Chapter 23

Interesting Times

In This Chapter

● Introducing Britain in the grip of the unions

● Following Britain and the unions in the grip of Mrs Thatcher

● Going into the new Millennium with Tony Blair

The Chinese have an old curse that goes ‘May you live in interesting times’. Which may not sound too bad, until you realise that benign curse is wishing everything from war and revolution to civil strife on your head. The last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have amassed more than enough wars, revolutions, strikes, economic booms and collapses, not to mention seriously bad fashions, to keep the historians of the future busy for years to come. If you were too busy partying, raving, buying shoulder pads, or investing in red braces and the dotcom boom to notice, you can catch up here. As you’ll see, we’ve all been living in interesting times.

Mrs Thatcher's Handbag

Even its proudest citizens would have to admit that Grantham is not one of England’s lovelier towns. Grantham’s a rather dull place in the flatlands of Lincolnshire where, before the war, a small grocery shop was kept by a very respectable citizen and alderman on the town council called Alfred Roberts. Mr Roberts’s daughter Margaret helped in the shop, carefully counting the pennies and learning the basic economic facts of life: Pay your debts and don’t spend money until you’ve got it. Margaret married a businessman called Denis Thatcher, so it was as Mrs Thatcher that young Margaret entered the British political scene. She didn’t like what she found.

Until the 1970s the two main British parties, Conservative and Labour, operated a form of consensus politics which saw them disagreeing on details but agreeing on the basics of British political and economic life. They both accepted a mixed economy, with heavy industry and utilities run by the state and everything else in private hands, and lots of quangos (Quasi-Autonomous Government Organisations, a nickname made up by people who didn’t like them) taking charge of different aspects of national life. They also both accepted the power and importance of the trade unions.

Union power and power cuts

By the 1970s the trade unions had grown into massive organisations of awesome power. To people living at the time, the country seemed to be always on strike. Other countries used to talk about militant strikes as ‘the British disease’. Strikes didn’t just hit the factories where the dispute occurred; workers at other factories, even in completely different industries, would come out in sympathy with their striking brother workers. Sometimes they’d send flying pickets to join the original strikers picketing the factory gates, and woe betide any worker who tried to cross a picket line and report for work: Such people were denounced as scabs and they and their families were completely shunned by the whole local community. Sometimes they, their families, or their homes were attacked.

The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson tried to keep in with the union leaders: He once invited them to a meeting at Downing Street where he put the traditional dainty tea and biscuits on hold and served them beer and doorstep sandwiches instead. When the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath took over in 1970, he tried to get the unions to agree to limit their wage demands. Bad idea. The National Union of Mineworkers announced a ban on overtime working (they didn’t even need a full strike to bring the country to its knees) which cut coal supplies to electricity power stations and meant nightly power cuts to save electricity. All over the country people had to spend the evenings sitting in the dark with only candles for light, which makes a good story to tell the grandchildren but wasn’t so funny at the time. Then the Arab world cut off oil supplies to the West after the 1973 Middle East war (see The Middle East For Dummies by Craig S. Davis for more on this crisis), so to save energy Heath had to shorten the working week to just three days, which, since it meant only three days’ pay, again had the unions up in arms. By 1974 Heath had had enough. He called a general election on the question ‘Who runs Britain - government or unions?’ And he lost.

The Conservatives were so badly shaken by losing the 1974 election that they turned on Heath and elected his former Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, as their leader instead. Heath never forgave her and nursed his hurt feelings in one of the longest sulks in history.

Some of your prints may be affected by sunlight and all-out industrial warfare

One of the most bitter industrial disputes happened in 1976-7 at a mail-order photo-developing company in North London, called Grunwick. The director sacked a group of Indian women workers who insisted on their right to join a union. The case was taken up by the trade unions and soon mass pickets from all over the country descended on the plant. Violent clashes took place between pickets and police at the factory gate, and when the postal workers refused to handle the company's mail, an extreme rightwing group called the Freedom Association took on the job and the strike collapsed.

Now is the winter of our discontent...

The Labour government spent the 1970s fighting a losing battle with galloping inflation. In 1976 they had to ask for a loan from the International Monetary Fund, and the payoff was that they had to limit the unions’ wage demands. The unions wouldn’t play ball. In 1978 they demanded bigger and bigger wage rises knowing they just had to walk out on strike and their bosses would give in. In the grim, cold winter of 1978-9, while prime minister James Callaghan was away at an international summit in Guadeloupe (why, oh why, he must’ve wondered, did the summit have to be on a sunny Caribbean holiday island?) the country collapsed into chaos. Goods and fuel dried up because the lorry drivers were on strike, hospitals and schools closed because the nurses and ancillary workers were on strike, and huge quantities of rotting food and rubbish piled up in the streets because the dustmen were on strike. Rats had the best time since the Black Death (see Chapter 10 to find out why), only you couldn’t bring out your dead because the gravediggers were on strike, too. People called this period the Winter of Discontent.

. . . Made glorious summer for this daughter of Grantham

When Callaghan flew back from his summit with his souvenirs and a nice tan some reporters asked him what he was going to do about the crisis. ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ he replied. As soon as the workers had got their pay rises and gone back to work he called an election. The Conservatives seized their chance. ‘Labour isn’t working’ declared their election poster, showing an enormous line of unemployed people, and the country clearly agreed. Labour lost heavily and Mrs Thatcher moved into Number Ten. Now things were set to get bumpy.

Mrs Thatcher liked to stride into battle clutching her handbag. She had a typically robust analysis of what Britain needed:

1. Ditch consensus politics. We don’t agree with the Labour Party so let’s stop pretending we do.

2. Reduce the power of the unions.

3. Stop spending government money propping up failing companies. If that means the companies go under and workers lose their jobs, so be it.

4. Reduce the size of the government. It was too big. Sack some civil servants, close down the quangos, and cut back on local government.

Mrs Thatcher’s approach to politics was based on encouraging individuals to make their own way, owning their own homes and even shares in the companies they worked for, instead of relying on the state. Her ideal was what she called a ‘property-owning democracy’.

Mrs Thatcher got many of her ideas from an American economist called Milton Friedman and his philosophy, monetarism. Monetarism taught that governments should cut taxes, especially on the rich, so as to allow a free flow of money at the top end of society which would trickle down to the lower levels as people set up new businesses that would provide jobs. In the short term, monetarism meant heavy unemployment as unprofitable companies lost their government subsidies and went bust, but so long as workers were prepared to try new ways of working, the economy would recover in the end. So went the theory, at any rate.

Mrs Thatcher started by changing the law to allow people living in council houses to buy their own homes. When the Labour-run Greater London Council objected she closed it down. Next she sold off privatised industries and offered shares in them to everyone. The trouble was that her policies were causing massive unemployment, especially in the north of England where many of the old heavy industries were being undercut by new technology or more efficient working practices abroad. The steel industry virtually had to close down in order to reinvent itself. If you’ve seen the film The Full Monty you’ll have an idea of the hardship this policy caused in Sheffield, the centre of the steel industry. But the biggest conflict came over coal.

The great miners’ strike

After centuries of mining, coal stocks were running low and Mrs Thatcher’s government was keen to move away from what they saw as a dirty, dangerous, and increasingly irrelevant industry. They also relished the idea of a final showdown with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). So did the fiery NUM leader, Arthur Scargill.

When the National Coal Board announced it would close down a large number of pits, Scargill called the whole union out on strike. This time the government had stockpiled coal supplies and arranged for foreign coal imports; it had also passed laws making secondary picketing (picketing somewhere other than your place of work) illegal. When vast crowds of angry pickets gathered outside collieries, the police were ready for them. Pitched battles broke out between police and miners, especially outside Orgreave colliery in South Yorkshire. It seemed like civil war.

The whole nation was bitterly divided. Some thought the government was being vindictive, others were appalled at the way Scargill and the miners were prepared to resort to violence. In one of the worst incidents, a group of miners dropped a concrete slab onto a taxi carrying a working miner and killed the driver. People all over the country held collections to support the families of striking miners, but Scargill was also getting money from Colonel Gadaffi’s regime in Libya, which leapt at the chance to destabilise a Western country. The Libyans had shot and killed a British policewoman in London a couple of years before, so this Libyan link didn’t go down well. Even the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, turned against the strike.

Divide and fall

After a year of increasingly bitter and violent confrontations, the miners had to give in and go back to work - while there was still work to go back to. Here’s why the strike collapsed:

● The miners were divided. Scargill hadn’t balloted the miners to check they supported him, and the miners in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire didn’t. They even formed a breakaway union which defended its members’ right to carry on working.

● The government refused to allow any power cuts. The winter of 1984 was mild in any case, so people didn’t miss coal as much as they had back in 1973.

● The other unions didn’t support the NUM. The other unions were angry that Scargill had denounced the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for not giving him enough support. From then on, Scargill was on his own.

● Mrs Thatcher refused to give in. And Scargill blinked first.

Falklands fight, Hong Kong handover

Mrs Thatcher was getting some of the lowest approval ratings since records began when, in 1982, help arrived in the unlikely shape of a right-wing military junta in Argentina. Argentina had a long-standing claim to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, home to a small population of Britons and a large population of sheep. The Argentinean dictator, General Galtieri, ordered a full-scale invasion and Mrs Thatcher hurriedly put together a military task force to sail south and take them back. The conflict was a close thing, especially when British ships proved horribly vulnerable to Argentinean missiles. HMS Sheffield was destroyed by a single missile and in one particularly ghastly incident, a boat full of Welsh guardsmen was hit with heavy loss of life. However, the British managed to get ashore and fought their way overland to retake the capital, Port Stanley, from its garrison of tired, cold, hungry, and scared Argentinean conscripts.

Sink the Belgrano!

On 2 May 1982 a British submarine sank the Argentinean cruiser General Belgrano, killing 360 people. Gotcha!' was the Sun newspaper's tasteless response. But opinion in Britain began to waver when it emerged that the Belgrano had actually been steaming away from the Falklands, not towards them. Mrs Thatcher angrily maintained that this detail made no difference: The cruiser was still a danger to the British task force. But others, led by a Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, argued for years for an inquiry into the sinking, calling it a war crime. The sinking of the Belgrano still divides opinion today.

Having fought so hard to keep the Falklands out of the clutches of one dictatorship, Mrs Thatcher proved remarkably compliant about handing Hong Kong over to another. Britain’s lease on the New Territories in Hong Kong ran out in 1997. Mrs Thatcher agreed to hand the whole of Hong Kong back to China if the Chinese agreed to maintain Hong Kong’s booming financial and capitalist economy and respect its democratic institutions. Since the British had made sure that Hong Kong didn’t have any democratic institutions the Chinese didn’t see any problem with this agreement, until the new governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, suddenly introduced elections. The Chinese called Patten all sorts of rude names until 1997, when British rule over its last profitable colony finally ended. The Chinese then set about raking in the profits from Hong Kong’s economy while taking no notice of its democratic institutions. So no change there, then.

Very special relationships

Mrs Thatcher had a bracing way of getting on with other world leaders. ‘The eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’ was how the French president Francois Mitterrand described her (he was referring to a mad Roman emperor and an American sex goddess, in case you’re not sure). She got her own back anyway by declaring, on its bicentenary in 1989, that the French Revolution had been a waste of time and blood and the French should have copied the English example instead. So there.

Mrs Thatcher got on much better with the US president Ronald Reagan, even allowing him free use of UK airspace for his 1986 bombing attack on Libya. And she was more than happy for him to station as many cruise missiles in Britain as he liked, as the Cold War seemed to hot up in the early 1980s.

Protest and survive

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) started in 1958 and grew into the biggest protest movement of the century. It made headlines in the 1980s when American cruise missiles were installed in western Europe. Women maintained a permanent protest against the cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common. CND made people aware of what nuclear missiles could do, and may - may - have given the politicians pause for thought. Or there again, maybe not.

The Russians had disparagingly called Mrs Thatcher the ‘Iron Lady’. They thought it was an insult, but her supporters loved it. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the new leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mrs Thatcher declared he was a man she could do business with, and her approval helped boost his popular image in the West.

Ironically, Mrs Thatcher’s approval ratings in America and Russia soared just when her popularity was on the slide at home. When her end came, she fell over two issues: The Poll Tax and Europe.

The Lady Vanishes

People either loved Mrs Thatcher or they absolutely loathed her. She won three elections in a row (in 1979, 1983, and 1987), but as the 1980s drew to a close her core supporters were suffering. In 1987 the stock exchange crashed spectacularly. House prices boomed as people bought them not to live in but to sell on again at a huge profit, but then the housing market collapsed and thousands of home owners found themselves stuck in houses which were worth a lot less than they’d paid for them. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, Mrs Thatcher hit the nation with the Poll Tax.

The Poll Tax (officially it was called the Community Charge, which sounded nicer but no one was fooled) was a tax to finance local government services. The trouble was that it was set at the same rate for everyone, however rich or poor they were. The last time a poll tax was introduced it sparked off the Peasants’ Revolt (see Chapter 10 to find out how). The protests against the Thatcher Poll Tax were the worst since the miners’ strike (see the earlier section ‘The great miners’ strike’ to find out about this). Even though war was brewing over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Conservatives decided she would have to go.

One last drama needed to be played out first, though.

All alone in Europe

The European Community’s first taste of the Thatcher style came when she demanded a rebate on Britain’s contribution to the EEC’s budget. ‘I want my money back!’ she demanded, rapping on the desk like an irate customer in her father’s shop back in Grantham. She got the rebate, too, but the rest of Europe was rather put off by this strange housewife figure with the formidable handbag, and from then on Britain regularly found itself in a minority of one on major European votes.

Mrs Thatcher hated the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, which paid farmers for overproducing and led to huge stockpiles of unsold butter, grain, and wine. She did sign up to the Single European Market, which removed all restrictions on trade, but she hated the EEC’s socialist-style Social Chapter, which guaranteed a minimum wage and the right to belong to a union, and she strongly opposed plans for a United States of Europe with a single European currency. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Mrs Thatcher opposed German reunification, saying that the Germans might take the opportunity to dominate Europe again.

By 1990 her ministers and ex-ministers, especially the pro-European ones, had had enough of Mrs Thatcher. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned from the government in protest at her stance on Europe he made a powerful resignation speech, attacking her whole style of government. Her ministers took the cue and trooped in one by one to tell her the game was over; she had to go. With tears in her eyes, Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time.

Belfast blows up

In 1968 many people in Britain were bewildered when appalling violence broke out in Northern Ireland. To anyone who had looked at Ireland’s history in the twentieth century, this eruption of violence came as no surprise at all.

Most of Ireland had become independent from Britain in 1922 (see Chapter 21 to find out how) but six Ulster counties with a majority Protestant population had chosen to remain part of the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists had never given up hope of bringing them into a united Ireland - whether they wanted to or not.

For most of the 1960s Northern Ireland seemed peaceful enough, but underneath the surface serious problems were growing. In areas with a Catholic majority, like the city of Londonderry, the Protestants were rigging the electoral boundaries (known as jerrymandering) so as to keep control in their hands and to make sure their families got the best schools and houses. In 1968 a Catholic civil rights movement started protesting against this but

Protestants attacked the protestors with stones and batons while the (Protestant) police stood by and watched. The riots got worse and the next year prime minister Harold Wilson sent troops into Northern Ireland to restore order and protect the Catholics.

The nationalist - and Catholic - IRA (Irish Republican Army) saw their chance to get people interested in a united Ireland again. They started shooting British soldiers (even though the soldiers were there to protect the Catholics). The soldiers started turning angrily against the Catholics, the Catholics turned against the soldiers, and the long, bloody Troubles began.

The Troubles

The Troubles involved so many ghastly incidents that knowing where to start is difficult. These are just a handful of the most notorious events - many, many more occurred:

● 1972: Bloody Sunday - British paratroopers open fire on a civil rights protest march in Londonderry and kill thirteen people. The British blame the IRA; everyone else blames the British.

● 1974: Birmingham - the IRA bombs two crowded pubs on the British mainland, killing seventeen people. The police have the bright idea of framing a group of entirely innocent people with the crime and keeping them in prison for sixteen years. Which leaves the actual bombers free to strike again.

● 1984: Brighton - the IRA bombs the hotel where Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet are staying for their party conference. She escapes death by a whisker.

● 1987: Enniskillen - the IRA bombs a Remembrance Day parade in the small town in County Fermanagh.

● 1996: Canary Wharf and Manchester - after a ceasefire breaks down, the IRA place bombs which devastate London’s financial centre and Manchester’s shopping centre.

The British held hundreds of paramilitary suspects and held them without charge in the Maze prison’s notorious H blocks (so called because they were in the shape of a letter H). The British interrogation methods, which included sleep deprivation and disorientation techniques, were condemned as ‘inhuman and degrading’ by the European Court of Human Rights. IRA prisoners demanded political status and went on hunger strike, refused to wear prison clothes, and even smeared their cells with their own excrement in protest when they didn’t get it. One IRA prisoner, Bobby Sands, even stood successfully for Parliament from his prison cell. Mrs Thatcher, however, whose Northern Ireland spokesman, Airey Neave MP, had been blown up by the IRA at the House of Commons, refused to give in; Bobby Sands and the other protesters starved themselves to death without having achieved their aims.

Searching for peace

In 1976 two housewives, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, started a peace movement which even won them both the Nobel Peace Prize, but it soon fizzled out. The only way to stop the violence was to work out who Northern Ireland ought to belong to. In 1973 the British closed the Northern Ireland Parliament down and started endless talks to work out some way in which the Protestants could share power with the Catholics. Not easy with people who sometimes refused to sit in the same room together. In 1974 the Protestants stopped one attempt at power-sharing by staging a general strike. In 1985 Mrs Thatcher allowed Dublin a tiny little say in Northern Ireland’s affairs, but the Unionists responded ‘Ulster Says No!’ Very, very loudly.

In 1993 prime minister John Major signed the Downing Street Declaration with the Irish taosaich Albert Reynolds, by which both sides agreed to respect the wishes of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, and in 1998 Tony Blair negotiated the Good Friday Agreement with all parties, including Sinn Fein (the IRA’s political arm), which confirmed the 1993 agreement and finally called a ceasefire. The paramilitaries refused to surrender their weapons, but they undertook to decommission them - somehow put them beyond use - and a special commission was set up under a Canadian general, John de Chastelain, to make sure they did it.

The people of Ireland, north and south, voted by a massive majority in favour of the ceasefire, but that action wasn’t good enough for one group of diehards: On 15 August 1998 the ‘Real IRA’ exploded a car bomb in Omagh killing 28 people, including children visiting from the Republic and from Spain, and three generations of one family. The bombers were trying to derail the peace process; for once they failed.

Mind you, the situation looked as if the politicians would be able to scupper the peace process all on their own. The first Northern Ireland government under the terms of the peace agreements had a Unionist leader and a Sinn Fein education minister. That government didn’t last. Here’s why:

Number of weapons decommissioned in Northern Ireland 1997-2000: Zero

In 2000 Tony Blair’s government had to suspend the new Northern Ireland Assembly for a few months and reimpose direct rule from London. Nevertheless, without bombs going off every few months Northern Ireland began to recover. Belfast and Londonderry began to develop the sort of cafe and club culture that other British cities were used to. Still no weapons were decommissioned, however, and in 2005 the Unionists threw out their Nobel-prize winning leader, the moderate David Trimble, in favour of the much more hardline veteran Dr Ian Paisley. No one wanted a return to violence and confrontation, but everyone knows that these have a habit of reappearing in Northern Ireland just when you think you’ve seen the back of them for ever.

The Americans are coming

When trouble broke out in Ulster in 1968 many Irish-Americans contributed to Noraid, which raised money for the IRA. Public opinion in Britain was deeply offended at the sight of American money bankrolling terrorists and for a long time British governments were wary of letting the American government intervene in Northern Ireland. When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997 he set up a good working relationship with US president Bill Clinton, who liked to claim he had Irish blood even though he hadn't. Clinton gave the green light for Senator George Mitchell to cross over to Ulster to supervise the peace negotiations between the British and Irish governments and the Northern Irish political parties, including Sinn Fein. After the Good Friday Agreement was signed, Clinton came over to Ulster and addressed a cheering crowd from Belfast's City Hall. And no doubt felt Irish all over again.

New Labour, New Dawn

Ironically, Mrs Thatcher probably changed the Labour Party even more than she changed the Conservatives. At first Labour responded to her by moving much more to the left, calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament, high taxes, heavy government spending, and the re-nationalisation of everything she’d privatised.

Labour councillors in Liverpool under Council leader Derek Hatton refused to set a legal level of rates. They wanted to soak the rich and they weren’t going to let a little thing like the law stop them.

Labour leader Neil Kinnock finally took on the left and expelled the extremists from the Labour Party. He was particularly scathing about Hatton’s councillors in Liverpool, who’d plunged the city into such financial chaos that they had had to sack hundreds of their own workers. So Labour was already looking much more balanced, moderate, competent, and electable when in 1994 the party elected a young up-and-coming MP called Tony Blair.

Tony Blair persuaded the party to drop its commitment to the state ownership of industry. To people on the left, state ownership of industry was what the Labour Party was for, but Blair had an answer for them: That was Old Labour; this was New Labour.

Major problems

The Conservatives were still in power, now under John Major. But Major was in trouble. On Black Wednesday in September 1992 the pound collapsed in value and Major had to pull Britain out of the European Exchange Rate

Mechanism. Most people probably didn’t understand the issue, but the crisis made the government look weak and, worse, incompetent.

Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, which set up the European Union, with a special opt-out for Britain both from the European Social Chapter and from the single European currency, but the rotating eyeballs brigade within the Conservative Party denounced the European Union as the work of Lucifer and continually sniped at Major for not being man enough to stand up to it. By 1997 Major’s parliamentary majority could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and his party was deeply tarnished by sleaze and scandal. In the General Election that year, Tony Blair trounced him.

Blair's Britain

New Labour kicked into action straight away. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, immediately handed over control of interest rates to the Bank of England: No longer would ministers push people’s mortgages up or down for their own political advantage. Labour signed up to the European Social Chapter, introduced a minimum wage for all employees, passed a Freedom of Information Act, and incorporated the European Declaration of Human Rights into English law.

Where Mrs Thatcher had hated local government, Blair tried to strengthen it by introducing elected mayors in some of Britain’s major cities. In London the local Labour candidate, Ken Livingstone, was a charismatic critic of New Labour.

Blair imposed his own candidate, but Livingstone simply stood as an independent and won. Livingstone proved a colourful mayor, introducing a widely-resented Congestion Charge to tackle London’s chronic rush-hour gridlock.

Blair’s Dome at Greenwich, to mark the new millennium, became a national joke, but London celebrated in 2005 when it won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. Meanwhile, the countryside was in economic crisis and up in arms about Labour’s plans to ban hunting. Blair’s was a very urban government.

Scotland and Wales: Sort-of nations once again

Scottish and Welsh nationalists were also putting in a bid to pull out of Great Britain plc. These nationalists called the process devolution, which wasn’t quite independence, but was a bit more than allowing soldiers to wear kilts or leeks in their hats. The Scots got a proper parliament, with a state opening by the queen, a state-of-the-art new building (eventually - it was late and way over budget) and the power to do pretty much everything except send out ambassadors and declare war. The Welsh got a limited assembly in Cardiff. This assembly couldn’t do much, and it didn’t.

Despite devolution, New Labour proved very keen on developing a sense of national citizenship and devised a ceremony for new British citizens, which involved a large Union flag and a tape recording of the National Anthem. This ceremony was rather like graduation and rightly so, because immigrants had a citizenship test to pass as well. The test didn’t cover history but you were expected to know some basic British geography, about the political structure of the country, and what to do if you knocked over someone’s pint in a pub. (Answer: Run.)

Lording it over the Lords

Blair was keen to tackle the anomalies in the House of Lords; well, okay, he wanted to stop it opposing him. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, sorted it out by getting rid of the hereditary peers. Lord Irvine - a rather grand man who liked to compare himself to Cardinal Wolsey to Blair’s young Henry VIII (see Chapter 11 if you’re not sure what on earth that was all about) - negotiated a deal whereby most of the hereditaries would keep their titles but give up their seats. That meant almost the whole House of Lords was nominated by the party leaders, which was just asking for dodgy dealings. Sure enough, after the 2005 election the police started investigating claims that seats in the Lords had been changing hands for cash.

Blair said he modelled his rule on Mrs Thatcher’s. Like her, he won three elections in a row (in 1997, 2001, and 2005). He did so by appealing to middle England, the sort of middle-class people with a bit of money put by who’d traditionally voted Conservative but who were dismayed by the Conservatives’ sleazy reputation and general incompetence. Unfortunately, many people in the Labour Party thought that Blair was so concerned about winning former Tory voters that he’d forgotten his own traditional Labour supporters. Blair kept the privatised industries privatised, and even extended private enterprise into schools and hospitals. For a Labour government, this state of affairs all looked very odd.

Hold it right there, General. You're nicked.

In 1998 the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet was arrested in London at the request of a Spanish judge. The courts couldn't decide whether the General, as a former head of state, enjoyed immunity or not, but the House of Lords ruled that he didn't. The case against Pinochet rocked to and fro and in the end he was sent back to Chile on health grounds anyway. But the principle underlying the Lords' judgment still stands in international law: even former heads of state can be tried for crimes against humanity.

But nothing dismayed Blair’s Labour supporters more than his approach to foreign policy.

Shoulder to shoulder with America

New Labour had learnt a lot from Bill Clinton’s success in making the Democrats electable again after the Reagan years, and they shared many of the same attitudes and outlook. Blair, who was always a very dutiful husband and father, even stood by his friend Bill throughout the lurid Monica Lewinsky scandal in Washington.

When George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 he was wary of Clinton’s British buddy, but after the Al-Qaida (the extreme Islamist international terrorist network) attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, Blair was quick to declare that Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with America in its hour of need. When Bush ordered a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan to flush out Al-Qaida’s bases and the Taliban government that had supported them, Blair immediately committed British forces to fight alongside the Americans (though perhaps he should’ve checked in this book first to see what happened on previous occasions when Britain invaded Afghanistan. You can, in Chapter 19).

And then Bush started talking about Iraq.

Iraq Round One: 1990-1

From the 1960s Iraq had been ruled by a brutal, anti-Islamic dictatorship set up by the Ba’ath Party under its leader, Saddam Hussein.

The West supported Saddam in his war with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s antiWestern Islamic republic in Iran. When Saddam used poison gas to murder hundreds of Kurdish people in northern Iraq, the West carefully looked the other way. But when Saddam suddenly launched an invasion of the oil-rich Kingdom of Kuwait in 1990, the West suddenly denounced him as a tyrant and a murderer. A US-led coalition invaded Kuwait and drove the Iraqis out, but did not carry on into Iraq itself and overturn Saddam. This fact was not good news for Iraq’s Kurdish people, who had risen in rebellion against Saddam, expecting that the allies would help them. Once it was clear that the allies weren’t going to help, Saddam launched his army against the defenceless Kurds.

When the situation looked as if US President George Bush (senior) might hold back from sending in the troops, Mrs Thatcher got on the phone and told him in no uncertain terms, ‘George, this is no time to go wobbly.’ John Major sent British troops to Iraq and came up with the idea of safe havens and no-fly-zones for the Kurds, where the Iraqi government was not allowed to send troops or planes and the Kurds could be safe. Coalition forces policed the nofly-zones and the system seemed to work. Britain and the US also maintained international sanctions against Saddam’s regime. Or said they did.

Iraq Round Two: 2003

After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 President George W. Bush started talking about the threat from Iraq’s stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) He said that the only safe solution was regime change. Which meant invasion.

In London, a quarter of a million people marched against the war in one of the biggest demonstrations in British history. To persuade parliament of the need for war, Blair’s government prepared a dossier of evidence gathered from British intelligence. The dossier claimed that Iraq had missiles that could hit British territory in only forty-five minutes. Even though it turned out that some of the dossier had been lifted from a PhD student’s thesis on the Internet, Parliament gave the go-ahead and British troops went into Iraq alongside the Americans.

That ‘dodgy dossier’ was soon causing Tony Blair major headaches. The coalition forces found no evidence whatsoever of WMD and Blair had to admit that the intelligence information had been wrong. But had it? A BBC journalist claimed that, according to a top British weapons inspector, the intelligence reports had been ‘sexed up’ by Blair’s office to make them look more definite. The row was just brewing, with the government and BBC making angry claims and denials, when the weapons inspector in question, Dr David Kelly, was found dead, apparently by his own hand.

Blair ordered an inquiry, which was heavily critical of the BBC and let the government off the hook. However, a second inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, former Cabinet Secretary, was heavily critical of Blair’s style of government, and suggested he’d taken the country into war without proper records being kept of crucial discussions and meetings. And then the war came even closer to home.

Britons bomb Britain

On 7 July 2005 four young British men took a train to London, boarded the tube (underground railway) in four different directions, and detonated bombs in their rucksacks. One of them couldn’t get onto the tube because the stations were all being evacuated after the first three bombs, so he got on a bus and blew that up instead. In all, 56 people were killed that day, not counting the bombers. People assumed this was an Al-Qaida attack in revenge for British participation in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and they were right. But the bombers hadn’t come from outside: They were British Muslims, born and bred.

Britain was shocked. Blair tried to maintain that the bombings had nothing to do with Iraq, but no one believed him, and soon video tapes from the bombers were released which made the connection quite clear. Two weeks later a second group of British Muslims tried but failed to explode four more suicide bombs. The following day the police shot a young Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the head in front of horrified tube passengers in South London. The police said they thought he, too, was a suicide bomber, but it soon turned out they’d made a horrific mistake.

What was happening to Britain? The government responded to the attacks by bringing in even tougher restrictions on personal liberty, allowing the police to lock suspects up for long periods without charge. The judges ruled that some of these new laws were themselves illegal, and that they denied liberties the British people had fought for centuries before.

As the twenty-first century got going, Britons needed more than ever to look at their history, to find out what their country stood for and what it should safeguard in the future. Britain was living in interesting times.

Where was the Queen while all this was going on?

When Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, everyone said her reign was going to be a 'new Elizabethan' age. It wasn't. The queen has so little power she isn't even needed when a dead heat occurs in an election. However, she has the right to have her advice listened to and many prime ministers have found her questioning surprisingly sharp. Her Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 were a great success, with street parties and acres of red, white, and blue bunting; Prince Charles's wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 was an even bigger worldwide hit. Diana had genuine star quality and developed a devoted following round the world.

But when the royal dream went sour the tabloids turned on the royals with undisguised glee. In the 1950s when the issue was 'Would Princess Margaret marry divorced Group Captain Peter Townshend?', the answer was no. In the 1960s when it was 'Would Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon get divorced?', the answer was yes. Then Princess Anne's marriage collapsed and Prince Andrew had hardly brushed the confetti out of his hair before his wife, Sarah 'Fergie' Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was caught on camera cavorting with a Texan millionaire. Could things get any worse?

Yes, they could. Diana and Charles were getting divorced, too.

Charles had apparently, it transpired, never really wanted to marry Diana and had been in love for years with Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles. Diana gave a frank television interview pointing out that with three people in it, her marriage to Charles was rather crowded. Not long after her divorce Diana was killed in a spectacular car crash in Paris, and the public grief had to be seen to be believed. The royals were in deep trouble and they knew it.

Yet, amazingly, the royal family bounced back. Diana's children, William and Harry, were very popular, the Queen Mother's death in 2002 won the royals a lot of sympathy, and against all the odds the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002 was a triumph. Public opinion even came round to accepting Charles's marriage to Camilla in 2004. Much of this success was down to the undiminished respect for the Queen herself, who rose to the occasion with some well chosen words when Muslim suicide bombers struck in London in 2005. What will happen after she has gone? Watch this space!