal rights for women. Pay for women in Britain lags well behind other EU countries: as the Equal Opportunities Commission’s witty poster of a young girl put it, ‘Prepare your daughter for working life. Give her less pocket money than your son.’

Though women are hardly a minority, their lack of representation at the higher levels of the judiciary until very recently was mirrored by the ethnic minorities. In the twenty-five years since it was created to combat racism the Commission for Racial Equality has been extremely successful in harmonizing relations between ethnic and white Britons. Nevertheless in 1999 the failure of the parents of Stephen Lawrence to get their son’s murder properly investigated seven years before led the High Court judge Sir William Macpherson to conclude that the British police were guilty of institutionalized racism, which he defined as a failure to provide a professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. Most white Britons felt deeply shamed by the Macpherson Report, and it resulted in a massive shake-up in British institutions. There was an investigation by the Home Office into statistics on race and the criminal justice system, and a decision by the Labour government actively to combat hidden or institutionalized racism in other public bodies. The Race Relations Amendment Act of April 2001 imposes a legal duty on central and local government bodies to represent their ethnic minorities in proportion to their communities and this also applies to hospitals, schools, universities and public institutions like the BBC.

Prince Charles, who has taken a close interest in inner-city regeneration for three decades, has done much to bring together the many different elements in Britain’s multicultural society. He says he intends to adapt the papal title bestowed on his ancestor Henry VIII and be, not the defender of the faith, but the defender of all faiths.

After more than half a century as queen, Elizabeth II lends grace, humanity and dutifulness to her position and continuity at a time of flux. In June 2002 the immense success of the Golden Jubilee to mark her fifty years on the throne was visible in the one million people who gathered in the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace to salute her. The deaths of the queen’s sister Princess Margaret and of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the Jubilee Year only enhanced the sympathy felt for her.

The queen continues to live at Windsor Castle whose site above the River Thames was chosen more than nine centuries ago by William the Conqueror because it was a day’s march from the Tower of London–it was intended to guard the western approaches to the capital. Though the M4 and a sprawl of housing and flyovers now lies between Windsor and the Tower, the queen’s residence there reminds us of the extraordinary continuity the monarchy provides as a national institution and of Britain’s great good fortune in not having been invaded since 1066. The monarchy’s ancient roots provide an element of stability in an ever-changing world. Yet the queen herself has made a habit of moving with the times. Though her Rolls-Royce may look as old fashioned as her handbag, she insisted on her coronation being televised in 1953 in order to include as many of her fellow countrymen as possible. Today she even has her own web site.

Britain’s days of pre-eminence as a great power are gone, as Antony Gormley’s ironic statue The Angel of the North, a huge angel in rusty iron, reminds us, looking back to northern Britain’s industrial and engineering past. All over the country, old industrial structures–whether the former Bankside power station in London or the Albert Dock at Liverpool–are being turned over to what is sometimes called the leisure industry. (Bankside and the Albert Dock became the art galleries Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool.) Britain’s manufacturing base may continue to decline, but service or skills industries are more important than ever. In the twenty-first century Britain’s expertise as a great imperial power enables the once informal arrangements between merchants waiting at wharves for their ships to arrive to be transformed into complex international insurance and maritime businesses. In the era of super-telecommunications, London’s fortunate position equidistant between the time zones of Asia and America makes the City the world’s leading financial centre, where 48 per cent of the global foreign equity market is traded. But ‘leisure industry’ seems a poor way of describing a mission to raise the British people’s cultural expectations and range. In the age of the computer chip, the future for the European world seems increasingly to be in highly skilled work. Machines and computers have made much physical labour redundant where it is not already uncompetitive with the third world. Ford Cars closed its last British factory in 2001.

When an earlier Tyneside inhabitant, the eighth-century monk Bede of Jarrow, composed his history of the English people, ferreting out documentary evidence in the archives of English abbeys and in the papal registers at Rome, he was writing for a tiny audience, the few nobles who could read. In those days culture was then dispersed to the many, if at all, through priests’ sermons or Bible readings at church. But one of Bede’s most moving stories was that of Caedmon, the poor lay brother whose poetry earned him a place in the monastery. How pleased Bede would be to think that in the thirteen centuries since his birth a sense of inclusive cultural renaissance was gathering that has now exploded in a great new building on the River Tyne, the Baltic Exchange, which opened in August 2002. Tyneside, once a neglected and depressed industrial area, is reviving under the impact of cultural centres, cinema complexes, concert halls and cheap homes for young professionals.

Despite all the change, some things about Britain remain the same. For many people the most striking feature of the country is a sense of community-mindedness, a sense that–whatever Mrs Thatcher believed–society matters. The National Health Service was once described as the nearest thing the British have to a state religion. Thatcherism may have been a revolution, but now that the revolution is over, old beliefs in the state as a disinterested force for good cannot help resurfacing. The privatization Mrs Thatcher pioneered is looking a little less shiny. Railtrack in particular angered many, with the large dividends paid to shareholders instead of being devoted to the maintenance of the railways’ infrastructure or to a proper inspectorate. When a broken rail caused an avoidable crash in Hertfordshire in 2002, the last of a line of terrible accidents, private finance initiatives began to look less good. The British expect political accountability in their public services, which many voters expected Labour to restore.

Britain has more or less gracefully withdrawn from the 400-year-old trading empire which made a great power out of some small north-westerly islands and their canny, energetic and not over-scrupulous natives. Though Britain has been reduced to her original area of a few offshore islands whose longest island is little more than 600 miles long, hers is the world’s fourth largest economy and she is its fourth largest monetary power. Her influence persists in disproportionate relation to her small size.

Britain is now a fully signed-up member of the European Union. The question is what sort of Europe is Britain agreeing to be part of? Will it fall to England once more to take up her historic role of leading the resistance to a masterplan for continental tyranny expressed in European institutions which are not politically accountable enough?

I say England advisedly, because the country called Britain, which was invented in 1707 to describe the union of the Scottish and English crowns, may soon no longer exist. With the financial support of Brussels Scotland may find irresistible the national will to become an independent country again.

The British are a rather schizophrenic and mysterious lot where authority is concerned–the result perhaps of having had to adapt to so many waves of invaders, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish spent many centuries fighting off the aggressive English state. There is both an official culture which the British subscribe to and a secret, rather Celtic, side of Britain which carries on regardless. It is helped to flourish by the nature of the country’s geography. Her veiling fogs, dense forests, indented coastline and hidden valleys, particularly in the north and west, lend themselves to movements resisting all manifestations of central government, whether it be new dynasties or new religions. This inextinguishably individualistic side smoulders and periodically flares up, whether as Boudicca, Hereward the Wake, Catholic recusancy or Jacobite revolts. Who are Britain’s’ greatest heroes? Anti-heroes, that’s who, from Robin Hood to Rob Roy.

Sir Howard Newby, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, warned in 2002 that Britain must fight off what he calls ‘increasing anti-intellectualism’ and hostility to scientific progress which could leave Britain behind the rest of the world. The national passion for rural life as a sort of paradise on earth sometimes leads to a suspicion of all scientific inquiry whether over genetically modified food or the necessary use of animals for experimentation to cure disease. Yet from Isaac Newton onwards British life has always contained a very strong vein of scientific inquiry. Not content with inventing the steam engine, Britons have split the atom, produced the first test-tube baby and cloned the first animal, Dolly the sheep.

As Dr Tristram Hunt trenchantly reminded a Britain apparently overflowing with monarchists during the Queen’s Jubilee, the island story is also ‘a story of freethinking and restive inventiveness utterly at odds with the stifling conformity of court life. The Britain of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham is a tradition of pioneering political thought unrivalled in western Europe.’ Although the Nonconformist conscience may have been identified as a national feature only in the seventeenth century, the rebellious British seemed genetically predisposed to make it their signature tune.

Pity the poor British then, despite their country’s renowned stability. As with the seas that surround them they are continually washed by one current and then another. Their views seem as peculiar as their weather. Is it the changeable sea winds that make it impossible to predict how the British will react, one minute swayed by intense patriotism, the next supremely rational and suspicious of emotion? For the British contain within themselves two warring strains of thought that can never quite be reconciled. There is what amounts to a folk belief in the necessity of kings and queens. Yet that coexists alongside an equally powerful and living tradition of liberty and progress, expressed in some of the world’s great reforming movements–Parliamentary democracy, the anti-slavery movement, penal reform, anti-militarism and municipal socialism.

From the middle ages onwards, Britain is generally held to have distinguished herself from other European countries by virtue of her highly mobile class system–considered to be one of the secrets of her prosperity. Yet foreigners complain that despite their apparently informal manners, there is no other people so hard to get to know as the British, and no country so class sensitive. As for Britain’s position in Europe, there the Europeans believe she is a maddening law unto herself, neither wholeheartedly pro nor quite against. A curious and contradictory people indeed.