by A. N. Wilson
It was against this graph of psephological decline that the panicking rump of Scottish MPs in John Major’s government began to make gestures of a distinctly un-Tory kind towards the Scottish nationalists. In 1995, Michael Forsyth succeeded Ian Lang as Scottish Secretary. A new slogan was introduced–‘Fighting for Scotland’.15 (‘Fighting for their lives’ would have been more accurate.) One of the most distasteful, and ridiculous, acts performed by the Conservative Party at this time was the removal of the Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone, from the throne in Westminster Abbey. Forsyth, who was behind this piece of vandalism, and Major, who allowed it, both brought down ill luck on their heads. The throne of Edward the Confessor, and the stone beneath it, were all of a piece, inseparable. They were a symbol of the Union of the Crowns and Kingdoms long before these unions occurred as a matter of political fact. Edward I had removed the stone from Scotland in the thirteenth century. Until then, it had always been used as the coronation stone for Scottish kings. For Scottish separatists, naturally, they were viewed as symbols of English conquest. The Stone had been stolen by Scottish nationalists from Westminster Abbey in 1950, but at that stage the possibility of the Union being broken was entertained only by Celtic dreamers. By the time of John Major, this was no dream, but a political reality. The collapse of the Tory vote in Scotland left the way clear for the nationalists. It was to appease them that devolution was brought in. The matter was put to a referendum as soon as New Labour won the 1997 election. The referendum was held on 11 September. There was a 60.2 percent turnout, compared with a turnout of 62.9 percent in a referendum of 1979; 74.3 percent of these voted for the proposition ‘I agree that there should be a Scottish Parliament’, and 63.5 percent voted for the proposition ‘I agree that a Scottish Parliament should have tax-varying powers’. It was open to those who wished to maintain the Union to vote against having a Scottish Parliament at all. Nevertheless, a mere 74.3 percent of 60.2 percent means that less than half of the population of Scotland did in fact vote for devolution. In Wales, a mere 50 percent of 50 percent voted for their assembly–i.e., no more than a quarter of the voters.
Nevertheless, once the devolutionary idea had been set in motion, it was inevitable that the Scottish separatists should move to greater triumphs. The inevitable consequence of this would one day be the break-up of the United Kingdom itself and the end of Britain as a political entity.
During the debates about Scottish devolution in the 1970s, the Labour MP for West Lothian, an Etonian named Tam Dalyell, had posed his famous West Lothian Question. After devolution, is it justifiable for Scottish MPs to vote in the Westminster Parliament on English domestic affairs? It was not permissible, after devolution, for English and Welsh MPs to vote on Scottish matters. The constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor wrote, ‘There is only one logical answer to the West Lothian question, but it is politically unrealistic: it is for Britain to implement legislative devolution all round, so becoming a thoroughgoing federalist state.’16 But this was an optimistic point of view even in 1999, when it was published, for it was clear that the Scottish nationalists intended to take things much further than that, in which event there would be no centralised authority from which power could be said any longer to evolve. Almost contemporaneously with the Scottish nationalist success story is–by pure coincidence–the development of the Big Bang Theory in physics. (It was in 1979 that Alan Guth, of Stanford University, aged thirty-two, proposed his view that matter, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, etc, all came into being milliseconds after the Bang.) Modern physics was a form of poetry, if not of theology, so strange as to be all but incomprehensible. One of the metaphors which it tried to use to describe the universe was that it was expanding. But Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg noted, ‘Solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space is not expanding.’ Rather, the galaxies were rushing apart.
Rushing apart was a good metaphor of what was happening to Britain at the same period. It took poets to be able to comprehend the height and breadth of what was happening. Benjamin Zephaniah:
With my Jamaican hand on my Ethiopian heart
The African heart deep in my Brummie chest,
And I chant Aston Villa, Aston Villa, Aston Villa,
Believe me, I know my stuff.
I am not wandering dark into the rootless future
Nor am I going back in time to find somewhere to live…
I want to make politically aware love with the rainbow…
Dis is not an emergency
I’m as kool as my imagination, I’m, more caring than your foreign policy,
I don’t have an identity crisis.
The Rastafarian poet might not have had an identity crisis. Many other Britons did. Many Scottish nationalists did want to wander drunk into the rootless future. And their desire to do so would plunge the British who did not share their desire, not into federalism, but into chaos. Wandering drunk into a rootless future was also the inevitable lot of the English and the Welsh if the Scots decided to go it alone and declare independence. And although the monarch was technically the Queen of Scots, as well as of the rest of her kingdom, it did not seem likely that Alex Salmond and his supporters in the National Party would wish to perpetuate her role. The Union, when it broke, would eventually bring not merely Britain, but also its monarchy to an end.
Part of the reason for the resurgence of the Scottish National Party was negative–the complete disillusion felt by the Scottish electorate for the Westminster-based parties, and for the patronising manner in which Secretaries of State for Scotland had (as it was perceived north of the border) known what was best for Scotland. Part of the reason was, no doubt, the political skill and personal charm of Alex Salmond, the leader of the party from 1990 onwards. By the time our period came to an end, it was too early to say whether an independent Scotland would enjoy a renaissance of cultural and national life, bestriding the world stage as an independent European nation, or whether, by contrast, it would become an inward-looking, puritanical, provincial, dull little country, incapable of recapturing the glory days of David Hume, Robert Adam, Adam Smith, Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey. The British Empire had in many senses been the Scottish Empire, with many of those who settled in nineteenth-century Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the newly formed African states being Scottish, many of the best engineers, medics and colonial administrators being Scottish. In the nineteenth century, Dundee had been a world centre of the whaling trade; and of the jute industry which provided sacking for half the world’s commodities. Glasgow was one of the greatest commercial centres in the world; and also one of the great manufacturing bases, where steam engines, machines for spinning cotton flax and wool were made. Above all, it was remembered as a hub of metal-working and of shipbuilding. No doubt two reasons for the pre-eminence of Glasgow were ‘the abundance of skilled workmen and the low wages paid to them’.17 But another reason was that, rather than being a small, inward-looking nation, Scotland, in partnership with England, was now part of the greatest Imperial adventure since Roman times. The Scottish Sun in January 1992 came out as a nationalist newspaper: ‘The Scottish Sun has been thinking long and hard about what form of government would best serve our future. We have come to the inescapable conclusion that Scotland’s destiny lies as an independent nation within the European Community. The political and economic union with England is now nearly 300 years old. It has served us well in the past, but as links with Europe strengthen, that union has become more and more unnecessary. The time has come to break the shackles. To collect our own taxes. To run our own lives. To talk to other nations in the world on our behalf. For too long–300 years too long–we have thought of ourselves as a second class nation…’18
It is too soon to say whether the Sun’s self-contradictory prophecy will come to pass: self-contradictory because, in one breath, it says that the Union had served Scotland well in the past, and in the next that Scotland had thought of itself as a second-class nation. Historically, t
his was simply not the case. The period when Scotland was manifestly not a second-class nation, and was not regarded as one either by its own citizens or by others, was during the period of its Enlightenment, and during the heyday of Empire: i.e., when the Union was at its closest. Many Scots felt, after devolution, that their country had diminished, and become more provincial, more petty, more inward-looking.
In Northern Ireland, John Major was lucky enough to have history on his side. The Long War was exhausting all sides. The IRA’s criminal activities made them deeply hated in working-class Catholic communities–the protection rackets, the knee-capping, the gangsterism. Crucially, its foreign backers in Libya and the United States were beginning to run out of cash, and at last America had a President, in Bill Clinton, who knew Britain (he was a graduate student at University College, Oxford) and who was prepared to stop the sentimental pro-Irish lobby in the US from giving money to Noraid. (Surveys had often showed that a majority of those donating money to this terrorist cause were under the impression that the IRA was the Army (official) of the Irish Republic, at war with an invading British force.) With an intelligent American President on the side of the Peace Process, the republican voters could feel reassured and, an almost equally weighty consideration, the self-importance of the Republican high command could be flattered. Not for them the kind of retirement they had witnessed being spent by IRA veterans in the 1950s and 1960s, undistinguished lives in the dingy outskirts of Dublin, poverty, whisky loosening the tongue to recall the bombing of pubs or shooting or border patrols, or to theorise about the Revolution, but with the evidence of failure all around their lyncrusta-coated parlours. They could see, if they played their cards right, careers as public speakers in America, perhaps even Irish senators. What was to prevent them by act or default from being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
These were the rewards which history might offer. ‘It is time for the cycle of violence to be broken. We are prepared to break it,’ Adams told Sinn Fein. And this in Dublin. Neither McGuinness nor Adams ever made any public acknowledgement of membership of the IRA and they continued to speak to the ends of their careers as if the violence was something quite outside themselves, something which they, in common with the American President and the new Prime Minister of Britain, who looked and sounded like a gentle bank manager, hoped would go away. ‘Republicans want peace. We want an honourable peace, no papering over the cracks or brushing under the carpet the humiliations, degradations and injustices inflicted on us, by a foreign power.’19
So, John Major had history on his side. He began the Northern Ireland peace process. It was left to Tony Blair to finish it. Probably as a good Chief Whip, Major had already foreseen that they could allow the UUP and its leader David Trimble–i.e., the decent, sensible, pro-British, etc, etc–be the victims of the process. Hitherto, the British politicians had been unable to resist the impulse to impose decency and common sense upon the Northern Irish. Major, and Blair after him, allowed the leader of the ‘mainstream’ Unionists to be the one who was prepared, very, very tentatively, to talk about the possibility of power-sharing with the nationalists. Inevitably Trimble was represented to the Protestants as a trimmer.
There were the expected delays as the IRA, in ever less penetrable communiqués, spoke of ‘decommissioning’ their weapons. A few rogue explosions would continue to save their pride but their game was up. Major was the first British negotiator really to insist that the Northern Irish must solve their own problems. Their new political arrangements must be decided by a referendum. There were talks about talks about talks. Canadian inspectors came to inspect the caches of Libyan guns and explosives, Algerian rocket launchers and Russia.20 pistols which the maniacs had so expensively collected over the years. Boring ‘framework documents’ were drafted, read out, spat upon, agreed upon. Every now and then one of the negotiators would fall back on the old crackpot rhetoric to please their grass-roots supporters. But they were tired of killing one another. Mr Major, as reassuringly boring as a man from the Alliance and Leicester Building Society advising them about the respective merits of repayment versus interest-only mortgages, led all these fanatics, in spite of themselves, down the pathway of peace. His own personal doggedness and niceness were integral parts of the story, though perhaps the whole oddity of the situation did require, if it was to be brought to fruition, the skills of histrionic fraudulence in which Mr Major was lacking but with which nature had so liberally endowed his successor.
24
Stephen Lawrence
Mr Major, upon his becoming Prime Minister, had expressed the wish ‘to see us build a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident’.1 In almost every big speech from now on, the Prime Minister would allude to the ‘two rooms in Brixton’ from which he emerged to create the classless society. And when on another occasion he evoked an idyllic vision of an England in which men sipped warm beer while watching village cricket, and old ladies cycled to Holy Communion in the early morning mist, his experience as a Lambeth councillor had taught him that in his native south London there was an abysmal fissure between any such vision and the cruel reality of things. In local government as a young man he had a liberal record. In 1968 he had stood aside from the other Conservative candidates who had signed up to a leaflet entitled ‘We Back Enoch, Don’t You?’ Nor did these die-hards, when offering themselves for election, even bother to approach Major to sign their pledge–‘We the undersigned call for a complete ban on all further immigration to the borough.’2
The other, and more poverty-stricken, parts of London, retained, in spite of much architectural wreckage, a rackety cohesion. South London, following much heavier wartime aerial bombardment than north, was rebuilt more brutally. Whereas north London had only one major thoroughfare, the M1, taking traffic out of the metropolis, south London became a sprawling mass of badly planned road systems attempting to convey traffic, in one direction to Kent, in another to Southampton, and often, it would seem from their chaos of traffic jams and road signs, to almost anywhere else other than where it happened to be, as though anyone finding themselves in Kennington or Lewisham or Camberwell had done so only by accident and was longing to get out again as soon as possible. Between the pockets of wealth in Clapham, Dulwich, Blackheath and Georgian Greenwich, there were the ruthlessly ‘Corbusian slabs.3 of Loughborough Road, Brixton, the ‘dour point blocks of Lambeth Walk’.4 South London was not at ease with itself. To cope with a huge increase in population, the boroughs had hurled up a chaos of gimcrack tower blocks and inadequate estates to house the growing numbers.
In the Borough of Greenwich alone, the GLC had created what was not merely an estate, but effectively a new town at Thamesmead on the Erith Marshes. The 1960s also saw the rebuilding of two large hospitals in the brutalist manner in Greenwich, and an extension of the grammar school at Eltham.
As so often happened in London, prosperity and poverty juxtaposed. Greenwich threw up extremes–on the one hand the handsome big houses of the rich at Blackheath, on the other the urine-marinaded brutalist tower blocks of Woolwich. Eltham, on the further edges of Woolwich, had medieval roots. The Institute of Army Education was housed in Eltham Palace–the building dated from 1475, when it was inhabited by Edward IV, but the moated site was two hundred years older. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club was housed in Eltham Lodge, a fine banker’s town house from the reign of Charles II. Beneath the more nondescript parts of Eltham High Street were the remains of Well Hall, a moated manor house which belonged in the earlier sixteenth century to Sir Thomas More’s daughter, Margaret Roper.5 It was in Eltham that Bob Hope and Frankie Howerd were born. Herbert Morrison lived there when a Cabinet Minister.6
Eltham had an ethnic minority population of around 13 percent. Unemployment was way above the national average at this point. One household in five was seriously behind with utility bills. It was an area of London where the whites beneath or at the poverty line felt especially threatened. A misspelt scrawl on the church gate de
clared: ‘Watch out coons, your now entering Eltham.’
Doreen and Neville Lawrence lived in a council house in Hanover Road, Woolwich. Neville was a builder, temporarily unemployed since the downturn in the housing market. Doreen was studying for a degree in humanities at the University of Greenwich. They had three children, the eldest of whom, Stephen, was preparing for his A-levels and wanted to be an architect. Doreen had been born in rural Jamaica in 1952. Her own mother was twenty-two when she came to England. ‘Where we lived in Jamaica I don’t recall seeing any white people.’7 When Doreen went to school in England, ‘[I] was the only black child in the class. I don’t recall anyone treating me badly or being racist towards me.’8 Her children were among many blacks in their English schools.
The murder of their son Stephen, which took place in Well Hall Road, Eltham, was an event which revealed the fissures in British society. The eighteen-year-old schoolboy was standing at a bus stop with his friend Duwayne Brooks and three strangers, after 10.30 on the night of Thursday 22 April 1993. Duwayne heard a shout across the road–‘What? What? Nigger!’
The next five minutes, which were the last of Stephen Lawrence’s life, happened very quickly. A gang of white youths had crossed the road to attack the two blacks. Duwayne saw the leading youth draw something long from inside his clothing as he crossed the road. This youth, the leader, lifted this object and brought it down on Stephen. The five attackers had found their prey and run off in a confused and terrifying instant. None of the four witnesses, including Duwayne, had a completely coherent memory of what happened, some remembering that Stephen was kicked to the ground and tried to ward off the blows, others remembering that he had fallen, while the attackers ran off down Dickson Road. Stephen had been stabbed twice, one blow cutting through two major nerves, a large vein and an artery before penetrating a lung; the other blow, which gashed the left shoulder, also cut an artery and a vein.9 In spite of these injuries, Stephen Lawrence managed to stagger some 200 yards up the hill of Well Hall Road after his friend before slumping beneath a bright orange street light. Duwayne, terrified that the assailants might return, ran to a telephone kiosk, and dialled 999, reporting that his friend had been hit by an iron bar. By chance, an off-duty policeman, PC James Geddis, and his wife, Angela, returning from a prayer meeting, slowed their car and came to Duwayne’s help. The ambulance arrived. The boys were taken to the Accident and Emergency Department at the Brooke Hospital, a mile or so up the hill; Stephen’s parents Neville and Doreen Lawrence came anxiously to the hospital, but by the time they had done so, their son was dead.