The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  In July 1997 one of the last great outposts of empire was relinquished when Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese. The lease on part of the Crown Colony had expired, but the whole of it was handed over following an agreement negotiated by the Thatcher government in 1982. Communist China undertook to allow Hong Kong considerable internal independence and leeway as a Special Administrative Region where capitalism would be permitted for the next fifty years at least, and it would continue to be a free port. In addition, the Basic Law for Hong Kong envisaged a freely elected legislature, and that has been honoured.

  In August 1997 the former wife of the Prince of Wales, the beautiful Princess Diana, was killed in a car crash in Paris aged only thirty-six. For the previous sixteen years her sympathetic nature, youth and spontaneity had given her a considerable hold over the nation’s affections. There was a great outpouring of sorrow at her death and for her bereaved sons, the fifteen-year-old Prince William and the thirteen-year-old Prince Harry.

  Continental Europe of the 1990s was racked by the spectacle on the nightly television news of a vicious civil war between members of the federation of Yugoslavia in the wake of the changes in eastern Europe. The brutal massacres of around 250,000 Muslims and forcible expulsion of another two million from the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbs, who resisted their fellow Yugoslav republics’ demand for independence and recognition by the European Union, generated a new expression that had echoes of the Holocaust–ethnic cleansing. In 1999 NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade to put an end to the Serb cleansing of the province of Kosovo of ethnic Albanians: 800,000 of them, many of them with babies and with their possessions in carts, were dying in the mountains. Although the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevíc was deposed and handed over to a special tribunal set up by the UN at the Hague to be tried for war crimes, the refugee crisis caused by these dispossessed peoples continues to pose great problems for the EU.

  But in Northern Ireland at Easter 1998 the twenty-six-year war finally came to an end. It was decided to allow the decommissioning of weapons to run in tandem with the devising of a new government. The only thing that Sinn Fein and the other political wings of paramilitary groups like the loyalist UDA had to do to participate was to get their paramilitaries to restore the ceasefire of 1994. The IRA had begun the process in July 1997.

  On Good Friday 1998 an agreement was signed by all shades of opinion in Northern Ireland that set up a power-sharing Assembly whose creation had been deferred for over twenty-five years. Once more it was reiterated that it would be the will of the people of Northern Ireland, not those of Eire or Britain, that would decide their future. The withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland put an end to the most dangerous tour of duty in every British soldier’s career.

  The peace process could have been derailed by a bomb set off at Omagh in August 1998 by a nationalist terrorist group beyond the control of the IRA. But Sinn Fein and the IRA condemned the tragedy in the strongest terms and the Assembly survived. Decommissioning remained an issue. However, the effect of the 11 September 2001 outrage in New York when the Twin Towers were destroyed by Islamic terrorists was to make Americans understand at first hand what terrorism does. So the IRA, despite its traditional American support, found that it had to alter its tactics, and in October that year a new effort at decommissioning began. Punishment beatings by both sides and mutual distrust continue to cause problems in Northern Ireland, however. Sadly, in October 2002 the Assembly was suspended (and remained so as at July 2003) and direct rule reimposed. After allegations of an IRA spy ring at Stormont, other parties refused to continue in government with Sinn Fein.

  On 1 January 1999 eleven of the fifteen member states of the European Union abandoned their currencies for the euro, or single currency, which is managed by the European Central Bank. The eleven were Finland, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Belgium, and they were joined in 2001 by Greece. To date Britain remains outside the euro zone; opinion polls show that around 60 per cent of Britain’s businessmen are in favour of jettisoning the pound in its favour, but a similar portion of the public are opposed. Tony Blair promised Britain a referendum before sterling is abolished and Britain joins a single European currency. But in principle his government was in favour of joining the euro, and in February 1999 the prime minister published a national changeover plan outlining the steps being taken in preparation.

  Britain’s ancient democratic institutions mean she cannot view a European superstate without protest. The EU headquarters, where one man one vote seems irrelevant compared to the powers of appointed bureaucrats, appears to some to be a threat to British freedoms. From earliest times observers like Tacitus noted that the inhabitants of these isles have an obsession with their liberty. Today it may translate as a desire to preserve national sovereignty over matters like taxation, and to halt further attempts to harmonize national laws through the EU. On the other hand it might be argued that until the (European) Romans came there was much that was uncivilized about Britain, and that that remains true today. Britons interested in their freedoms will have noted that Europe is not short of liberties herself. The European social chapter, which Labour signed up to in 1998, has made Britain bring in legislation to ensure that the workplace is protected by far greater health and safety requirements and to set a minimum wage that she seemed incapable of introducing on her own. Successful appeals to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, whether over the UK’s harsh treatment of her children or over gender equality, show that there is much to learn from Europe. The Human Rights Act that Labour implemented in 1998, which incorporated into UK law the European Convention on Human Rights, is bringing Britain into line with a more humane way of life. Women, many of whom have not shared British liberties until recently–the Church of England only allowed women to be ordained vicars in 1993–can especially look forward to the benign influence of Europe, which is committed to enforcing equal rights for women. Pay for women in Britain lags well behind other EU countries: as the Equal Opportunities Commission’s witty poster of a young girl put it, ‘Prepare your daughter for working life. Give her less pocket money than your son.’

  Though women are hardly a minority, their lack of representation at the higher levels of the judiciary until very recently was mirrored by the ethnic minorities. In the twenty-five years since it was created to combat racism the Commission for Racial Equality has been extremely successful in harmonizing relations between ethnic and white Britons. Nevertheless in 1999 the failure of the parents of Stephen Lawrence to get their son’s murder properly investigated seven years before led the High Court judge Sir William Macpherson to conclude that the British police were guilty of institutionalized racism, which he defined as a failure to provide a professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. Most white Britons felt deeply shamed by the Macpherson Report, and it resulted in a massive shake-up in British institutions. There was an investigation by the Home Office into statistics on race and the criminal justice system, and a decision by the Labour government actively to combat hidden or institutionalized racism in other public bodies. The Race Relations Amendment Act of April 2001 imposes a legal duty on central and local government bodies to represent their ethnic minorities in proportion to their communities and this also applies to hospitals, schools, universities and public institutions like the BBC.

  Prince Charles, who has taken a close interest in inner-city regeneration for three decades, has done much to bring together the many different elements in Britain’s multicultural society. He says he intends to adapt the papal title bestowed on his ancestor Henry VIII and be, not the defender of the faith, but the defender of all faiths.

  After more than half a century as queen, Elizabeth II lends grace, humanity and dutifulness to her position and continuity at a time of flux. In June 2002 the immense success of the Golden Jubilee to mark her fifty years on the throne was visible in the one million people who gathered in the M
all in front of Buckingham Palace to salute her. The deaths of the queen’s sister Princess Margaret and of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the Jubilee Year only enhanced the sympathy felt for her.

  The queen continues to live at Windsor Castle whose site above the River Thames was chosen more than nine centuries ago by William the Conqueror because it was a day’s march from the Tower of London–it was intended to guard the western approaches to the capital. Though the M4 and a sprawl of housing and flyovers now lies between Windsor and the Tower, the queen’s residence there reminds us of the extraordinary continuity the monarchy provides as a national institution and of Britain’s great good fortune in not having been invaded since 1066. The monarchy’s ancient roots provide an element of stability in an ever-changing world. Yet the queen herself has made a habit of moving with the times. Though her Rolls-Royce may look as old fashioned as her handbag, she insisted on her coronation being televised in 1953 in order to include as many of her fellow countrymen as possible. Today she even has her own web site.

  Britain’s days of pre-eminence as a great power are gone, as Antony Gormley’s ironic statue The Angel of the North, a huge angel in rusty iron, reminds us, looking back to northern Britain’s industrial and engineering past. All over the country, old industrial structures–whether the former Bankside power station in London or the Albert Dock at Liverpool–are being turned over to what is sometimes called the leisure industry. (Bankside and the Albert Dock became the art galleries Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool.) Britain’s manufacturing base may continue to decline, but service or skills industries are more important than ever. In the twenty-first century Britain’s expertise as a great imperial power enables the once informal arrangements between merchants waiting at wharves for their ships to arrive to be transformed into complex international insurance and maritime businesses. In the era of super-telecommunications, London’s fortunate position equidistant between the time zones of Asia and America makes the City the world’s leading financial centre, where 48 per cent of the global foreign equity market is traded. But ‘leisure industry’ seems a poor way of describing a mission to raise the British people’s cultural expectations and range. In the age of the computer chip, the future for the European world seems increasingly to be in highly skilled work. Machines and computers have made much physical labour redundant where it is not already uncompetitive with the third world. Ford Cars closed its last British factory in 2001.

  When an earlier Tyneside inhabitant, the eighth-century monk Bede of Jarrow, composed his history of the English people, ferreting out documentary evidence in the archives of English abbeys and in the papal registers at Rome, he was writing for a tiny audience, the few nobles who could read. In those days culture was then dispersed to the many, if at all, through priests’ sermons or Bible readings at church. But one of Bede’s most moving stories was that of Caedmon, the poor lay brother whose poetry earned him a place in the monastery. How pleased Bede would be to think that in the thirteen centuries since his birth a sense of inclusive cultural renaissance was gathering that has now exploded in a great new building on the River Tyne, the Baltic Exchange, which opened in August 2002. Tyneside, once a neglected and depressed industrial area, is reviving under the impact of cultural centres, cinema complexes, concert halls and cheap homes for young professionals.

  Despite all the change, some things about Britain remain the same. For many people the most striking feature of the country is a sense of community-mindedness, a sense that–whatever Mrs Thatcher believed–society matters. The National Health Service was once described as the nearest thing the British have to a state religion. Thatcherism may have been a revolution, but now that the revolution is over, old beliefs in the state as a disinterested force for good cannot help resurfacing. The privatization Mrs Thatcher pioneered is looking a little less shiny. Railtrack in particular angered many, with the large dividends paid to shareholders instead of being devoted to the maintenance of the railways’ infrastructure or to a proper inspectorate. When a broken rail caused an avoidable crash in Hertfordshire in 2002, the last of a line of terrible accidents, private finance initiatives began to look less good. The British expect political accountability in their public services, which many voters expected Labour to restore.

  Britain has more or less gracefully withdrawn from the 400-year-old trading empire which made a great power out of some small north-westerly islands and their canny, energetic and not over-scrupulous natives. Though Britain has been reduced to her original area of a few offshore islands whose longest island is little more than 600 miles long, hers is the world’s fourth largest economy and she is its fourth largest monetary power. Her influence persists in disproportionate relation to her small size.

  Britain is now a fully signed-up member of the European Union. The question is what sort of Europe is Britain agreeing to be part of? Will it fall to England once more to take up her historic role of leading the resistance to a masterplan for continental tyranny expressed in European institutions which are not politically accountable enough?

  I say England advisedly, because the country called Britain, which was invented in 1707 to describe the union of the Scottish and English crowns, may soon no longer exist. With the financial support of Brussels Scotland may find irresistible the national will to become an independent country again.

  The British are a rather schizophrenic and mysterious lot where authority is concerned–the result perhaps of having had to adapt to so many waves of invaders, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish spent many centuries fighting off the aggressive English state. There is both an official culture which the British subscribe to and a secret, rather Celtic, side of Britain which carries on regardless. It is helped to flourish by the nature of the country’s geography. Her veiling fogs, dense forests, indented coastline and hidden valleys, particularly in the north and west, lend themselves to movements resisting all manifestations of central government, whether it be new dynasties or new religions. This inextinguishably individualistic side smoulders and periodically flares up, whether as Boudicca, Hereward the Wake, Catholic recusancy or Jacobite revolts. Who are Britain’s’ greatest heroes? Anti-heroes, that’s who, from Robin Hood to Rob Roy.

  Sir Howard Newby, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, warned in 2002 that Britain must fight off what he calls ‘increasing anti-intellectualism’ and hostility to scientific progress which could leave Britain behind the rest of the world. The national passion for rural life as a sort of paradise on earth sometimes leads to a suspicion of all scientific inquiry whether over genetically modified food or the necessary use of animals for experimentation to cure disease. Yet from Isaac Newton onwards British life has always contained a very strong vein of scientific inquiry. Not content with inventing the steam engine, Britons have split the atom, produced the first test-tube baby and cloned the first animal, Dolly the sheep.

  As Dr Tristram Hunt trenchantly reminded a Britain apparently overflowing with monarchists during the Queen’s Jubilee, the island story is also ‘a story of freethinking and restive inventiveness utterly at odds with the stifling conformity of court life. The Britain of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham is a tradition of pioneering political thought unrivalled in western Europe.’ Although the Nonconformist conscience may have been identified as a national feature only in the seventeenth century, the rebellious British seemed genetically predisposed to make it their signature tune.

  Pity the poor British then, despite their country’s renowned stability. As with the seas that surround them they are continually washed by one current and then another. Their views seem as peculiar as their weather. Is it the changeable sea winds that make it impossible to predict how the British will react, one minute swayed by intense patriotism, the next supremely rational and suspicious of emotion? For the British contain within themselves two warring strains of thought that can never quite be reconciled. There is
what amounts to a folk belief in the necessity of kings and queens. Yet that coexists alongside an equally powerful and living tradition of liberty and progress, expressed in some of the world’s great reforming movements–Parliamentary democracy, the anti-slavery movement, penal reform, anti-militarism and municipal socialism.

  From the middle ages onwards, Britain is generally held to have distinguished herself from other European countries by virtue of her highly mobile class system–considered to be one of the secrets of her prosperity. Yet foreigners complain that despite their apparently informal manners, there is no other people so hard to get to know as the British, and no country so class sensitive. As for Britain’s position in Europe, there the Europeans believe she is a maddening law unto herself, neither wholeheartedly pro nor quite against. A curious and contradictory people indeed.

  FURTHER READING

  This book could not have been prepared without relying on the scholarship provided by the standard histories and reference books, in particular the Oxford History of Britain, the New Cambridge Modern History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Pimlico Chronology of British History by Alan and Veronica Palmer. The following is a list of suggestions for stimulating further reading–works by modern authors or translators which are in print or available from libraries.

  Ackroyd, Peter Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. G. N. Garmonsway (1953)