A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Kinnock had thought of taking them on a year earlier but had decided the miners’ strike made that politically impossible. The Liverpool mayhem gave him his chance. So in the middle of his speech at Bournemouth, up to then a fairly conventional Labour leader’s address, attacking the other parties and cheering up the hall, Kinnock struck. It was time, he suddenly said, for Labour to show the public that it was serious. Implausible promises would not win political victory.

  I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

  By now he had whipped himself into real anger, shouting yet also – just – in control. The best speeches are made on the lip of the curve of the track, an inch away from crashing into incoherence. Kinnock’s enemies were in front of him. All the pent-up frustrations of the past year were being released. The hall came alive. Militant leaders like Derek Hatton, a man with the looks of a recently retired footballer, stood up and yelled back. Boos came from left-wingers. Uncertain applause came from the loyalists. The pompous left-wing MP Eric Heffer (who had once begun a speech in the Commons with the immortal words, ‘I, like Jesus Christ, am the son of a carpenter’) stood up and stomped from the hall, followed by camera crews and journalists. This was drama of a kind even Labour conferences were unused to. Kinnock went on:

  ‘I’m telling you, and you’ll listen, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services, or with their homes.’

  There was another huge outburst, now both of cheers and of boos. Kinnock insisted that the voice of people with real needs was louder than all the booing that could be assembled: ‘The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency tacticians.’

  Alliteration, then eruption. Most of those interviewed said it was one of the most important and courageous speeches they had ever heard, though the hard left was venomously hostile. The newspapers, used to kicking Kinnock, were almost delirious with praise. David Blunkett, the blind socialist leader of Sheffield city council, who would later serve in the Blair cabinets, organized a climb-down on a Militant-sponsored motion, much to Kinnock’s annoyance. But the speech was a genuine turning point. By the end of the following month Liverpool District Labour Party, from which Militant drew its power, was suspended and an inquiry had been set up. By the spring of 1986 leaders of Militant had been identified and charged with behaving in a way incompatible with Labour membership. The process of expelling them was noisy, legally fraught and time-consuming, though more than a hundred were eventually expelled. As important, there was a strong tide towards Kinnock across the rest of the party, with many left-wingers cutting their ties to the revolutionaries. There were many battles with the hard left to come, and several pro-Militant MPs were elected to the Commons. Newspaper stories about ‘loony left’ councils allegedly banning black bin bags on the grounds of racism and ordering teachers to stop using nursery rhymes for the same reason, would continue to be used to taunt Labour. Yet by standing up openly to the Trotskyist menace, as Wilson, Callaghan and Foot had not, Kinnock gave his party a new start. It began to draw away from the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the polls and do much better in local elections too. It was the moment when New Labour became possible.

  Yet neither this, nor the new fashion for better-controlled, slicker and sharper management that Kinnock brought it, would do the party much good against Thatcher in the election that followed. Whatever glossy pamphlets, well-made adulatory films and carefully planned photo-opportunities could do, was done. Mandelson, a former student leader and television producer whose grandfather had been Herbert Morrison, became the best-known of the modernizers. Prince Charles greeted him as ‘the red rose man’ for his role in ditching the old red banner as Labour’s symbol and substituting a long-stemmed rose. Mandelson was certainly a single-minded and devoted reformer, cajoling and bullying a generally anti-Labour press. But he was not the only one. The red rose had been suggested by others, a copy of European socialist party imagery. Yet symbolism could not mask the fact that in its policies, Labour was still behind the public mood. Despite mass unemployment Thatcher’s market optimism was filtering through. Labour might have ditched the red flag but it was still committed to renationalization, planning, a National Investment Bank and unilateral nuclear disarmament, a personal cause for both Kinnock and his wife Glenys over the previous twenty years.

  The mid-eighties were a time when, after ferocious arguments about disarmament and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, then a spate of espionage cases, the Cold War was finally thawing. In the White House President Reagan, scourge of the ‘evil empire’, was set on creating ‘Star Wars’, the orbiting satellite and anti-missile system intended to make the United States invulnerable to Russian attack. Yet he was ready to talk too, as the famous summit with Gorbachev at Reykjavik showed. There the Russians agreed to big missile reductions and the Americans declined to scrap ‘Star Wars’. It was not a time for the old certainties. Yet for Kinnock, support for unilateral nuclear disarmament was fundamental to his political personality. It was the reflex response to those who accused him of selling out his socialism. It was a source of some of his best rhetoric. He therefore stuck with the policy, even as he came to realize just how damaging it was to Labour’s image among swing voters.

  He was clear about it. Under Labour all the British and American nuclear bases would be closed, the Trident nuclear submarine force cancelled, all existing missiles scrapped and Britain would no longer expect any nuclear protection from the United States in time of war. Instead more money would be spent on tanks and conventional warships. Kinnock was forceful and detailed about all this, and the more he spoke, the more Labour’s ratings went down. He set off gamely trying to sell the CND line as no kind of surrender when in Russia; and something wholly compatible with Nato membership while in Washington, where on his third visit Reagan’s team humiliated him with a twenty-minute meeting, followed by a coldly hostile briefing. All of this did him a lot of good among many traditional Labour supporters; Glenys turned up at the women’s protest camp at Greenham Common. But it was derided in the press, helped the SDP and was unpopular with just the floating-voter, middle England people Labour desperately needed to win back. In the 1987 general election campaign Kinnock’s explanation about why Britain would not simply have to surrender if threatened by a Soviet nuclear attack sounded as if he was advocating some kind of Dad’s Army guerrilla campaign once the Russians had got here. With policies like these, he was not putting Thatcher under the kind of pressure which, perhaps, she needed.

  96

  A Revolution’s Mid-Life Crisis

  There had been some bad moments for the second Thatcher government. Most obviously, she had nearly been assassinated. The IRA bomb which demolished a chunk of the Grand Hotel at Brighton during the 1984 Conservative conference was intended as a response to Mrs Thatcher’s hard line at the time of the 1981 hunger strike. The plot had been to murder the British cabinet and Prime Minister and plunge the country into political chaos, resulting in withdrawal from all Ireland. As for her, when it went off at 2.50 she was still working on an official paper about Liverpool’s garden festival, having finished writing her speech ten minutes earlier so she was not even woken up. The blast scattered broken glass on her bedroom carpet and filled her mouth with dust. She then decamped to lie fully clothed in the bedroom of a nearby police college, pausing only to kneel and pray with her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford, or ‘Crawfie’, when they heard that the bomb had killed the wife of the cabinet minister John Wakeham and nearly killed him; killed the Tory MP Anthony Berry; had badly injured Norman Tebbit, and paralysed his wife.

  After less than an hour�
�s fitful sleep and with her cabinet hurriedly dressed in clothes from a nearby branch of Marks & Spencer, their dresses and suits still being in the half-wrecked hotel, she rewrote her speech and told the still stunned conference that they had witnessed an attempt to cripple the government. ‘And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’ The final death toll from Brighton was five dead and several more seriously injured but its consequences for British politics, which could have been momentous, turned out to be minimal.

  If the IRA could not shake her, could anything else? There had been internal rows, not only over Westland but more ominously for the future, about economic policy. Her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had wanted to replace the old and rather wobbly system of controlling the money supply through targets, the Medium Term Financial Strategy, with a new stratagem – tying the pound to the German mark in the European Exchange Rate system, or ERM. This was an admission of failure; the older system of measuring money was useless in the world of global fast money described earlier. Using Germanic bondage was an alternative. In effect, Britain would have subcontracted her anti-inflationary policy to the more successful and harder-faced disciplinarians of the West German Central Bank. Lawson was keen. She was not; if anyone was to play dominatrix round here, it would be her. At the time, little of this debate bubbled from the specialist financial world into general political life.

  Other rows did. There was the Westland affair itself but also a botched sale of British Leyland and the highly unpopular use of British airbases for President Reagan’s attack on Libya in 1986. After her hugely successful fight to claw back some of Britain’s overpayment to the European Community budget in her first term, these were years of Thatcherite drift over Europe, which would so fatally damage her at the end. Jacques Delors, later her great enemy, had been appointed President of the European Commission and begun his grand plan for the next stages of union. The Single European Act, which smashed down thousands of national laws preventing free trade inside the EC, promising free movement of goods, capital, services and people, and presaging the single currency, was passed with her urgent approval. She pooh-poohed the idea that when the continentals talked of economic and political union, they really meant it. She would regret all this later.

  At home a wider dilemma was emerging right across domestic policy, from the inner cities to hospitals, schools to police forces. It was one which would puzzle both her successor governments, John Major’s and Tony Blair’s. It was simply this: how does a modern government get things done? In the economy, she had an answer. Government sets the rules, delivers sound money and then stands back letting other people get on with it. In practice she often behaved differently, always more pragmatic and interventionist than her image suggested. At least, however, the principle was clear. But when it came to the public services there was no similar principle. Where were the staunch, independent-spirited movers and shakers in the hospitals, town halls or the school system, the equivalent for public life of the entrepreneurs and risk takers she admired in business? If government stood back and just let go of schools, hospitals, inner cities, who would be waiting to catch them?

  Before the Thatcher revolution the Conservatives had been seen as, on balance, defenders of local democracy. They were very strongly represented in councils across the country and had been on the receiving end of some of the most thuggish threats from Labour governments intent, for instance, on abolishing grammar schools. Conservatives had seen local representatives on hospital boards and education authorities as bulwarks against socialist Whitehall. Margaret Thatcher herself had good reason to recall the days of sturdy local independents, doing the public’s work on unpaid committees for her father, Alderman Roberts, had been one of them. In the seventies, Tory think tanks regularly produced reports calling for stronger localism, the building of a rich ‘civil society’ in which independent institutions – churches, schools, charities, clubs and the rest – would spread autonomy and freedom. It was the theme of the most influential conservative philosopher of post-war Britain, Michael Oakeshott. The Tory vision emphatically included elected local government. In 1978, two right-wing Conservative politicians, for instance, wrote a passionate pamphlet complaining that ‘local government is being deprived of more and more of the functions it used to be thought capable of fulfilling.’

  Yet in power, Thatcher and her ministers could not trust local government, or any elected and therefore independent bodies at all. Between 1979 and 1994, an astonishing 150 Acts of Parliament were passed removing powers from local authorities, and £24 billion a year, at 1994 prices, had been switched from them to unelected and mostly secretive gatherings. The first two Thatcher governments transferred power and discretion away from people who had stood openly for election, and towards the subservient agents of Whitehall, often paid-up party members and well-meaning stooges. Ministers, whether ‘wet’ or ‘dry’, competed to show her their zeal by taking the initiative away from organizations on the ground. Michael Heseltine attacked local government with new auditing arrangements, curbs on how much tax they could raise, and then spending caps as well. Nicholas Ridley, an Environment Secretary, forced them to put out a wide range of services to tender for private companies, telling local councils in the harshest terms that no dissent was permissable: ‘we might have to force them to expose their activities to competition if they did not choose to do that themselves.’

  So there was no public service equivalent of privatization. In hospitals and schools Thatcher had eventually rejected the radical alternatives of fees, private management, selection and independence when offered them by the CPRS (Central Policy Review Staff). Stirred by the idea, she was too cautious to follow where it led. If neither new private nor old public, then what? The answer turned out to be expensive bureaucratic central activity which made ministers feel important. In the health service, early attempts to decentralize were rapidly reversed and a vast top-down system of targets and measurements was put in place, driven by a new planning organization. It cost more and the service seemed to get worse. Similar centralist power-grabs took place in urban regeneration, one of the most visible and immediate areas of government action, where unelected corporations, UDCs, rather than elected councils, got the money to pour into rundown cities. The biggest city councils, notably the Greater London Council, were simply abolished. Its powers were distributed, including to an unelected organization controlled by Whitehall. As one critic, Simon Jenkins, pointed out, by 1990 ‘there were some 12,000 laymen and women running London on an appointed basis against just 1,900 elected borough councillors.’ Even in housing, the gap left by the sale of council homes was met by the rise of the Housing Corporation, disbursing 90 per cent of the money used by housing associations to build new cheap homes. In the Thatcher years its staff grew sevenfold and its budget, twentyfold.

  Back in the mid-eighties she did, to be fair, have other things on her mind. Personal relationships matter as much in modern diplomacy as they did in the Renaissance, and the Thatcher-Gorbachev courtship engaged her imagination and human interest. She was becoming the closest ally Ronald Reagan had, in another international relationship which was of huge emotional and political significance to her. In these years she had become an international diva of conservative politics, feted by crowds from Russia and China to New York. Her wardrobe, coded depending on where an outfit had first been worn, told its own story: ‘Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black’. Meanwhile she was negotiating the hard detail of Hong Kong’s transitional status before it was handed over to Communist China in 1997. She got a torrid time at Commonwealth conferences for her opposition to sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa – and where she gave as good as she got. At home, the problem of persistently high unemployment was nagging away, though it started to fall from the summer of 1986, wh
ile Tory strategists still seemed to lack a clear idea about how to deal with the unfamiliar threat of the ‘two Davids’ and the Liberal-SDP Alliance. And electorally, the multiple failures and political threats turned out to matter not at all.

  97

  1987: The Revolution Confirmed

  When the 1987 election campaign began, Thatcher had a clear idea about what her third administration would do. Just like Tony Blair later, she wanted more choice for the users of state services. There would be independent state schools outside the control of local councillors, called grant-maintained schools. In the health service, though it was barely mentioned in the manifesto, she wanted money to follow the patient. Tenants would be given more rights. The basic rate of income tax would be cut. She would finally sort out local government, ending the rates and bringing in a tax with bite. On paper the programme seemed coherent, which was more than could be said for the management of the Tory campaign itself. Just as Kinnock’s Labour team had achieved a rare harmony and discipline, Conservative Central Office was racked by hissy fits and screaming cat-fights between politicians and ad-men. The Leaderene began to snap at her former favourite, the carnivorous ‘Chingford Skinhead’, Norman Tebbit, now party chairman.