A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  What did Tony Blair take from the force of the Diana cult, and of charismatic celebrity generally? His instinct for popular culture when he arrived in power was uncanny. He too would soon launch himself onto daytime television programmes, spinning an engaging and chirpy story about his life and interests, not always accurate in every detail. The New Age spiritualism which came out into the open when Diana died, with its shrines and its charms, its wide-eyed-ness, was echoed by the influence of people such as Carole Caplin in Blair’s Downing Street circle. But it went further. What other politicians failed to grasp, and he did grasp, was the power of optimism expressed by the glossy world of celebrity, and people’s readiness to forgive their favourites not just once, but again and again. In celebrity-land, if you had charisma and you apologized, or better still, bared a little of your soul, you could get away with most things short of murder. Interesting. But the world of politics would prove to be a little tougher.

  112

  Days of Hope

  Optimism was the only real force behind the Northern Ireland peace process. Too often, this is now remembered by one of Blair’s greatest soundbites as the talks reached a climax: ‘This is no time for soundbites…I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.’ While irresistibly comic, it would be a horribly unfair thing to hold on to from one of Blair’s biggest achievements. As we have seen, John Major had been tenacious in trying to bring Republicans and Unionists to the table but there had been a stalemate contributed to by both IRA bloody-mindedness and his own parliamentary weakness. Encouraged by Bill Clinton, Blair had decided in Opposition that an Irish peace settlement would be one of his top priorities in government. He went to the province as his first visit after winning power and focused Number Ten on the negotiations as soon as the IRA, sensing a new opportunity, announced a further ceasefire. In Mo Mowlam, the pugnacious, earthy and spectacularly brave new Northern Ireland Secretary, he had someone prepared to eff and blind at Unionists and coo or hug Sinn Feiners in pursuit of a deal. Mowlam was, after Blair himself, the nearest the new government had to a charismatic celebrity.

  Quite soon the Ulster Unionist politicians found her a bit much, and suspected she was basically ‘Green’. She concentrated her charm and bullying on the Republicans, while a Number Ten team run by Blair’s chief aides concentrated their work on the Unionists. Blair would emphasize his own family’s Unionist roots to try to win trust. As under Major, there were three separate negotiations taking place simultaneously. There was direct talking between the Northern Irish political parties, aimed at producing a power-sharing assembly in which they could all sit. This was chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell, and was the toughest part. There were the talks between the Northern Irish parties and the British and Irish governments about the border and the constitutional position of Northern Ireland in the future. And finally there were direct talks between London and Dublin on the wider constitutional and security settlement.

  The story of the negotiations in detail is gripping but cannot be given here. Suffice it to say that this was a long, intensely difficult process which appeared to have broken down at numerous points, and was kept going mainly thanks to Blair himself. His advisers grumbled that he spent a ludicrously disproportionate amount of time on Northern Ireland, expending charm, energy, long days and late nights for months at a time. He also took big personal risks, as when early on he invited Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, the latter also a top Provisional IRA commander, to Downing Street. Some in the Northern Ireland Office, as well as in Unionist politics, believe Blair personally gave too much away to the Republicans, particularly over the release of terrorist prisoners. His former Northern Ireland Secretary and friend Peter Mandelson later said as much. But he spent most of his time trying to keep the Unionists with him, having moved Labour policy away from a position of support for Irish unification and in Washington, Blair was seen as too Unionist. At one point, when talks had broken down again, Mowlam made the astonishing personal decision to go into the notorious Maze prison herself and talk to Republican and Loyalist terrorist prisoners. Hiding behind their politicians, the imprisoned hard men still called the shots, at a time when this was not a metaphorical expression.

  Given a deadline for Easter 1998, after last-gasp setbacks, a deal was finally struck. Northern Ireland would stay part of the UK for as long as the majority there wished it. The Republic of Ireland would give up the territorial claim to Northern Ireland, amending its constitution. The parties would combine in a power-sharing executive, based on a new elected assembly. There would be a new North-South body, knitting the two parts of Ireland together in various practical, undramatic ways. The paramilitary organizations would surrender or destroy their weapons, monitored by an independent body. Prisoners would be released. The policing of Northern Ireland, long a sore point, would be made fairer. This deal involved much pain, particularly for the Unionists. It was only the start of true peace and would be threatened frequently afterwards. The horrific bombing of the centre of Omagh a few months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement was the worst setback. A renegade IRA splinter group murdered twenty-nine people and injured two hundred. Yet this time the extremists seemed unable to stop the rest from talking.

  Once the agreement had been ratified by referendums on both sides of the border, the decommissioning of arms proved an endless and wearisome game of bluff. Though the two leaders of the moderate parties in Northern Ireland, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists and John Hume of the SDLP, won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the agreement was to elbow both their parties aside. With electorates nervous, they lost out at the ballot box to the harder-line Democratic Unionists of Dr Ian Paisley and to Sinn Fein, under Adams and McGuinness. This made it harder to set up an effective power-sharing executive and assembly in Belfast. Yet, astonishingly, the so-called ‘Dr No’ of Unionism, Paisley, and his republican enemy, Adams, would eventually sit down together. The thuggery and crime attendant on years of terrorist activity has not yet disappeared. Yet because of the agreement hundreds of people who would have died had the ‘troubles’ continued, are alive and living peaceful lives. Investment has returned. Belfast is a transformed, cleaner, busier, more confident city. Large businesses increasingly work on an all-Ireland basis, despite the existence of two currencies and a border. Tony Blair can take a sizeable slice of the credit. As one of his biographers wrote: ‘He was exploring his own ability to take a deep-seated problem and deal with it. It was a life-changing experience for him.’

  113

  The Tartan Pizza

  If the Good Friday Agreement changed the UK, Scottish and Welsh devolution plans changed Britain. Through the Tory years, the case for a Scottish parliament had been bubbling north of the border. Margaret Thatcher was seen as a conspicuously English figure imposing harsh economic penalties on Scotland, which considered itself inherently more egalitarian and democratic. This did not stop Scots buying their council houses (when she came to power the proportion of people living in state housing was higher than in many Eastern European countries under Communism), nor did they send back their tax cuts or fail to use the new legislation to choose which schools their children went to. But Scotland did have a public culture further to the left than that of southern England and the real action came from the respectable middle classes. A group of pro-devolution activists, including SNP, Labour and Liberal people, churchmen, former civil servants and trade unionists formed the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly. In due course this produced a ‘Constitutional Convention’ meant to bring in a wider cross-section of Scottish life behind their Claim of Right. It argued that if the Scots were to stand on their own two feet as Mrs Thatcher insisted, they needed control over their own affairs.

  Momentum increased when the Scottish Tories lost half their remaining seats in the 1987 election, and when the poll tax was introduced there first to stave off a rebellion among homeowners about higher-rates bills. Over the next three years a staggering 2.5 million summary warrants f
or non-payment of the poll tax were issued in Scotland, a country of some five million people. The Constitutional Convention got going in March 1989, after Donald Dewar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, decided to work with other parties. The Convention brought together the vast majority of Scottish MPs, all but two of Scotland’s regional, district and island councils, the trade unions, churches, charities and many more – almost everyone indeed except the Conservatives, who were sticking with the original Union, and the SNP, who wanted full independence. Great marches were held. The newspapers became highly excited. A detailed blueprint was produced for the first Scottish parliament since 1707, very like the one later established.

  Scottish Tories, finding themselves increasingly isolated, fought back vainly. They argued that ‘Thatcherism’ bore a close family resemblance to many of the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. Was not Scotland’s time of greatness based on thrift, hard work and enterprise? One of the cradles of Thatcherism more recently had been in Scotland, at St Andrews University. They pointed out that if a Tory government, based on English votes, was regarded as illegitimate by the Scots, then in future a Labour government based on Scottish constituencies might be regarded as illegitimate by the English. In the 1992 election, John Major made a passionate plea for the survival of the Union. Had the four countries never come together, their joint history would have never been as great: ‘are we, in our generation, to throw all that away?’. He won back a single Scottish seat. Various minor sops were offered to the Scots in his years, including the return of the Stone of Destiny, with much ceremony. In 1997, the party, which had once had a majority of seats in Scotland, had not a single one left.

  So by the time Tony Blair became leader, Labour’s commitment to devolution was long-standing. Unlike most of Labour’s commitments this was not a manifesto promise by a single party. It had been agreed away from Westminster, outside the New Labour hub, with a host of other bodies. John Smith, whose funeral in Scotland was a great gathering of the country’s establishment, united in grief, had been a particularly passionate supporter. Dewar, now in charge of the project, was Smith’s great friend. Blair could not simply tear this up. He was not much interested in devolution or impressed by it, particularly not for Wales, where support had been far more muted. The only thing he could do was to insist that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly would only happen after referendums in the two countries, which in Scotland’s case would include a second question as to whether the parliament should be allowed the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound. This proved to be a great service to devolution, because it entrenched the legitimacy of the parliament. In September 1997, shortly after the death of Diana, which interrupted campaigning, Scotland voted by three to one for the new Parliament, and by 63.5 per cent to 36.5 per cent to give it tax-raising powers. The vote for the Welsh assembly was far closer, indeed wafer-thin. The Edinburgh parliament would have clearly defined authority over a wide spread of public life – education, health, welfare, local government, transport, housing – while Westminster kept taxation, defence, foreign affairs and some lesser issues. Wales’s assembly had fewer powers, and no tax-raising rights. Only six Labour MPs said they would leave London and make a career in politics at home.

  In 1999, after nearly 300 years, Scotland got her parliament with 129 MSPs, and Wales her assembly, with sixty members. Both were elected by proportional representation, making coalition governments almost inevitable. In Scotland, Labour provided the first ‘first minister’ (‘prime minister’ being considered too provocative a title). He was Donald Dewar, a lanky, pessimistic and much-loved intellectual who looked a little like a dyspeptic heron. He took charge of a small pond of Labour and Liberal Democrat ministers. To start with, Scotland was governed from the Church of Scotland’s general assembly buildings, the forbidding gothic affair in Edinburgh. Later it would move to a new building by a Catalan architect, Enrico Miralles, who died of a heart attack at an early stage. A brewery opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse was demolished and the complex new structure, with a roof meant to look like overturned fishing boats, was finally ready for use in 2004. It is architecturally impressive with a lightness and openness millions of miles removed from Westminster, but it was originally budgeted to cost £55 million and ended up costing £470 million, producing a vitriolic public argument in Scotland about wasted money. Dewar never lived to see it opened, collapsing and dying from a brain haemorrhage in 2000. Wales got her new assembly building, by Richard Rogers, in Cardiff Bay, in 2006 with much less controversy.

  Few predictions about the Scottish Parliament proved right. It was said that it would cause an early crisis at Westminster because of the unfairness of Scottish MPs being able to vote on England-only business, particularly when the cabinet was so dominated by Scots. This did not happen, though it may yet. It was said that home rule would put paid to the Scottish National Party. Under Alex Salmond, their pugnacious leader, they were by 2007 so popular they were ousting Labour from its old Scottish hegemony. It was assumed that the Scottish Parliament would be popular in Scotland. A long and tawdry series of minor scandals, plus the cost of the building, meant that it became a butt of ridicule instead. This too may change, as Scots experience new laws it has passed. Among the policies the Edinburgh parliament has implemented are more generous provision for older people; no up-front top-up fees for students from Scotland, though English students at Scottish universities must pay; new property laws to allow Highland communities to compulsorily purchase the land they occupy; and a ban on smoking in public places. In all these Scotland has reinforced her reputation for being to the left of England, though extra taxes have not yet been levied on the Scots.

  The most striking change, however, has been how quickly Scottish public life has diverged from that of the rest of Britain since the parliament was established. Scotland always had a separate legal system, schools, newspapers and football leagues. Now she had separate politics too, with her own controversies and personalities, a news agenda increasingly different from that of England. This part of post-war Britain’s story is still developing. Like England’s, Scotland’s economy has moved steadily towards services and away from manufacturing. After many years of decline, Scotland’s population has begun to rise gently since 2003, with net immigration from the rest of the UK. When large numbers of asylum seekers began arriving in Britain those who were sent to Scotland found that the Scots were considerably less welcoming than their piously democratic self-image suggested they would be. And anti-English feeling was not much quietened by home rule.

  Wales too has her own politics, but feels not radically different, a change of emphasis, not direction. Scotland feels more like a different country, and London now seems a lot more than 400 miles from Edinburgh. By the winter of 2006-7 some polls showed more than half of Scots prepared to vote for independence. This may be a blip, a reaction to an unpopular government in London. There had been earlier warnings of a coming break-up of Britain, a great topic of debate from the late sixties, when the oil was discovered, right through to the final years of John Major’s administration in the mid-nineties. It may be that a slow, soft separation is now taking place instead. There has been no constitutional chopper coming down to separate Scotland and England. It is more like two pieces of pizza being gently pulled apart, still together but now connected only by strings of molten cheese.

  114

  The Dawning of a New Era?

  Margaret Thatcher had been a celebrity strictly on her own terms, never big on forgiveness or peace-making but always understanding the importance of optimism. Blair was learning from her. He quickly invited her back to see him in Downing Street and during his first years in office showed that he had picked up some of her bad traits too. She was unreasonably suspicious of the civil service. So was he. She was unimpressed by her first cabinet. He felt the same about his. Like her, when it might have voted him down on a pet idea, he simply went round it. Like her, he toyed with and then discarded the
ideologies of intellectuals as he saw fit. With Thatcher it was the radicals of the new right, urging her to sell off hospitals or motorways. With Blair, it was the more gentle spirits urging him to adopt ‘stakeholding’ or ‘communitarianism,’ novel ways of reordering or taming capitalism. For their authors these were new political philosophies, for New Labour, briefly useful fads. Blair was no more of an intellectual than she was. He shared middle-class instincts, just like her. She took to praising him, if in qualified terms. They were really quite similar. Yet when Thatcher became Prime Minister she had years of Whitehall experience. Blair had none. She may not have enjoyed the boozy male clubbiness of Parliament but she respected the institution. Blair gave every sign of disliking the place intensely.

  But the biggest difference between the two was Blair’s obsession with journalism. Thatcher did her best to cope with the media, a little flattery here, a blunderbuss-blast from Bernard Ingham there. Blair during his first years in power was a fully engaged media politician. She sailed on the stuff, he swam in it. She knew who her press enemies were, and who were her friends, and more or less kept both throughout. Blair tried to make everyone his friend, and would lose almost all of them. Campbell was more powerful in the Blair court than Ingham had been in the Thatcher one. Again it was a generational thing: she had come into politics when newspapers were comparatively deferential and it was beneath a rising minister to court journalists. Blair learned the dangers of schmoozing media people, but slowly. More a problem of his early years, his relationship with the press and his misused press briefings hurt him and his reputation badly.