A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Yet, at the end of this story, the need for true politics seems to have returned. Towards the end of his time in office Tony Blair unveiled a report by an economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, which he described as more important than any report to government during the New Labour years – more important, therefore, than the debate over Iraq, or pensions, peace in Ireland or the future of Britain’s health service. Few questioned this bold assertion. For the report was about climate change. We have already seen how radically new waves of migration were changing Britain but they were as nothing compared to what a new climate might do. An overwhelming preponderance of scientists believed not simply that the climate was changing (there was no room left for doubt about that) but that the change was man-made and potentially catastrophic. The polar ice was melting, weather patterns were disrupted around the globe, species were disappearing and yet, as China and India advanced, the gases causing these changes continued to pour upwards. Blair had tried to persuade his partner in Iraq, George Bush, to alter in some way his hostility to carbon limits but to no avail: compared to the agreements he had won on Africa, Blair’s effort on climate change had been a failure.

  American self-interest overrode what to others seemed proper and fair. And there was no bigger cultural challenge to Britons’ sense of proportion and fairness than the one thrown down by militant Islam. After 9/11 and the London bombings, there were plenty of angry, narrow-minded young Muslim men running amuck, either literally or in their heads. Their views, and the veiled women of Arab tradition, provoked English politicians to ask whether their communities wanted to fully integrate. Britain did not have as high a proportion of Muslims as France, but large parts of the English Midlands and the South had long-established and third-generation urban villages of hundreds of thousands of Muslim people. Muslims felt they were being watched in a new way and they were perhaps right to feel a little uneasy. In the old industrial towns of the Pennines, and in stretches of West London near Heathrow there were such strong concentrations of incomers that the word ghetto was being used by ministers and civil servants. White working-class people had long been moving, quietly, to other areas: Essex, Hertfordshire, the towns of coastal Sussex, even Spain.

  They were a minority, if polling was any guide: only a quarter of Britons said they would prefer to live in white-only areas. Yet multi-culturalism, if it was defined as more than simple ‘live and let live’, was being questioned. How much should new Britons integrate, and how much was the retention of traditions a matter of their human rights? Speaking in December 2006 Blair cited forced marriages, the importation of sharia law and the ban on women entering certain mosques as being on the wrong side of the line. In the same speech he used new, harder language. After the London bombings, ‘for the first time in a generation there is an unease, an anxiety, even at points a resentment that our very openness, our willingness to welcome difference, our pride in being home to many cultures, is being used against us.’ He went on to try to define the duty to integrate: ‘Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here. We don’t want the hate-mongers…If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us.’ Though Blair chose security as his ground, for others it was about more than the struggle against terrorism. Britain’s strong economic growth, despite a weak manufacturing base, was partly the product of a long tradition of hospitality. The question was now whether the country was becoming so crowded – England had the highest population density of any major country in the Western world – that this tolerance was eroding. It would require wisdom from politicians and efficiency from Whitehall to keep things on an even keel.

  Just the same is true of that larger threat, climate change. This threatened reshaping was physical, not demographic, the waves of water, not of people. It promised to alter the familiar splatter of Britain as she is seen from space or on any map. Nothing is more fundamental to a country’s sense of itself than its shape, particularly when the country is an island. Rising sea levels could make Britain look different on every side. They could eat into the smooth billow of East Anglia, centuries after the wetlands were reclaimed with Dutch drainage, and submerge the concrete-crusted, terraced marshland of London, and drown idyllic Scottish islands and force the abandonment of coastal towns which had grown in Georgian and Victorian times. Wildlife would die out and be replaced by new species – there were already unfamiliar fish offshore and new birds and insects in British gardens. All this was beyond the power of Britain alone to deflect, since she was responsible for just 2 per cent of global emissions. Even if the British could be persuaded to give up their larger cars, their foreign holidays and their gadgets, would it really make a difference?

  Without a frank, unheated conversation between the rest of us and elected politicians, who are then sent out into the world to do the bigger deals that must be done, what hope for action on climate change? It seems certain to involve the loss of new liberties, such as cheap, easy travel. It will change the countryside as grim-looking wind farms appear. It will change how we light and heat our homes and how we are taxed. All these changes are intensely political, in a way the British of the forties would have recognized. Politics is coming back as a big force in our lives, like it or not. It will require more frankness, less spin, and a more grown-up interest in policy, not scandal. Without this frankness, without trust on each side, what hope for a sensible settlement between Muslim and Christian, incomer and old timer? Without a rebuilding of strong local structures, what hope for better-run schools, councils or hospitals? Without level-headed politics, how will the future shape of the UK, if it continues, be negotiated? In the course of this history, most political leaders have arrived eager and optimistic, found themselves in trouble of one kind or another, and left disappointed. Such is the nature of political life. (Indeed, perhaps it is the nature of life.) But the rest of us need those optimistic politicians, the next leaders, the ones whom we’ll laugh at and abuse. And we need them more than ever now.

  The threats facing the British are large ones. But in the years since 1945, having escaped nuclear devastation, tyranny and economic collapse, we British have no reason to despair, or emigrate. In global terms, to be born British remains a wonderful stroke of luck.

  Insert

  New Dawn: Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins in uniform at Labour’s 1945 party conference.

  Clement Atlee, driven by his wife Violet, was advised to jump in his car and head for Buckingham Palace to be made prime minister before plotters could put in Herbert Morrison instead.

  and . John Maynard Keynes, possibly the cleverest man in Britain, died after struggling desperately to save his country from bankruptcy. But he could not do a deal with the Americans good enough to avoid the grim austerity of the post-war years, including bread rationing, the subject of the 1946 demonstration in Trafalgar Square.

  British women were hectored constantly about their clothes, and would soon revolt.

  Temporary pre-fab homes, often built using German and Italian prisoners of war, were one answer to the huge housing shortage. Some were still being used in the seventies.

  Despite Labour’s triumph, and fearing socialism, the old order quickly reasserted itself: Cecil Beaton poses on the set of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1946.

  Hero of the working classes: Joan Littlewood (. was one of the most radical voices in British theatre. But her influence in conveying the spirit and dilemmas of a new Jerusalem was far less than that of Ealing Studios, with films such as Passport to Pimlico (..

  and . Bitterly disappointed by his 1945 rejection, Churchill endured his exile writing, speaking, painting – and hunting, here, four days before his seventy-fourth birthday. He would be back in 1951, proclaiming a new Elizabethan age.

  and . Old Labour’s greatest prophet? Nye Bevan in full Welsh flow, presumably unaware that he’s being mimicked by a small boy.

  The comprehens
ive vision, pushed by Tories too: a new school in Anglesey, 1954.

  The Skylon at the 1951 Festival of Britain: people said that it, like the country, was suspended without visible means of support.

  Simpler pleasures: a honeymoon couple at Billy Butlin’s hotel near Brighton, 1957.

  and . In the Tory years, there were dreams of a super-technological British future: just along from Parliament, this is the planned London Heliport, complete with passenger helicopters, as pictured in 1952. Instead, ‘the great car economy’ was getting underway: in 1964 London’s Chiswick flyover was an early glimpse of the real future.

  and . Alec Issigonis, an immigrant from Turkey, was the design genius of post-war British car-making. His first huge success, the 1948 Morris Minor, was condemned by his company boss as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.

  As the mass car market developed, Issigonis worked on sketched for an even more radical car (., which would become the Mini. Late sketches (. for ‘the small car of the future’ are strikingly like the rounded city runabouts of today.

  Cold war: RAF crews practise a scramble for their Vulcan nuclear bombers in Lincolnshire, 1960. The V-bombers were Britain’s first line of attack but they were quickly made obsolete by improved Russian defences.

  By 1958, the anti-nuclear marches were mobilized and CND’s logo was on its way to becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of all.

  The working classes begin to be heard: Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey was a breakthrough play set in Salford, and written when she was just nineteen.

  Chaps dapper and chaps disgraced: the well-connected Soviet spy Kim Philby (. and the man who split Britain over Suez, Anthony Eden (., knew how to put on a good front. Stephen Ward (., the man at the centre of the greatest scandal of the early Sixties, barely bothered. Christine Keeler is to his left.

  If the reality is disappointing, weave a different one: Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, at the card table, 1962.

  and . The enigma and the optimist: Harold Wilson, reflective with pipe, in 1963 and Edward Heath, campaigning in exuberant mood, 1966.

  and . British Cool? The actor David Hemmings in Swinging London, 1966, and the Kinks, struggling with trousers and ruffles.

  The Liberal Hour: the flamboyant MP Leo Abse was one of the Labour backbenchers who led reform, in his case to legalize homosexual acts between men.

  In 1971, the editors of the underground magazine Oz were prosecuted for obscenity. A libidinous cartoon Rupert Bear was at the centre of the case; the significance of the whip is unclear.

  Violence becomes a theme: Catholic demonstrators (. in Londonderry/Derry after the killing of thirteen civil-rights marchers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1972, and (. the nearest Britain came to left-wing terrorists, the Angry Brigade, outside the Old Bailey a few months later.

  and . When the country failed: a boy stands outside his school, closed because of a lack of fuel during the miners’ strike of 1972. The miners were badly paid, and went on to humiliate Heath and the Conservatives.

  and . It’s the beans, stupid. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Common Market, both sides campaigned more about the cost of food than about the constitutional implications of surrendering sovereignty.

  Two men as influential as most prime ministers, Enoch Powell (., opponent of immigration, and (. Denis Healey, chancellor during Britain’s economic storm, making a characteristic point to his opponents.

  Punk gets cheeky: Vivienne Westwood (centre), Chrissie Hynde (left) and Jordan advertise Westwood’s King’s Road punk shop Sex, in 1976.

  But nothing was sexy about the economy: rubbish piles up in London during the ‘winter of discontent’, 1979.

  Michael Foot, the most literate and radical man to lead Labour, points in the general direction of the political wilderness. But his harshest critics, the SDP’s Gang of Four, failed to return to power, either.

  Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins plot over a glass of wine or two in 1982. The fourth member of the gang was not, as this photograph below suggests, surprisingly well-endowed but was Mrs Shirley Williams.

  The Iron Lady on manoeuvres. Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her power, with tank and flag, 1986.

  The Tories had another blonde who felt the call of destiny: Michael Heseltine, Conservative conference darling.

  and . When Thatcher took on the moderate ‘wets’ in her own cabinet, she could rely on the support of much of the press. But it was the Falklands that changed everything: a soldier aboard the 1982 task force waits for the shooting to start.

  and . Rebel faces: picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police, 1986, and the notoriously violent poll-tax riot of 1990 in Trafalgar Square.

  and . Two lost leaders: Labour’s Neil Kinnock attacking left-wing Militants at the party conference in 1985 and his successor John Smith, who would have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack.

  In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs.

  Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John Major win a triumphant electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat at Bath, and was sent as the last governor to Hong Kong.

  The death of Diana in 1997 produced an almost Mediterranean outpouring of grief across the country. A small field of flowers lies outside Kensington Palace.

  What’s waiting in the wings? Alastair Campbell guards his master’s back (. New Labour was famously image-obsessed, but (. by 2005 neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown could be bothered to disguise their mutual enmity.

  Tony Blair’s legacy? Anti-war protestors became a familiar sight on the streets of Britain (., while British troops did their utmost in the devastated and violence-plagued world of post-war Iraq. By 2007 (. they were still not welcomed by many Iraqis.

  More than four-million closed-circuit television cameras now watch the British: a surveillance society that echoes the wartime world of identity cards and observation with which this history began.

  The biggest social change continues to be migration, latterly from eastern Europe: Polish road signs to help drivers in Cheshire, February 2007.

  EOF