by Andrew Marr
Confrontations between hunt supporters and ‘Sabs’, often violent with the police in full pursuit, became a regular feature of country life from then on. Sabs would compare themselves to the hunters, needing quick wits, courage and good tactics to confuse the hounds and allow the fox or stag to escape. They were accused of thuggery. They accused the hunt supporters of being brutal to them, and many bones and noses were broken in the bracken. There was a bit of class conflict and of city-against-country in it all. Over time it became clear that while the Sabs might save some foxes, they were unable to stop the hunts, so animal rights activists turned increasingly to Parliament to get it banned. Labour voters and MPs tended to be against hunting, and the party took a £100,000 donation from the animal rights lobby before the 1997 election. When New Labour won with a massive majority it was clear that a parliamentary move to ban hunting with hounds was inevitable. With so many MPs committed, it would probably become law. This directly affected the 200,000 people who were hunting regularly and with those who watched and supported them, perhaps half a million in all. A new organization, the Countryside Alliance, was formed to campaign against a ban and held its first big rally, with 120,000 people present, at Hyde Park, six weeks after the election.
From then on pro-hunting protests were continual and varied. There were marches at Labour Party conferences, in Scotland where a separate and earlier ban was being passed, outside Parliament and in many other towns throughout Britain. People had always been on the march about something, but whereas before it had been students in duffel-coats, coalminers or left-wingers in leather jackets, this time it was ruddy-faced women in tweed skirts, farm-workers and former public schoolboys – Boden and loden, Barbour and brogue. In the Blair years, the sound of hunting horns, the excited yelping of hounds and even the clatter of hooves became part of the backdrop of parliamentary life. After a noisy march in Bournemouth, Blair himself joined in the argument, telling his conference in 1999 that he would sweep away the ‘forces of conservatism’ and branding the Conservatives ‘the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers – the uneatable, the unspeakable and the unelectable’.
This was a rare and quickly regretted Blair incursion into the language of leftism. He never much cared about hunting one way or another, and wished the issue would vanish. It did not. John Prescott, more of a class warrior than his leader, enlivened the 2001 election when a burly Countryside protester threw an egg at him during a visit to Rhyl, Wales, and was rewarded with a hefty punch. After the election Labour MPs pressed ahead while on the other side, vigils were mounted, topless women delivered petitions to Whitehall and a thousand horses rode through Leicester as part of a ‘summer of discontent’ in 2002. That September, the Alliance claimed more than 400,000 supporters in its biggest ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ protest outside the Commons, a protest which saw violent confrontations between the police and angry young men in tweed caps and waxed olive jackets.
On 18 November 2004 a law banning hunting with hounds finally passed its parliamentary hurdles. After legal challenges it became law the following February though the many loopholes, allowing riders with hounds to flush out foxes, which could then be shot, meant hunts carried on across England and Wales. The day after the ban took effect, thousands were out again and ninety-one foxes were killed. There, as in Scotland, the hunts continue and Sabs still follow with cameras, trying to find evidence of law-breaking. There have been very few prosecutions. Bloody predictions of masters of foxhounds shooting their dogs and then hanging themselves, a nightmare hanging over Labour spin-doctors for several years, were never realized. The fox hunting story can serve as a symbol for much else in the New Labour years: a long and noisy confrontation at Westminster, which in the end had surprisingly little effect on the ground.
The first intimation that protest could go further under New Labour than noisy pro-hunting demonstrations came in 2000, when a nationwide revolt by truckers against high petrol prices brought the country to a standstill. The automatic increase in fuel duty had in fact been briefly halted, but rising world oil prices and the high petrol taxes already in place meant unheard-of prices at the petrol pumps. A group of irate truckers, men who owned their own lorries, held a protest meeting in Wales and decided to mount a brief blockade of a giant oil refinery in Cheshire. They attracted widespread news coverage and an enthusiastic reaction from ordinary drivers. To begin with, Blair and his ministers concluded that it was not a serious challenge and continued with their plans. A command centre was established at Cobra, the bland meeting-room below Downing Street from where national crises are directed.
The Prime Minister himself went ahead with a tour of the English Midlands, due to end with a celebration of John Prescott’s thirty years in Parliament in a Hull Chinese restaurant. On the way, officials and journalists noted V-formations of slow-moving lorries blocking motorways in other parts of the country and followed reports of petrol stations in the north of England running dry, or being besieged by queues of panicky motorists. More refineries were blockaded. Still Blair and his team insisted that nothing was really wrong and the tour would go on. He would not be diverted. By that evening, with Prescott in a Hull town hall surrounded by countryside protesters, he was getting a different message. Told that he could not be guaranteed a getaway from the splendid Chinese restaurant, he apologized to his deputy and headed for Sheffield, still insisting the show would go on. On the following morning, after overnight briefings, he gave in, turned tail and sped back to London to take charge.
Blair was generally good in a crisis and began trying to knock heads together. But this time the oil company bosses would not help him by ordering drivers of petrol tankers, who were both self-employed and sympathetic to the fuel protesters, to break through the pickets. Blair raged, threatened and begged. Now all across Britain, petrol stations ran dry. Wherever petrol remained, vast queues formed. It was all perfectly good-humoured but the crisis was spinning out of Blair’s hands. Food shortages were reported. Bread was going, milk was going and the nation’s egg-laying chickens were in danger. What was left of Britain’s manufacturing industry was close to being forced to suspend working. Yet all tests of public opinion showed the majority of the country was with the protesters not the government. Brown repeatedly refused to pre-announce his March Budget by promising cuts in fuel taxes, in response to blackmail by two thousand to three thousand hauliers. There was private talk of bringing in the army, forcing the blockades. Panicky-sounding government papers were leaked and Blair came close to begging the protesters to stop: ‘This is not on, you know. This is just not right…’ Eventually, after health service managers had warned that people would soon die, and with even the anti-Blair press telling the protesters that enough was enough, the blockades were lifted and life returned to normal. Brown made a crabwise but generous-enough move on petrol duty in his Budget and something close to honour was restored. Yet Britain had come very close to the kind of collapse not seen since the winter of 1978-9.
The country quickly bounced back – there was no threatening undertow in the 2001 election. The combination of early Prudence and the public spending promised had played well with the electorate. John Major was succeeded as party leader by the most talented Tory of his generation, the young, bright, bald and witty Yorkshireman, William Hague. A natural Thatcherite since his schooldays and a political obsessive, he had done his best to make his leadership seem trendier and more in touch with modern Britain, donning a baseball cap and visiting the Notting Hill carnival. He was mocked for it, and learned. Hague was a man of some political experience, having been with Norman Lamont at the Treasury and later Welsh Secretary, and his greatest achievement was that he stopped a bewildered and defeated party tearing itself apart. At his best in the Commons, he had been a sparkling Opposition leader, discomfiting Blair and leading the charge on Labour ‘stealth taxes’, the Dome and the new issue of bogus asylum-seekers. But heavily concentrating his election campaign on saving the pound, promising vot
ers ‘we will give you back your country’ and attacking the still-popular Blair as a slimy liar, he allowed New Labour to portray his party as xenophobic and nasty. By any standard, the Tory attack failed. Labour was returned with a majority of 166, having lost just six seats net, and the Conservatives, after all their energy and hard work, managed a single net gain. It was an important election because it cemented the New Labour achievement of 1997 and showed the country had moved towards Blair’s agenda. Yet this general election will be remembered for one other ominous statistic too. The turnout was – just – below 60 per cent. Since Britain had first become a democracy, the public had never been less interested in voting.
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Pre-Iraq Wars and Foreign Policy
The Iraq War will remain for ever the most important and controversial part of Tony Blair’s legacy. But long before it, during the dog-days of the Clinton administration, two events had taken place which primed his response and explain some of what followed. The first was the bombing of Iraq by the RAF and US air force as punishment for Saddam Hussein’s dodging of UN inspections. The second was the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, and the threat of a ground force invasion. These crises made Blair believe he had to be involved personally and directly in overseas wars. They caused dark nights of self-doubt, and toughened him to criticism. They emphasized the limitations of air power and the importance to him of media management. Without them, Blair’s reaction to the changing of world politics on September 11 2001 would have been different.
Evidence of Saddam Hussein’s interest in weapons of mass destruction was shown to Blair soon after he took office. He raised it in speeches and privately with other leaders. Most countries in Nato and at the United Nations security council were angry about the dictator’s expulsion of UN inspectors when they tried to probe his huge palace compounds for biological and chemical weapons. But the initial instinct was for more diplomacy. Iraq was suffering from sanctions already; Saddam eventually allowed the inspectors back. He was playing cat and mouse, however, and in October 1998 Britain and the United States finally lost patience and decided to smash Iraq’s military establishment with missiles and bombing raids. In a foretaste of things to come, Blair even presented MPs with a dossier about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Again, at the last minute, the Iraqi leader backed down and the raids were postponed. The United States soon concluded this was another trick and, in December, British and American planes attacked, hitting 250 targets over four days. Operation Desert Fox, as they called it, probably only delayed Saddam’s weapons programmes by a year or so though it was sold as a huge success. As later, Britain and the United States were operating without a fresh UN resolution. Among their publics there was a widespread suspicion that Clinton had ordered the raids to distract from his embarrassing ‘Monica-gate’ travails. Congress was debating impeachment proceedings during the attacks and did indeed formally impeach Clinton on the final day of the raids. Over this episode, however, Blair faced little trouble in Parliament or outside it.
The second bombing campaign happened as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the later stages of the long Balkan tragedy that had haunted John Major’s time in office. Kosovo, a province of Serbia, was dominated by Albanian-speaking Muslims but was considered almost a holy site by history-minded Serbs, who had fought a famous medieval battle there against the Ottomans. The Serbian ex-communist leader Slobodan Milosevic had made himself the hero of the minority Kosovar Serbs. The Dayton peace agreement had calmed things down in 1995 but the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army triggered a vicious new conflict, marked by increasingly savage Serb reprisals from 1998-9. Despite the use of international monitors and a brief ceasefire violence returned with the slaughter of forty-five civilians in the town of Racak, provoking comparisons with Nazi crimes. Ethnic cleansing and the forced migration of tens of thousands of people across wintry mountain tracks produced uproar around the world. In Chicago Blair declared a new ‘doctrine of the international community’ which allowed ‘a just war, based…on values’. When talks with the Yugoslavs broke down, Nato duly launched a massive bombing campaign. British and American jets attacked targets first in Kosovo and then the rest of Serbia, hitting factories, television stations, bridges, power stations, railway lines, hospitals and many government buildings.
It was, however, a complete failure. Many innocent civilians were killed and daily life was disrupted across much of Serbia and Kosovo. Sixty people were killed by an American cluster bomb in a market. An allegedly stealthy US bomber blew down half the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, causing a huge international row. Meanwhile, low cloud and the use of decoys by Milosevic’s generals limited the military damage and he used the attacks to increase his ethnic cleansing massively. The death squads went back to work. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the move – eventually roughly a million ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo and an estimated 10,000-12,000 were killed. Blair began to think he might not survive as Prime Minister if nothing was done. (So Downing Street staff said at the time: if they were right, the reader will notice that Mr Blair believed he might be ousted much more often than any level-headed observer might have predicted.) The real problem was that only the genuine threat of an invasion by ground troops might convince Milosevic to pull back; air power by itself was not enough. Blair tried desperately to persuade Clinton to agree. He visited a refugee camp and angrily said: ‘This is obscene. It’s criminal…How can anyone think we shouldn’t intervene?’
It would be the Americans whose troops would bear the brunt of a new war, since the European Union was far away from any coherent military structure and lacked the basic tools for carrying armies to other theatres. There was alarm in Washington about the British Prime Minister’s moral posturing and it was only after many weeks of shuttle diplomacy that things began to move. Blair ordered that 50,000 British soldiers, most of the available army, should be made available to invade Kosovo. This would mean a huge call-up of reserves and if it was a bluff, was one on a massive scale, since other European countries had no intention of taking part. For whatever reason, the Americans began to toughen their language and finally, at the last minute, the Serb parliament buckled. The Americans and Russians worked together to apply pressure and Milosevic withdrew his forces from Kosovo and accepted its virtual independence, under an international mandate. Blair declared a kind of victory. Good had triumphed over evil, civilization over barbarism. Eight months later, Milosevic was toppled from power and ended up in The Hague charged with war crimes.
First Desert Fox and then Kosovo are vital in appreciating Blair’s behaviour when it came to the full-scale Iraq War. They taught him that bombing rarely works. They suggested that, threatened with ground invasion by superior forces, dictators will back down. They played to his sense of himself as a moral war leader, combating dictators as wicked in their way as Hitler; something that was underpinned by the successful, life-saving intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000. After working well with Clinton over Desert Fox, he worried that he had tried to bounce him too obviously over Kosovo. He learned that American presidents need tactful handling. He learned not to rely on Britain’s European allies very much, though he pressed the case later for the establishment of a European ‘rapid reaction force’ to shoulder more of the burden in future wars. He learned to ignore criticism from the left and right, which became deafening during the Kosovo bombing. He learned to cope with giving orders which resulted in much loss of life. He learned an abiding hostility to the media, and in particular the BBC whose reporting of the Kosovo bombing campaign infuriated him. The Irish peace process had convinced him of his potency as a deal-maker. Desert Fox, Kosovo and Sierra Leone convinced him of his ability to lead in war, to take big gambles, and to get them right.
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Dubya
Most of those around the Prime Minister, certainly including his wife, had hoped that the Democrats’ Al Gore would win the 2000 presidential election. Blair himself had been careful to open up
early lines of communication to George W. Bush, sending diplomats to his ranch and passing a friendly message to the Texan governor via his father, ahead of the election campaign. His first phone conversation with the new President had been friendly enough but Blair was uneasy. With reason; he had enjoyed extraordinarily close relations with Clinton, an intellectual romance with the charismatic reshaper of Democratic politics which had survived their disagreements and the embarrassment of the Lewinsky affair. Bush had been elected to wipe away all that. Blair’s first visit to see Bush at Camp David in February 2001 has been remembered for an uneasy photo-opportunity stroll when Blair was wearing embarrassingly tight jeans, and for Bush’s awkward joke that the two of them did agree about issues – they both used the same brand of toothpaste, Colgate.