A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  A Red Cross camp at Sangatte, near its French entrance, was blamed by Britain for exacerbating the problem. By the end of 2002, when Blunkett finally managed to get a deal with the French to close it, an estimated 67,000 had passed through Sangatte into Britain. Many African, Asian and Balkan migrants, believing the British immigration and benefits systems to be easier than those of other EU countries, simply moved across the continent and waited patiently for their journey into the UK. Thermal-imaging devices, increased border staff and unwelcoming asylum centres were all deployed. Unknown numbers of migrants died through thirst, asphyxiation or cold; some were murdered en route. Successive home secretaries – Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid – tried to gapple with the trade, introducing legislation which was criticized by civil liberties campaigners and challenged in the courts. None was much applauded for their efforts and the last of them eventually confessed that he believed his department was ‘not fit for purpose’. He hived off the struggling IND as a separate agency and promised to clear a backlog of around 280,000 failed asylum-seekers still in the country within five years. Uniformed border security staff were promised, and the historic Home Office was to be split up.

  Meanwhile, many straightforwardly illegal immigrants had bypassed the asylum system entirely. In July 2005 the Home Office produced its own estimate of what the illegal population of the UK had been four years earlier, reckoning it between 310,000 and 570,000 souls, or between 0.5 and 1 per cent of the total population. A year later unofficial estimates pushed the possible total higher, to 800,000. The truth was, with boxes of cardboard files still being uncovered and no national recording system, nobody had a clue. Even the Bank of England complained, asking how it could set interest rates without knowing roughly how many people were working in the country. Official figures showed the number applying for asylum falling, perhaps as former Yugoslavia returned to relative peace. Controversially, thousands were being sent back to Iraq. But there were always new desperate groups, in the Middle East or war-torn and hungry Africa: projections about the impact of global warming suggested there always would be.

  The arrival of workers from the ten countries which joined the EU in 2004 was a different issue, though it involved an influx of roughly the same size. When the European Union expanded Britain decided that, unlike France or Germany, she would not try to delay opening the country to migrant workers. Ministers suggested that the likely number arriving would be around 26,000 over the first two years. This was wildly wrong. In 2006 a Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, announced that since 2004 when the European Union expanded 427,000 people from Poland and seven other new EU nations had applied to work in Britain. If the self-employed were included, he added, the real figure would be nearer 600,000. There were at least 36,000 spouses and children who had arrived too and 27,000 child benefit applications had been received. These were very large numbers indeed. The Ugandan Asian migration which caused such a storm in 1971 had, for instance, amounted to some 28,000 people. It was hardly surprising that Britain now faced an acute housing shortage and that government officials began scouring the South of England looking for new places where councils would be ordered to let the developers start building.

  By the government’s own 2006 figures, annual net migration for the previous year was 185,000 and had averaged 166,000 over the previous seven years. This compares to the 50,000 net inflow which Enoch Powell had criticized in his notorious 1968 speech as ‘mad, literally mad’. Projections based on many different assumptions suggested the UK population would grow by more than seven million by 2031. Of that, 80 per cent would be due to immigration. The organization Migration Watch UK, set up by a former diplomat to campaign for less immigration, said this was equivalent to requiring the building of two new towns the size of Cambridge each year, or five new Birminghams over the quarter century. But was there a mood of unnecessary hysteria? As has been noted, many of the Eastern European migrants, like those from Australia, France or the United States, could be expected to return home eventually. Immigration was partially offset by the outward flow of around 60,000 British people moving abroad each year, mainly to Australia, the United States, France and Spain. By the winter of 2006-7 one policy institute, the IPPR, reckoned there were 5.5 million British people living permanently overseas – nearly one in ten of us, or more than the population of Scotland – and another half million living there for some of the year. Aside from the obvious destinations, the Middle East and Asia were seeing rising colonies of expatriate British. Who were they? A worrying proportion seemed to be graduates; Britain is believed to lose one in six graduates to emigration. Many were retired or better-off people looking for a life of sunlit ease, just as many immigrants to Britain were young, ambitious and keen to work. Government ministers tended to emphasize the benign economic effects of immigration. Their critics looked around and asked where all the extra people would go, and what spare road space, hospital beds or schools they would find to use.

  129

  Blair’s Final Years

  From Labour’s arrival in power in 1997 right through to the 2005 election, Blair and his ministers had never been seriously worried about the Conservatives. After the heavy defeat in 2001, Hague had instantly resigned. The Conservatives then rejected the man who had seemed the obvious alternative, Michael Portillo. The son of a Spanish republican refugee and as a boy the advertising face of Ribena fruit juice, he had suffered the crippling fate of being regularly touted as a future leader from the mid-eighties, Mrs Thatcher’s chosen one. But Portillo had feuded with Hague. More importantly, he was on a personal journey to a more metropolitan view of the world, had admitted homosexual affairs in his youth, and would not condescend to pretend to his party that he was anything other than socially liberal. He launched his campaign in an achingly trendy London restaurant, so the party in its first full democratic leadership vote instead chose Iain Duncan Smith. In ‘IDS’, a former soldier, businessman and, in Parliament, a Euro-sceptic rebel, MP for Norman Tebbit’s old seat of Chingford, traditionalist Conservatives thought they had found someone who truly represented their core beliefs. Indeed they had. But they underestimated Duncan Smith’s deep interest in helping the disadvantaged and, sadly, had overestimated his political skill. A thoroughly decent man, he was outclassed so badly as a speaker and on television that the Tories took fright. A growing rebellion persuaded him to resign as leader in December 2003.

  A demoralized party did something rare. It chose its next leader without the customary vicious fight, returning the former cabinet minister Michael Howard to the colours. Howard had been controversial as Home Secretary but was part of the Tories’ ‘Cambridge mafia’ and brought rivals from the liberal wing of the party back inside his leadership tent. He began brilliantly as leader, binding wounds and restoring morale. He was the first Tory leader to really worry Brown and Blair, a dangerous opponent. Like Hague, he performed well in the Commons, calling on the Prime Minister to resign over Iraq and making much of a series of Home Office scandals and failures. In 2005 his election focused on better public services and immigration. Conservative posters asked the question: ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ Though they gained substantial numbers of seats and votes – a majority in England – the country’s overall answer was ‘No, not really’. Michael Howard resigned and was replaced by the bright young Old Etonian David Cameron. Taking the Tories in a green and liberal direction, he won high poll ratings and looked set, by 2007, to be the Conservative leader best placed to oust a sitting Labour government since Margaret Thatcher had the job thirty years earlier.

  The Liberal Democrats might have hoped that the hugely unpopular Iraq War and the Blair government’s growing reputation for illiberal and fiddly statism, would allow the third party to break through. Under Paddy Ashdown, there had been a long and fruitless courtship with Labour, ultimately made impossible to consummate by Blair’s large majorities. Then the experience of the Scottish parliamentary elections turned Bla
ir against voting reform, a key Lib-Dem demand. His old mentor Roy Jenkins wryly gave him up as a constitutional reformer of any kind, and that relationship cooled. Ashdown’s successor Charles Kennedy had been the youngest MP when first elected for the Western Isles as an SDP member. He was popular with the party and the media. He took the Lib-Dems away from any proximity to New Labour and campaigned, after some encouragement, against the Iraq War. Under him the third party became a place where disaffected leftish Britons gathered, a pacific haven from Blair’s bellicose certainties and the Home Secretary David Blunkett’s enthusiasm for locking up asylum-seekers. In the 2001 election the Liberal Democrats won fifty-two seats and in 2005, sixty-two, a record performance. But after the heady optimism of the early eighties, they seemed to be back playing a long game. Charles Kennedy had a serious alcohol problem which could make him fuzzy and unconvincing and which, though his aides lied about it for years, eventually led to his resignation as party leader. He was replaced by Sir Menzies Campbell, a Scottish lawyer and former Olympic runner who was older but safer.

  The 2005 election campaign ended with Labour’s majority cut from 167 in the previous contest to just sixty-seven. For most previous prime ministers a majority of that size would have been considered handsome. Heath, Wilson, Callaghan or Major would have killed for it, and it was twenty-four more than Margaret Thatcher had enjoyed in her first, strife-ridden and tumultuous administration. But by the standards of New Labour’s record the loss was a serious rebuke. The voters were noticing. But what? Blair thought they were noticing the habit of disloyalty among his MPs. Many of them thought they were noticing Blair. Certainly with so many disaffected former ministers and left-wing dissidents on the Labour benches it meant he would have an even harder time getting his own way. Then there was the further problem of his time-limited remaining tenure and the slow withdrawal of his personal authority. Brown had not been given his accustomed role in election planning but was far more involved than Blair had first intended in the 2005 fight. With their best false hearty smiles in place, and much criticized for making wild claims about the cuts planned by their Tory opponents, they had won their third mandate standing beside one another, if not hand in hand. As soon as the election was over Blair turned his mind to staying on rather longer than the Chancellor had hoped.

  The latter stages of Blair’s time as Prime Minister were overshadowed by the bloody aftermath of the Iraq War, and by renewed fighting in Afghanistan. After more bad local elections in 2006 he sacked his Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, who publicly protested; he demoted his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and he stripped John Prescott, who had been hit by a scandal, of his departmental responsibilities. The embarrassing police inquiry into whether businessmen had been recommended for peerages as a result of offering loans to the Labour Party drew closer to Downing Street; shortly before Christmas 2006 Tony Blair became the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed by the police as part of a criminal investigation. He was questioned in Downing Street for two hours by Detective Chief Inspector Graeme McNulty and a colleague. This occurred on the same day as the official police report into the death of Diana was finally published, and a controversial announcement was made about rural post offices. Downing Street denied there was any attempt to bury bad news but from the outside it looked like one New Labour tradition that should have been ditched.

  But would it bring forward an earlier departure? After a rocky summer in 2006 there had been an organized round of junior ministerial resignations, and demands for Blair to quit, assumed by Number Ten and most of the media to have been organized by supporters of Gordon Brown. Despite calling an open letter on the subject ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’, on 7 September the prime minister promised that the coming party conference would be his last, breaking under duress his earlier promise to serve a full term. Labour’s conference, held unusually in Manchester, saw one of Blair’s most eloquent speeches ever, a defiant farewell to the party which no longer wanted him, and which responded to him with largely hypocritical adulation. It did not look as if the parting would be particularly sweet, on either side. His wife was heard referring to Brown’s earlier conference speech with the single word ‘liar’. Soon, Blairites were attempting to persuade the young cabinet minister David Miliband to challenge Brown in a leadership contest. He was being bashful, but it was evidence of how deeply in trouble Labour now was. The polls showed Brown trailing the new Conservative leader David Cameron. Whatever this was, it was not glad confident morning again.

  130

  Britain After Blair

  This history has told the story of the defeat of politics by shopping. The political visions of Attlee, and Churchill in his romantic-nostalgic mood, were overthrown by the consumer boom of the fifties. People generally wanted colour, variety and new tastes, not austere socialist egalitarianism or thigh-slapping New Elizabethan patriotism, though a large minority was drawn to each of these. In the Wilson and Heath years, politicians promised a newly scientific, planned future, all straight lines and patriotism, drawn up in Whitehall with everyone sitting down together ‘backing Britain’. Their Britain collapsed and Margaret Thatcher’s revolution shovelled away the rubble. Her boot-sale of state enterprise, defeat of the unions, and her abandonment of politicians’ controls over money led to a new boom. The old state retreated and the consumer society advanced. Far from remoralizing the British with the Victorian values of frugality, saving, orderliness and continence as she had hoped, Thatcher gave many of us the licence and credit to behave like Regency rakes on a spree. The country went shopping again, as it had in the fifties and sixties and would again in the nineties and beyond.

  The new great powers in the land were organizations that had barely been noticed before the war. In 1924 an East End barrow boy called Jack Cohen had used part of his surname and the initials of a tea supplier to market his own-brand tea under the title Tesco. Five years later he opened his first shop, then the country’s first all-purpose food warehouse and in 1956, when Tony Blair was three, a self-service store. Tesco leaped ahead. In the eighties Cohen’s daughter, Dame Shirley Porter, became leader of Westminster Council and, after a highly controversial ‘homes for votes’ scandal, left the country. By the time Blair left office, Tesco was the country’s leading retailer with 1,780 stores, sales of more than £37 bn and profits of over £2 bn. It was gaining one pound in every three the British spent on groceries and there was talk of Britain becoming a ‘Tescopoly’. Asda, set up by Yorkshire farmers in 1965 and now owned by Wal-Mart, the American behemoth and the world’s biggest company, came second to Tesco, but was still serving more than 13 million people a week. Sainsbury’s, which had originated in a Victorian dairy shop and had launched the first self-service supermarket in 1950, had sales of £17 bn, and more than 750 stores. Such companies dominated farmers and other suppliers exercised great power in planning disputes, and were becoming increasingly controversial. Meanwhile, to enjoy the consumer economy, the British were borrowing: the average adult had credit card, finance-deal and unsecured personal loans amounting to more than £4,500.

  Apart from generous planning laws, the shopping boom required the ‘great car economy’ lauded by Margaret Thatcher, which was now restrained only by rising petrol prices and congestion. London had deployed its own congestion charge and a national debate had begun about road pricing. Car use was huge by historic standards. At the beginning of the sixties when supermarkets first took off, there were 9 million vehicles on the roads; by the mid-2000s, there were 30 million. It was not all shopping, of course. Commuting by car had become mundane and the number of journeys to school by car had doubled in ten years. By the standards of the forties or fifties, the British now led strikingly privatized lives. They mostly shunned public transport and were far less likely to shop shoulder to shoulder with neighbours, using shopkeepers they knew by name. With television, digital or analogue, and the computer boom, entertainment was much likelier to remain in the home. The British were afloat on a t
ide of cheap imported goods, easy credit and new labour, both skilled and unskilled. House prices had by now nearly tripled in the Blair years. But politicians, still taxing vigorously, still struggling to deliver popular and efficient public services, were not given any credit for that.

  Politics shrivelled – as an activity, as a source of status, as a way of ordering life that was respected or trusted. Lady Thatcher found no truly effective way to run the public services. Nor did her successors, John Major and Tony Blair. The great middling layer of public life, the independent-minded managers of schools, hospitals and towns, who had real freedom to manage, and the self-confident local politicians who could make waves, had gone. By most measures overall crime had fallen from the late nineties, at the cost of overcrowded prisons. But violent crime was as much feared as ever, and as present on the streets of the main cities. All this had a direct effect on people’s hopes and fears about the country. One commentator from a conservative-minded think tank explained the exodus of 1,000 people a day to other countries: ‘People are emigrating because of a sense of hopelessness…nothing is ever done about the big problems like education, health, crime. There is a growing sense that politicians will never deal with the problems.’ That was only one voice, and others had different views, but it reminds us why the policy problems discussed at length earlier are so critical to the country’s notion of its future.