A History of Modern Britain Read online

  Andrew Marr

  United Kingdom

  A History of Modern Britain

  2008, EN

  A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what they are doing, but find themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted. Throughout, Britain is a country on the edge – first of invasion, then of bankruptcy, then on the vulnerable front line of the Cold War and later in the forefront of the great opening up of capital and migration now reshaping the world. This history follows all the political and economic stories, but deals too with comedy, cars, the war against homosexuals, Sixties anarchists, oil-men and punks, Margaret Thatcher’s wonderful good luck, political lies and the true heroes of British theatre.

  Table of contents (138)

  Introduction to the Paperback Edition: One Year On

  Prologue

  Part One: Hunger and Pride: Britain After the War

  1: The Democratic Bombshell

  2: Hiroshima and Keynes: the Limits of Wit

  3: A Meeting of Remarkable Men

  4: Patriots First, Socialists Second

  5: In Deepest Secret

  6: A Winter Landscape

  7: The Sun Also Sets

  8: White People

  9: Proper Drains and Class Distinction

  10: The Old Order

  11: Gnasher George and his Girls

  12: The Look of the Forties

  13: What Did We Look Like?

  14: Under the Skin: Belief

  15: What the Romans Did For Us

  16: Beveridge: Spin Doctor and Sage

  17: The NHS: Nye’s Simple Idea

  18: The People’s Economy?

  19: Squatters and Prefabs

  20: Dirty Stubs to Rich Spikes

  21: Rebellion: No to Snoek!

  22: Rebellion: a Bit of Skirt

  23: Knobbly Knees and Other Fun

  24: Did It Matter, Darling? Theatre After the War

  25: Korea: Mao, Bugles, Tins of Cheese

  26: Jerusalem Falls

  Part Two: The Land of Lost Content

  27: Balcon’s Britain

  28: Small Rooms: How Governments Were Run in the Fifties

  29: Churchill in Old Age

  30: Strikes and Money: Jack Is All Right…

  31: The Purge

  32: The Spies: Tom and Guy in Moscow

  33: Public Laughter

  34: All Fall Down: Suez

  35: Muddle or Logic? Two Soldiers

  36: The Revolt of the Chicken Farmer

  37: Things that Fall on your Feet

  38: The Great Arragonis

  39: The Growth of Car Mania

  40: Slipping Through Our Fingers

  41: The Egg-heads and Duffel-coat Rebels

  42: Labour Destroys its Future

  43: Leaving Mayhem: the British in Africa

  44: Notting Hill

  45: Incident at Birch Grove

  46: Tales of Yankee Power

  47: Small Worlds Collide

  48: Beyond the Fringe

  49: Conclusion: A Country of Cliques is Over

  Part Three: Harold, Ted and Jim: When the Modern Failed

  50: The Little Spherical Thing

  51: Some Bad News, Minister…

  52: Empty Pots and Magic Boxes

  53: Roy Jenkins’s Britain

  54: The Democracy of Narcissism

  55: A History of British Pop

  56: Flash, Snip, Smile: the Making of Celebrity

  57: Butterflies and Other Insects

  58: Home Grown?

  59: Rhodesia: Rebellion of the Whites

  60: The Pound and the Viet Cong

  61: Devaluation and a Coup

  62: Rivers of Blood

  63: Plot! Lord Louis and the King Thing

  64: In Place of Beer

  65: Election Upset

  66: Blood and Shame: the Irish Tragedy Begins

  67: The Yachtsman

  68: Ugandan Asians

  69: Floating

  70: Into Europe, with the Peasants

  71: A Dream Disintegrates

  72: Bloody Sunday

  73: Authority Undermined

  74: Wilson

  75: The Stairs Were on Fire

  76: Referendum

  77: Power Ages

  78: Peasants Revolt: One, the Right

  79: Beyond Pop

  80: Sunny Jim, Stormy Winter: the Callaghan Years

  81: Cap in Hand

  82: Peasants’ Revolt: Two, the Left

  83: Then Was the Winter of their Discontent

  Part Four: The British Revolution

  84: Margaret Roberts, Superstar

  85: The Left at War With Itself

  86: The Nice Gang

  87: The Falklands: Big Hair and Bald Men

  88: The Plague

  89: The Enemy Within

  90: Whirlybird Madness

  91: Very Big Bang

  92: Sid Gets Lucky: the Privatization Years

  93: Rainbows and Pots of Black Gold

  94: The Scots and the Welsh Leave Us Close to Tears

  95: The Boyo and the Bolsheviks

  96: A Revolution’s Mid-Life Crisis

  97: 1987: The Revolution Confirmed

  98: The Year of Hubris, 1988 – and Why We Still Live There

  99: Enter the Peasants, with Billhooks

  100: The Final Curtain

  Part Five: Nippy Metro People: Britain from 1990

  101: John Ball, More Interesting than He Looks

  102: Old Labour’s Lost King

  103: Black Wednesday and Party Suicide

  104: The Age of Major

  105: Citizens and Hoop-jumpers

  106: Small Wars, Big Questions

  107: A Very English Coup

  108: The Killer Cows of Old England

  109: The Sword of Truth

  110: Team Tony

  111: Celebrity Life, Celebrity Death

  112: Days of Hope

  113: The Tartan Pizza

  114: The Dawning of a New Era?

  115: Squeeze, Relax: New Labour Economics

  116: The Moment of Truth

  117: Rebel British

  118: Pre-Iraq Wars and Foreign Policy

  119: Dubya

  120: From New York to Kabul

  121: The Joy of Trivia

  122: Into the Furnace

  123: Mediaocracy

  124: Always with us?

  125: The War on Privacy

  126: Seven Seven

  127: The Waning

  128: A Crowd of New People

  129: Blair’s Final Years

  130: Britain After Blair

  Insert

  Introduction to the Paperback Edition

  One Year On

  A year has passed since this book was first published in hardback. How much has changed? How do the judgements stand up? The big theme of the story that follows is the defeat of politics by shopping. The surging consumer economy has been by turns exhilarating, wasteful, liberating and narrowing. Nobody who escaped the grey years of rationing, queues and shortages should snootily dismiss the triumph of shopping; yet nobody who looks at our dead-eyed obsession with buy-and-throw newness can be comfortable either. Britain’s shopping economy, shorn of most of its industry, has produced a country which is more crowded, cleaner and richer (far richer) than it used to be, but which is also more vulnerable t
o shocks from outside. Consumerism has shouldered aside other ways of understanding the world – real political visions, organized religion, a pulsing sense of national identity.

  Yet during 2007, the biggest change was a darkening of the national mood. It is not just global warming, but a sense that the good times are not, after all, forever. The decade-long Blair-Brown boom has been based on cheap imports from China, on very high levels of borrowing secured by upward-spiralling house prices, and on cheap, skilled migrant labour from Eastern Europe. None of these things are indefinitely sustainable. As this book shows, our recent prosperity is partly the achievement of politicians who are now almost forgotten. But after ten years in which New Labour had enjoyed the political fruits of strong, low-inflationary growth, many of us think we can see the buffers looming out of the mist.

  This is recent. Early in 2007 house prices were still strongly rising. The stock market was at a six year high. Economists and opposition parties were warning about the government being overborrowed, and about private debt. But nobody paid much attention. In the City the big banks still reported huge profits. There were mysterious characters called private equity investors and hedge fund managers. Few people really understood what they were up to, except that it was all very clever and complicated. The banks were paying astronomical bonuses to their managers. And for the majority, in the shops, clothes and gizmos were ludicrously cheap. A Western economy based on high debt, both private and public, ensured cash was there to keep the spree going. But the intricate and always-shifting tangle of loans, bets, guesses and 80-proof, chill-filtered optimism that is modern global finance, was about to suffer a reality check. And if ‘reality check’ is an ugly American phrase, then it is perhaps not as ugly as another which entered the Queen’s English in 2007. ‘Sub prime’ is jargon for bad loans – the mortgages and other pricey money offers to ordinary Americans who had no proper security and in many cases no way of paying it back. This overborrowing, mere greed by the banks, had been causing worries on Wall Street as early as February 2007. We have known since the Great Crash of 1929 that a global economy transmits problems from one country to another through the banking system very fast. We are supposed to have a stabler world trading system these days. But what has also changed is that bad debts have been bundled up and sold around like sacks of plastic casino counters between banks so many times that nobody knows just who is in trouble, and for how many billion dollars. In great US institutions like Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, the one-time wizards started to lose their jobs.

  Meanwhile back in Britain, its prime minister lost his. Tony Blair carried on working at strategic plans almost until the day he finally left Downing Street. It was as if he was still waiting for a final vindicating victory in Iraq or believed that if he could only nail down one last element of his programme to the cabinet table, his domestic legacy would be secured. But at last he went, in June 2007, telling the Commons: ‘I wish everyone, friend and foe, well. And that is that. The End.’ Gordon Brown took over without the bloodbath or recriminations that had been so widely predicted. He promised to govern differently, to take the cabinet more seriously, and to be more inclusive, bringing in outsiders with police, military and business careers to advise him – and Liberal Democrats too. To start with, all this was popular. Under Brown, Labour rose sharply in the polls and many Conservatives were dejected. Perhaps he would not turn out to be the disaster they had predicted. Their new leader David Cameron was attacked for being lightweight, ‘the heir to Blair’ just when the country had had enough of Blair. There was muttering about replacing him. So there was too about Sir Menzies Campbell, who was attacked not for being in his sixties, but for looking as if he was. A sequence of crises, including terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London, widespread summer flooding and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, seemed to show Brown as a decisive, rather traditional leader; and his position strengthened further.

  Then, in the autumn of 2007, it all started to go wrong for him. By far the most ominous event was the revelation than an adventurous building society, based in the north-east of England, had been forced to go to the Bank of England for emergency support. What had happened to Northern Rock, Britain’s fifth-largest provider of mortgages, was the direct consequence of those ‘sub-prime’ problems in America earlier in the year. Mud and ice were spreading through the Western banking system as banks, wondering how much bad debt others were exposed to, stopped lending readily to one another. The lubrication began to fail, and because Northern Rock had lent so much money so aggressively, it was first in trouble. Its bosses resigned, but not before the world had watched huge queues of people across Britain waiting to get their money out.

  It was the first run on a bank in this country for 140 years. The new chancellor, Alastair Darling, promised to guarantee all savers’ funds in Northern Rock – though not elsewhere – in order to shore up the stability of the banking system. The Bank of England injected money into the system to provide some more lubrication. A search began to find a private buyer who would take over Northern Rock without being completely underwritten by the taxpayer. And another search began to find who was to blame. The management of Northern Rock? American banks? The Bank of England, which had reacted slowly to the early signs of trouble? Most attention focussed on the prime minister, who had created the new system of banking regulation early in his time as chancellor. In the end, the building society had to be nationalised – a whiff of the Seventies.

  The Northern Rock crisis began just when pressure was mounting on Brown to call an early general election. Things came to a head at the Labour party conference at Bournemouth. Some of the cabinet ministers closest to him were convinced that by going to the country in October 2007, capitalizing on his summer successes, he could win a clear and substantial majority over the Tories. But he hesitated. The following week, as the Tories gathered for their conference at Blackpool, their mood was grim and there was open talk in the bars about forcing out yet another leader. Then came a speech by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, in which he promised to abolish inheritance tax on estates worth under £1 million and scrap the stamp duty for first time buyers on homes worth up to £250,000. This would be paid for by a new tax on foreigners living and earning in Britain but not paying tax here. It was a brilliantly targeted political counter-strike, which caused an abrupt shift in the polls, confirmed after an assured speech by Cameron. Assuming that Brown really was in a strong position in September 2007, as the polling suggested, and this author believes, then Osborne’s speech will go down as one of the most significant moments at a party conference in recent political history. It persuaded Brown not to call an election. Rarely do party conferences have any impact on the real world; this one did.

  In a BBC interview calling off the election, Brown repeatedly denied that the opinion polls were the cause, but the impression was given of indecision, or lack of nerve. He was not helped by maladroit political counter-thrusts nor by a series of serious failures which followed. These were, in a weary way, familiar – another Labour party funding scandal, more embarrassing losses of data, above all the personal details of a mere 25 million people involved in applying for or getting child benefit, and 600,000 who had wanted to join the Navy or the marines. The initiative had, for the time being, gone to the Conservatives who were now sounding more traditional on tax and immigration and riding so high in the polls they could dream of a clear victory in a future election. The Liberal Democrat leader was more or less pushed into resigning once it was clear there would be no election for a while. His job was taken by another young and telegenic leader, Nick Clegg. The country prepared for an eighteen-month slog in parliament, over the new European treaty, civil liberties, the problem of violent youth crime and pay – politics as usual, or at least as it had often been during the seventies and eighties. People had grown fed up of Blair, regarding his television skills and vision as lightweight: remarkably quickly, they seem to have concluded that Brown, welcomed as
dour and cautious, was worse. He put his head down and resolved to batter his way back to popularity with hard work and more initiatives.

  Many British people would barely have noticed. The papers were obsessed by the disappearance of a young girl, Madeleine McCann, from her parents’ apartment during a holiday in Portugal, and an inquest into the death of Princess Diana. A hard-shopping, hard-drinking pleasure economy continued to thrust ahead, even as evidence of a looming recession piled up. House prices slowed, then stuttered, then fell. Rumours about other banking problems flickered and hissed. The stock market has some terrible lurches, including its biggest one-day fall since the attack on the Twin Towers. Only a hard effect on wallets, jobs and security will really make most people think about politics at all seriously. So an obvious question is whether the triumph of consumerism, that big story of British life from 1945 until today, is about to be halted. It seems most unlikely that the country is going to be transformed merely by the economic cycle. Britain and America may well be heading towards recession, perhaps some very hard years by modern standards. But these will feel at worst more like a return to some of the earlier tough times in the seventies, eighties or nineties, than a great change of direction as happened after the war or in the Thatcher revolution. It will teach another generation that nothing goes up forever, that there are no final answers in economics and that, perhaps, we have been a little too smug in dismissing earlier generations of politicians and economists as ignorant.

  More important for our shopping economy will be the effects of carbon addiction. Distinguished scientists are beginning to confront the notion that to save the planet, an age of hair-shirted austerity is now necessary. Instead there is a renewed enthusiasm for technological fixes, from nuclear power and offshore windfarms, to electric cars and sun-deflecting mirrors in space. Such optimism is urgently needed because one of the most important effects of the global warming debate is that it has so disheartened people, they simply turn away. We are flinching. This is too big, too frightening to think about. Many people felt just the same way about the rise of Hitler, or the likelihood of nuclear holocaust in the sixties. ‘You can’t just turn your back,’ some say. Oh yes you can. Without hope, without a clear sense that, beyond the struggle, there are blue skies and a life worth living, then most of us will turn away and try not to look. So far, all the main parties are sending mixed messages (to put it politely) about global warming. One day it is wind turbines on the roof, or new taxes to force more recycling; the next it is a major expansion of airports so we can fly even more often, and promises that cheap holidaymaking overseas will remain a human right. In the end, it may be the scientists, the engineers and the investors who lead the politicians, not the other way about. As a political observer myself, I cannot pretend that the past year has seen politics at its best. But is the challenge ahead so big that it dwarfs the problems already confronted? Absolutely not. The history of modern Britain tells us we have had some narrow squeaks, but also that we have done some extraordinary things – even more extraordinary than going shopping and worrying about house prices. This gives no alibi for pessimism. At the risk of sinking to sales patter, I would say – don’t panic about the crystal ball when you can settle down and read the book.