A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Under Treasury pressure to produce the maximum competition and revenue, the new Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, chose it. A vastly complicated new system of subsidies, contracts, bids, pricing (of almost everything), cross-ticketing and regulation was created, topped off when late in the day, it was decided to sell off the nation’s railway tracks separately to a single private monopoly to be called Railtrack. Suddenly to get across the country could become a complicated transaction, involving two or three separate train companies. They would not, however, be left to get on with it in a new market. Trains were too important for that. A Franchise Director would be given powers over the profits and pricing, including ticket prices, of the new companies and a Rail Regulator would deal with the track. Both would end up reporting directly to the Secretary of State so that any public dissatisfaction, commercial problem, safety issue – indeed, almost everything – would be back in the lap of the politicians. If this was privatization, it was a strange and possibly pointless one, which would end up costing the taxpayer far more than old-fashioned, much-mocked British Rail. The historian of this curious tale, Christian Wolmar, dubbed it ‘the poll tax on wheels’. The writer Simon Jenkins, who had sat on the British Rail board, concluded: ‘The Treasury’s treatment of the railway in the 1990s was probably the worst instance of Whitehall industrial mismanagement since the Second World War.’

  105

  Citizens and Hoop-jumpers

  As a Brixton man who had known unemployment, and as a sensitive man quick to feel slights, Major was well prepared by upbringing and temperament to take on the arrogant and inefficient quality of much so-called public service. In his early years he himself had been the plaintive figure who found ‘telephones answered grudgingly or not at all. Booths closed while customers were kept waiting…Remote council offices where, after a long bus journey, there was no one available to see you who really knew about the issue…Anonymous voices and faces who refused to give you a contact name.’ He was making a good point. Why in a country that spent so much on public services were so many of them so bad? The answer of the Thatcher revolution was that in the end only the market is properly responsive. Yet nobody in power during the eighties or nineties, including Margaret Thatcher, was prepared to take this logic to its limit and privatize the health service or schools or road system, compensating the worse off with vouchers or cash help. Nor, under the iron grip of the Treasury, was there any enthusiasm for a revival of local democracy to take charge instead.

  This left a fiddly and highly bureaucratic centralism as the only option left, one which we have seen gather momentum in the Thatcher years and which would flourish most extravagantly under Blair. Under Major, the centralized Funding Agency for Schools was formed and schools in England and Wales were ranked by crude league tables, depending on how well their pupils did in exams. The university system was vastly expanded by simply allowing colleges and polytechnics to rename themselves as universities, and a futile search began for ways in which civil servants might measure academic merit and introduce league tables there. The hospital system was further centralized and given a host of new targets. The police, faced with a review of their pay and demands by the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, for forces to be amalgamated, were given their own performance league tables. The Tories had spent 74 per cent more, in real terms, on law and order since 1979 yet crime was at an all-time high, as a doleful list of high-profile murders reminded the public. Clarke’s contempt for many of the police as ‘vested interests’ was not calculated to win them round to reform. Across England and Wales elected councillors were turfed off police boards and replaced by businessmen. Clarke’s hostility to local control had been confirmed by his time as Health Secretary when, according to one department insider, he showed himself as ‘a leading exponent of the Stalinist side of the Tory party. He castrated the regional health authority chairmen.’

  In 1993 Clarke defended his new police league tables in language that was eerily echoed by New Labour later: ‘The new accountability that we seek from our public services will not be achieved simply because men of good will and reasonableness wish that it to be so. The new accountability is the new radicalism.’ Accountability: once the word had implied a contest of ideas and achievements, played out in front of the voters. Now it meant something very different. Across the country, from the auditing of local government to the running of courts or the working hours of nurses, an army of civil servants, accountants, auditors and number-crunchers marched in. Once, long ago in the 1940s, Labour had been mocked for saying that the man in Whitehall knew best. Now the auditors and accountants hired by Whitehall ruled instead. Weakly, from time to time, ministers would claim that the cult of central control and measurement had been imposed by Brussels. Some had been, but this was mostly a homegrown ‘superstate’.

  Major called his headline policy the Citizen’s Charter, though he himself did not like the name very much because of its ‘unconscious echoes of Revolutionary France’. Every part of government dealing with public service was ordered to come up with proposals for improvement at grass-roots level, to be pursued from the centre by inspections, questionnaires, league tables and ultimately the system of awards, Charter Marks, for organizations that did well. Throughout, Major spoke of ‘empowering’ teachers and doctors, ‘helping the customer’ and ‘devolving’. He thought his great system of regulation from the centre would not last long: it was ‘a regulatory goad to raise standards…over time, I anticipated formal regulation steadily withering away, as the effects of growing competition are felt.’ But how would this happen? In practice, the regulators grew more powerful, not less so. If people are paid to respond to regulators’ targets and jump through hoops, they become excellent at target-practice and hoop-jumping. This does not make them wise administrators. Despite the rhetoric, public servants were not being given real freedom to manage. Elected office-holders were being sacked. Major’s hopes for central regulation withering away echo Lenin, who hoped for a ‘withering away’ of the Soviet State, with similar success.

  106

  Small Wars, Big Questions

  In December 1993 John Major stood outside the black-painted, steel-armoured door of Number Ten Downing Street with the affable Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, Albert Reynolds. He declared a new principle which offended many traditional Conservatives and Unionists. If both parts of Ireland voted to be reunited, Britain would not stand in the way. She had, said Major, ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. Thus a long strand of Tory thinking, which was that the party was dedicated to the United Kingdom, consciously and proudly biased in its favour, was torn up. There was more. If the Provisional IRA, which had so lately bombed the very building Major was standing in front of, and murdered two young boys in Cheshire, renounced violence, it could be welcomed into the sunlight as a legitimate political party.

  In the run-up to this Downing Street Declaration, the government was also conducting top-secret ‘back channel’ negotiations with the terrorist organization. The Provisional IRA leadership proved slippery and frustrating but in August 1994 they declared ‘a complete cessation of military operations’ which, though it was a long way short of renouncing violence, was widely welcomed. It was followed a month later by a Loyalist ceasefire. A complicated dance of three-strand talks, framework documents and arguments about the decommissioning of weapons followed. The road to peace would be tortuous, involving many walk-outs and public arguments. On the streets, extortion, knee-capping and occasional murders continued. But whereas the number of people killed in 1993 had been eighty-four, the toll fell to sixty-one the following year and nine in 1995. The contradictory demands of Irish republicanism and Unionism meant that Major failed to get a final agreement, even on paper. That was left for Tony Blair, unfinished business. But Major’s achievement was substantial: he was a good peacemaker.

  And he made a dramatic bid for peace at home. In July 1995, tormented by yet more rumours of right-wing conspiracies
against him, Major riposted with a theatrical coup all of his own, one his music-hall father would have applauded. He resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and invited all comers to take him on. He told journalists gathered in the sunshine in the Number Ten garden it was ‘put up or shut up’ time. If he lost, he would resign as Prime Minister. If he won, he expected the party to rally around him. This was a risk, for there were other plausible leaders. One was Michael Heseltine, who had become Deputy Prime Minister and who loyally supported Major. Another was Michael Portillo, then a pin-up boy of the Thatcherite right, whose supporters prepared a campaign headquarters for him but who decided against standing. In the event the challenger was John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, known to many as ‘the Vulcan’ because of his glassy extraterrestrial demeanour but a highly intelligent Thatcherite. At a catastrophic press launch of his campaign he was surrounded by a celebratory, luridly dressed collection of supportive MPs swiftly dubbed ‘the barmy army’. Major won his fight, though not gloriously. In the end 109 Tory MPs failed to back him. Nevertheless, in a clever political operation, victory was swiftly declared and he lived to be defeated finally by the real electorate two years later. By then defeat had been made inevitable by the self-destructive European war of the previous years.

  Major was also a cautious warmaker. Blair would inherit not only the Northern Irish peace process but also the bubbling ethnic wars breaking out in former Yugoslavia, following the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as independent states in the early nineties. The worst violence followed the Serbian assault on Bosnia and the three-year siege of its capital, Sarajevo. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was heard for the first time as woeful columns of refugees fled in different directions. A nightmare which Europeans thought had vanished in 1945 was returning, only a couple of days’ drive away from London. Major asked his military advisers how many troops it would take to keep the sides apart and was told the answer was 400,000, three times the total size of the British Army. He sent 1,800 men to protect the humanitarian convoys that were rumbling south. Many British people proved ready to collect parcels of food, warm clothes, medicine and blankets, which were loaded onto trucks and driven south by volunteers. A London conference tried to get a peace deal and failed.

  This new war went on, ever nastier. Many in the government were dubious about Britain being further involved. But the evening news bulletins showed pictures of starving refugees, the uncovered mass graves of civilians shot by death squads, and children with appalling injuries. There was a frenzied campaign for Western intervention. But what kind? In the United States President Clinton was determined not to risk American soldiers on the ground, but a swelling of outrage about the behaviour of the Serbs persuaded him to consider less costly alternatives, such as air strikes and lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnians. This would have put others who were on the ground, including the British, directly in the line of fire when the Serbs retaliated. There were rows between London and Washington. Hideous attacks in Sarajevo, notably a mysterious mortar strike at the market, finally provoked the Nato air strikes. In response the Serbs took UN troops hostage, including British soldiers who were then used as human shields. The Serb capture of the town of Srebrenica was followed by disgusting slaughter, and renewed demands for full-scale military intervention.

  It never came. After three years of war, sanctions on Serbia and the success of Croats in fighting back, a peace agreement was finally made in Dayton, Ohio. Major was the first British Prime Minister of the post-Cold War world, grappling with what the proper role of the West should be. The Balkan wars, a result of the fall of communism, showed perfectly the dangers and limits of intervention. When a civil conflict is relayed in all its horror to tens of millions of voters every night by television, the pressure to do something, to separate the sides and succour the suffering, is intense. But mostly this requires not air attacks but a full-scale ground force, which will be drawn into the war, and must be followed by years of aid and rebuilding. Will the same voters be happy to keep paying, and keep accepting the casualties that follow? Major and his colleagues were accused of moral cowardice and cynicism in allowing the revival of fascist behaviour in one corner of Europe. This was nobody’s finest hour. Yet Western leaders were wary about whether their voters would have accepted a full-scale war and the thankless neo-colonial responsibilities that would follow. They may have been right.

  107

  A Very English Coup

  Tony Blair was an Establishment figure, more so than Thatcher, Major or Smith. He had been a mild teenage rebel, worn his hair long, broken school rules and imitated Mick Jagger in a rock band. His father had been brought up by a Communist on Clydeside and had suffered an early and severe stroke which brought his children uncertainty and a bump down in the world. Far more importantly, though, Blair was the son of a Tory lawyer and went to a preparatory school in Durham, then the grand fee-paying boarding school Fettes in Edinburgh, then Oxford University, and then the Bar, before becoming an MP. There was more Gothic architecture in his early history than in most volumes of Pevsner’s architectural guide. Though he rebelled, the lessons of politeness, deference and a quiet knowledge about where power lay, were in place from the start. Gifted with a natural charm, infectious good humour and a great skill in acting, he was a young man whose seriousness and principle were also evident. His father’s stroke had happened when he was still young: he lost his adored Irish-born mother when he was a student and turned increasingly to religion, in its activist, not contemplative form.

  Much ink has been spilled about why he joined the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. It is not a ridiculous question. Falling for a young Liverpudlian socialist called Cherie Booth sharpened his politics but he had joined Labour before he met her. There is a widespread belief that it was mere calculation. In the early eighties, the Tories were awash with bright lawyers looking for seats and political careers while Labour seemed on its last legs. If you wanted to get into the Commons and then rise, Labour offered an easier if riskier route. While this is possible, joining Labour at its lowest ebb would show uncanny prescience for a pure careerist. The likeliest explanation is simply that he believed in political action and that, though flawed, Labour’s belief in social justice was nearest to the Christian social views he had formed. Once in the party, working his way through local branches in London, he displayed the full kit of soft-left beliefs of the time, being hostile to the European Community and privatization, pro-CND and high taxes, the rights of illegal immigrants and greater freedom for the press. He would ditch all of these views later but this does not mean they were insincerely held at the time; for the Labour Party of Foot’s time they were considered moderate, and Blair was always opposed to the hard-left Bennite and Militant groups.

  After fighting a hopeless by-election, Blair won a safe Labour seat in the north-east of England with his combination of chutzpah and charm and, in the Commons from 1983, quickly fell in with another new MP. Gordon Brown was much that Blair was not. He was a tribal Labour Party man from a strongly political family, who had barely glimpsed the crenellated English Establishment which produced Blair. Brown had been Scotland’s best-known student politician and a player in Scottish Labour politics from the age of twenty-three, followed by a stint in television. Yet the two men had some things in common. They were both Christians and they were both deeply impatient with the condition of the Labour Party. For seven or eight years they seemed inseparable, working mostly from a tiny, windowless office they shared. Brown tutored Blair in the darker ways of politics, treating him like a sweetly naive kid brother. (He would learn.) Blair was also a vital sounding-board for Brown, however, teaching him what the mysterious English middle classes might be thinking. No working relationship in politics was closer. Brown summed it up in 1991: ‘I think Blair could well be leader of the party after me.’ Together, they made friends with Westminster journalists, together they matured as Commons performers, together they shared their frustration abou
t older Labour politicians, together they worked their way up the ranks of the shadow cabinet.

  Then Blair began to pull ahead. After the 1992 defeat he made a bleak public judgement about why Labour had lost so badly. The reason was not complicated, but simple: ‘Labour has not been trusted to fulfil the aspirations of the majority of people in a modern world.’ As shadow home secretary he began to try to put that right, promising (in words borrowed from Brown) to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. His response to the horror of the 1993 murder of the toddler James Bulger by two young boys, which provoked a frenzy of national debate, was particularly resonant. In general Blair tried to return his party to the common-sense language of morality. He drank deep from the mix of socially conservative and economically liberal messages used by the great communicator Bill Clinton and his team of ‘New Democrats’.

  So too did Brown. But he had a harder brief, since as shadow chancellor his job was to demolish cherished spending plans and say no to Labour MPs. Brown’s support for the ERM meant he was ineffective when Major and Lamont suffered their great defeat. The Brown and Blair relationship was less close than it had been earlier but it was still strong. Together they visited the United States to learn a new political style from the Democrats. Awkwardly for Brown, it relied heavily on leadership charisma. At home Blair pushed Smith aggressively over reforming the party rulebook, falling out with him badly. Watching media commentators and some Labour MPs began to tip him as the next leader, Brown’s team began to ask whether Blair was now manoeuvring and briefing against his old mentor. It was a grim time for Brown and he did not bother to reach out, or show a sunny side. Slowly but perceptibly, Brown-Blair was turning into Blair-Brown.