A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Abroad, the government’s anti-poverty agenda concentrated on Africa. In 2004 Blair initiated the Commission for Africa which worked to persuade the world’s richest countries to back a wide plan for economic, political and social reform, supported by debt relief. By then it was estimated more than 50,000 people were dying every day from famine or bad water in Africa and the continent’s AIDS epidemic was wiping out much of a generation. In 2005 Brown, struggling to persuade the United States to back his plans for an international finance facility – a global piggy bank – agreed to raise Britain’s aid contribution to 0.7 per cent of GDP. Washington declined to follow suit. Enormous strength was added to the campaign by Make Poverty History, one of the two biggest examples of street politics in the Blair age. Here was extra-parliamentary action which showed people’s readiness to engage with politics-as-unusual, a residual idealism. There is a tradition in Britain of moral protest and practical action for famine abroad. Oxfam had started as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942, campaigning to persuade the wartime government to lift its blockade on German-occupied Greece, where the Nazis were allowing people to starve as they diverted food to their army in North Africa. (Churchill took the view that the starvation was the fault of the occupying power and the blockade should stay – the argument was strikingly similar to those made about sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Major and Blair years.) What made the later movement different was the fusion of celebrity, music and television to raise unheard-of sums.

  It began with the Irish rock star Bob Geldof, and Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, who were shocked by news coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. They formed a thirty-strong ‘supergroup’ to make a fundraising Christmas single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ It raised £65 m and Geldof managed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to waive VAT for the famine victims. This success was followed by Live Aid, a linked global concert held in London and Philadephia in 1985. It was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people in 160 countries, making it by far the biggest world television event to that point. Geldof continued to campaign on Africa, joining the Commission for Africa. Having sworn he would never try to repeat Live Aid, Geldof did so in 2005 with a host of rock stars, including U2 and the (briefly) reformed Pink Floyd, breaking more records for global audience numbers. This time, though, the focus was on lobbying the richest countries, meeting as the G8 under British chairmanship at Gleneagles in Scotland.

  On 2 July 2005, some 225,000 people marched in Edinburgh calling for debt cancellation to help Africa’s poorest countries. A week later a £28.8 bn aid deal and a debt cancellation programme for eighteen countries, plus new guarantees to fund anti-HIV drugs, were indeed agreed at Gleneagles. Because parts of the rich world remained hostile to opening up trade to Africa, essential to helping the continent recover, some campaigners were disappointed. And the announcement was greeted with cynicism by the anti-globalization movement which was also a feature of these years. Geldof said, however, that ‘never before have so many people forced a change of policy onto a global agenda’ and his fellow campaigner, Bono of U2, claimed the deal would save the lives of 600,000 Africans, mostly children. The legacy of Live8 and the Commission for Africa will continue to be debated for years but it was a unique alliance between civil organizations, churches, rock musicians, actors, writers – and politicians. Both Blair and Gordon Brown were consciously trying to use the hundreds of thousands of marchers and the glamour of the rock stars to nudge other world leaders towards agreement, and they were at least partially successful. It showed what their partnership could do.

  Poverty is hard to define, easy to smell. In a country like Britain, it is mostly relative. Though there are a few thousand people living rough or who genuinely do not have enough to keep them decently alive, and many more pensioners frightened of how they will pay for heating, the greater number of poor are those left behind the general material improvement in life. This is measured by income compared to the average and by this yardstick in 1997 there were three to four million children living in households of relative poverty, triple the number in 1979. This does not mean they were physically worse off than the children of the late seventies, since the country generally became much richer. But human happiness relates to how we see ourselves relative to those around us, so it was certainly real. Under their new leader David Cameron, the Conservatives declared that they too believed in the concept of relative poverty, as described by a left-of-centre commentator, Polly Toynbee. And a world of work remained below the minimum wage, in private homes, where migrant servants were exploited, and in other crannies. Some 336,000 jobs remained on ‘poverty pay’ rates.

  Nevertheless the City firm UBS believes redistribution of wealth – a phrase New Labour did not like to use in case it frightened middle-class voters – had been stronger in Britain than other major industrialized countries. Despite the growth of the super-rich, overall equality slightly increased in the Blair years. One factor was the return to means-testing of benefits, particularly for pensioners and through the working families’ tax credit (which in 2003 was divided into a child tax credit and a working tax credit). This was a personal U-turn by Brown who in Opposition had opposed means-testing. As Chancellor he concluded that if he was to direct scarce money at the people in real poverty he had little choice. More and more pensioners were means-tested, eventually some 66 per cent of them, provoking a nationwide revolt and persuading the government to back down and promise an eventual return to a link between state pension rates and average earnings. The other drawback of means-testing was that a huge bureaucracy then had to track people’s earnings and try to establish just what they should get. Billions were overpaid. As people getting tax credits rather than old-style benefits, did better, and earned a little more, they found themselves facing demands to hand back money they had already spent. Many thousands of civil servants were hurriedly sent to try to deal with a tidal wave of complaint, and the system became extremely expensive to administer. It was also hugely vulnerable to fraud, with gangs taking over people’s identities (13,000 civil servants alone) and exploiting ‘a culture of overpayment’.

  In the New Labour years, as under John Major, a sickly tide of euphemism rose ever higher, depositing its oily linguistic scurf on every available surface. Passengers became cubecame refuse operatives, stomers; indeed everybody became customers. Bin-men people with mental disabilities became differently-abled. And the poor became the socially excluded. There were controversial drives to oblige more disabled (and sometimes shirking) people back into work. The ‘socially excluded’ were confronted by a wide range of initiatives designed to make them, in essence, more middle class. In theory, Labour was non-judgemental or liberal about behaviour. In practice, responding to the darkest areas of deprivation, an almost Victorian moralism began to reassert itself. Advice on diet, weight-loss and alcohol consumption followed earlier government campaigns on AIDS and drugs. Parenting classes were much trumpeted. And for the minority who made life hellish for their neighbours on housing estates or in the streets, Labour introduced a word which became one of its particular gifts to the language of the age, as essential as dotcom or texting, the Asbo.

  The Anti-Social Behaviour Order, first introduced in 1998, was an updated system of injunctions for what earlier generations called hooligans. These had to be applied for by the police or local council and granted by magistrates. To break the curfew or restriction, which could be highly specific, became a criminal offence. Asbos could be given for swearing at people, harassing passers-by, vandalism, making too much noise, graffiti, organizing raves, flyposting, taking drugs or sniffing glue, joyriding, either offering yourself as a prostitute or kerb-crawling in your car to find a prostitute, hitting people, drinking in designated public places…almost anything in fact that was annoying or frightening. More bizarre-sounding ones included giving an Asbo to an entire part of Skegness to allow police arrests of troublemakers there; a 13-year-old girl being bann
ed from using the word ‘grass’ and an 87-year-old man being ordered not to make ‘sarcastic remarks’ to neighbours and their visitors. In one case a woman who kept trying to commit suicide was given an Asbo to prevent her jumping into rivers or canals.

  Though almost every story about an unlikely-sounding Asbo as reported in newspapers turned out to have a reason behind it, Asbo-spotting became a minor national sport and there were fears that for the tougher children, they became a badge of honour. In their early years they were much mocked by Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs for being ineffective and rarely used by local authorities, as well as being criticized strongly by civil libertarians. Since breaking an Asbo could result in a prison sentence, it meant extending the threat of prison to crimes that before had not warranted it. Yet the public when polled strongly supported Asbos and as they were refined and strengthened they were gradually used more frequently, becoming almost routine. Like the minimum wage, Bank independence and some of the anti-poverty initiatives they seemed to be a part of New Labour Britain that would stick. At the time of writing, 7,500 or so had been given out in England and Wales (Scotland followed in 2004 with its version). Was this part of a wider authoritarian and surveillance agenda changing life in the country?

  125

  The War on Privacy

  At an educated guess, the British are currently being observed and recorded by 4.2 million closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras. Professor Clive Norris of Sheffield University, who did the educated guessing, has pointed out, ‘That’s more than anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of China. It’s one for every 14 citizens.’ When they first appeared in the early nineties, gazing beadily down from a few high-security buildings, these remotely staring cameras were pointed out as novelties. They are now in almost every sizeable store, looking down at key points in most big streets, in railway and underground stations, buses, housing estates and even from the fronts of private homes. Londoners are said to be picked up on CCTV cameras on average 300 times a day; their cars are filmed and tracked by the cameras set up for the capital’s congestion charge. The Home Office has spent three-quarters of its crime prevention budget on CCTV cameras and the face-recognition and ‘smart’ technology that goes with them. The number of mobile phones is now equivalent to the number of people in Britain; with global satellite positioning chips, they can show where their users are, and the same of course goes for GPS systems in cars (by 2007 Britons were losing the art of map-reading). There are also more than 6,000 speed cameras on British roads.

  Britain’s information commissioner Richard Thomas warned that the country had becoming a ‘surveillance society’. He thought future developments could include microchip implants to identify and track people; facial recognition cameras fitted into lampposts; and even unmanned surveillance aircraft over Britain’s towns. Thomas suggested this could lead to discrimination and harassment: ‘As ever more information is collected, shared and used, it intrudes into our private space and leads to decisions which directly influence people’s lives.’ Certainly, if being watched makes us good and safe, the British are now the goodest, safest people in the history of the world.

  Who watches all the CCTV coverage? Court cases often demonstrated that either there was no film kept, or that to spot a face took many police officers many weeks. Though this can increasingly be done electronically, other kinds of surveillance were being done in person. A new force of council tax inspectors were given powers to enter any home in England and take photographs of any room, including bedrooms and bathrooms, on pain of a £1,000 fine for refusal or obstruction. This was to assess improvements including patios, conservatories and double glazing for revaluation purposes as soon as the government gave the go-ahead for such a revaluation, which was planned to include extra charges for people living in agreeable areas, or who could park their cars outside their homes. It was reported in early 2006 that discussions had taken place with the civil servant in charge of the surveillance programme about selling on the information his men had gleaned to insurance and mortgage companies. Paul Sanderson, director of modernization for the tax inspectors, said he thought privacy was ‘an old-fashioned concept’ and called for all the details, including photographs, to be shown online.

  If anything could be more intimate than the insides of everyone’s homes, it is their DNA, with its clues about heredity, vulnerability to disease and much else. In 2003 the law was changed to allow the police to take and store the DNA of anyone arrested for any imprisonable offence, whether or not they were later convicted. Previously the police had had to destroy the samples of anyone found innocent, or whose case was dropped. Three years later, by which time 3.6 million samples were being held, Tony Blair said the database should be extended to everybody: ‘The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get’ and there was ‘no problem’ with the general public providing their DNA as part of the wider fight against crime.

  By then the public also knew they would be expected to give biometric data – iris recognition and perhaps eventually DNA – for new compulsory identity cards, due to be introduced from 2008 when people applied for new passports. David Blunkett had promoted the idea of compulsory ID cards despite a hostile reaction from his predecessor Jack Straw, the Chancellor Gordon Brown, and initial caution from the Prime Minister. But he won his fight in government essentially because he convinced Blair the technology was becoming safe, and that ID cards would be popular with the majority of voters. These cards would carry a range of personal information, forming yet another new database, the National Identity Register. The issue provoked rebellions in Parliament before and after the 2005 election, but seemed to have been finally resolved by a thirty-one-vote majority in the Commons in February 2006. The new cards would cost citizens at least £93 each though ministers did not initially make it an offence to fail to carry one at all times. What were they for? To combat fraud and crime, to make life easier for government, and for individuals to make it harder to lose money through ‘identity fraud’. Yet compulsory ID cards would probably not have passed through Parliament had it not been for the terrorist threat.

  126

  Seven Seven

  On 7 July 2005, at rush-hour, four young Muslim men from West Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, Hasib Hussein, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Germaine Lindsay and Shezhad Tanweer, murdered fifty-two people and injured 770 more by blowing themselves up on London Underground trains and one London bus. The report into the worst such attack in Britain later concluded that they were not part of an al Qaeda cell, though two had visited Pakistan camps, and that the rucksack bombs had been constructed for a few hundred pounds. Despite government insistence that the war in Iraq – discussed below – had not made Britain more of a terrorist target, the Home Office investigation asserted that part of the four terrorists’ motivation was British foreign policy.

  They had picked up the information they needed for the attack from the internet. It was a particularly ghastly one, because of the terrifying and bloody conditions below the streets of London in tube tunnels and it vividly reminded the country that it was as much a target as the United States or Spain. Indeed the intimate relationship between Britain and Pakistan, with constant and heavy traffic between them, provoked fears that the British would prove uniquely vulnerable. Blair heard of the attack at the most poignant time, just following London’s great success in winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. He rushed back from Gleneagles in Scotland, where the G8 summit was discussing the ambitious new aid plan for Africa, and differences between the United States and the rest over global warming.

  The London bombings are unlikely to have been stopped by more CCTV coverage, for there was plenty of that, nor by ID cards, for the killers were British citizens, nor by ‘follow the money’ anti-terror legislation, for little money was involved. Only even better intelligence might have helped. The Security Service as well as the Secret Intelligence Service (MI5 and MI6 as they are still more familiarly known)
were already in receipt of huge increases in their budgets as they struggled to track down other murderous cells. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe bomber’ from Bromley who tried to destroy a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was another example of the threat from home-grown extremists, visiting ‘radical’ mosques from Brixton to Yorkshire, and there were many more examples of plots uncovered in these years, though by no means every suspect finally made it to court. In August 2005 police arrested suspects in Birmingham, High Wycombe and Walthamstow, east London, believing there was a plan to blow up as many as ten passenger aircraft over the Atlantic. The threat was all too real, widespread and hard to grip.

  After many years of allowing dissident clerics and activists from the Middle East asylum in London, Britain had more than its share of inflammatory and dangerous extremists, who admired al Qaeda and preached violent jihad. Once September 11 had changed the climate, new laws were introduced to allow the detention without trial of foreigners suspected of being involved in supporting or fomenting terrorism. They could not be deported because human rights legislation forbade sending back anyone to countries where they might face torture. Seventeen were picked up and kept at Belmarsh high security prison. But in December 2004 the House of Lords ruled that these detentions were discriminatory and disproportionate and therefore illegal. Five weeks later the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, hit back with ‘control orders’ to limit the movement of men he could not prosecute or deport. They would also be used against home-grown terror suspects. A month later, in February 2005, sixty Labour MPs revolted against these powers too, and the government only narrowly survived the vote. Ten Belmarsh men were put under these new restraints but the battle was far from over. In April 2006 a judge ruled that such control orders were ‘an affront to justice’ because they gave the Home Secretary, a politician, too much power and two months later said curfews of eighteen hours a day on six Iraqis were ‘a deprivation of liberty’ and also illegal. The new Home Secretary, John Reid, lost his appeal and reluctantly had to loosen the orders. In other cases, meanwhile, two men under control orders vanished.