A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  After Suez – with the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, scrambling to dismantle what was left of the post-imperial presence, Hong Kong excepted – Britain was forced to come to terms with its loss of status, assets and, in an intangible way, national swagger. The occasional Happy Event, like England’s World Cup victory in 1966, royal jubilees and weddings, even the 1982 Falklands War in the south Atlantic, which Margaret Thatcher represented as a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy’ over Argentinian dictatorship, was no real compensation. But the satire culture of the 1960s turned the mournful fatalism of retreat into a reason to celebrate, not grieve; the disconsolate arm round the shoulder became the gleeful punch in the ribs. The second-coming of mutton-chop sideboard whiskers, droopy moustaches, neo-Victorian steel-framed glasses and heavily embroidered, brilliantly coloured ‘Nehru jackets’, half imperial military band, half Hindu swami, popularized by The Beatles, was exactly the moment at which the loss of empire turned from a massive case of denial into affectionate acceptance.

  There was, in fact, still one empire left: Britain indisputably survived as a dominant centre of world finance. But even this advantage turned into a liability when the defence of sterling forced successive governments, especially Wilson’s, into accepting humiliating conditions, either from the United States or the International Monetary Fund, usually involving deep spending cuts. Yet again, a policy intended to arrest the shrinkage of sovereignty only ended up accelerating it. This would go on – with increasingly brutal battles over slices of an ever-diminishing economic pie, fought out between unions and management or between unions and government – so long as the original post-1945 Labour party assumptions to keep Britain as a substantial military power and a fully funded welfare state remained in being.

  All the alternatives mooted and attempted from the 1960s to the 1980s ran into trouble. Relying exclusively on the United States for nuclear defence was ruled out as anathema by both Labour and Conservatives: seen as an abdication, not just of great power but of any power status, equivalent to a transatlantic recolonization in the opposite direction. A European solution, through membership of the EEC, was vetoed by General (now President) de Gaulle twice, in 1963 and 1967, over what he described as Britain’s incorrigible insularity and post-imperial mentality (rich, coming from him, embroiled as his country had been in its own colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria). Particular irony was attached to his emphatic ‘Non’ on the second occasion, since this was precisely the moment when Harold Macmillan was determined to abandon both attitudes. In 1967 – a year before egg was to fly into his own face in the Paris riots – de Gaulle loftily instructed ‘this great people’ to embark on the economic and social transformation that would qualify them to be truly part of Europe rather than a satellite of the United States.

  The third way in 1970, initiated by free-enterprise, anti-collectivist Tories like Anthony Barber, Edward du Cann and Keith Joseph at the Selsdon Park conference during Edward Heath’s ascendancy (although Heath himself had mixed feelings about it), would prepare the way for Margaret Thatcher’s attempt in the 1980s to liquidate what was left of the welfare state. Billed as a return to the values that had made Victorian Britain great, it was not in fact a revival of Gladstonian liberalism, nor even of the Palmerstonian anti-continental gunboat-sending and chest-thumping (or handbag-swinging) which at times it rhetorically resembled. Thatcher’s government, elected in 1979, was a reversion, rather, to the empire of the hard-faced 1920s, when war socialism had been energetically dismantled, leaving industries that could survive and profit to do so and those which couldn’t to go to the wall. As in the 1920s, resistance to brutal rationalization through closure or sell-off of uneconomic enterprises, or by wage or job reductions, was met by determined opposition, never tougher than in the confrontation in 1984–5 between Thatcher and the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill – a battle, however, in which the Iron Lady comprehensively routed the King of Coal.

  The trouble with this retro-capitalism masquerading as innovation was that, 60 years after the policy had first been implemented, the regions that were the weaker species in this Darwinian competition were not just poorly but prostrate. South Wales, Lancashire, the West Riding, Tyneside and Clydeside happened to be precisely those regions that had risen to extraordinary prosperity as part of the British imperial enterprise. Now they were being told, in effect, to drop dead, written off as so many disposable assets in a fire sale. What interest did the Welsh and Scots, in particular, have for remaining part of the firm? (The same would have happened in the shipyards and defunct linen mills of Belfast, had not the Provisional IRA given the Unionists a very strong reason for waving their Union Jacks.) The understandable euphoria over Thatcher and her party winning three successive general elections disguised the fact that those majorities were built at the price of perpetuating a deep rift in Britain’s social geography. Not since Edward I in the 13th century had a triumphant England effectively imposed its rule on the other nations of Britain.

  Thatcher’s constituency was, overwhelmingly, the well-off middle and professional classes in the south of England, whilst the distressed northern zones of derelict factories, pits, ports and decrepit terraced streets were left to rot and rust. The solution of her governments, in so far as they had one, was to let the employment market and good old Gladstonian principles of bootstrap self-help take care of the problem. People living in areas of massive redundancy amidst collapsing industries ought simply to ‘retrain’ for work in the up-and-coming industries of the future, and if need be move to places such as Milton Keynes, Basingstoke or Cambridge where those opportunities were clustered. But this vision of ex-welders lining up to learn how to use computers was conspicuously unassisted by much in the way of publicly subsidized retraining. And even if it was available, there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it. The point of the computer revolution in industry was to save, not to expand, labour. Finally, the kick-up-the-rear-end effect of the Thatcher counter-revolution ran into something that was neither her responsibility nor her fault: the Coronation Street syndrome. Millions in the old British industrial economy had a deeply ingrained loyalty to the place where they had grown up, gone to school, got married and had their kids; to their pub, their park, their football team. In that sense, at least, the Beveridge–Labour social revolution – and behind it the Liberal–Lloyd George revolution – had indeed created cities that, for all their ups and downs, their poverty and pain, were real communities. Fewer people were willing to give up on Liverpool and Leeds, Nottingham and Derby than the pure laws of employment opportunity and the Iron Lady demanded.

  But not everything the Thatcher government did was out of tune with social reality. The sale of council houses created an owner-occupier class which corresponded to the long passion of the British to be kings and queens of their own little castles. Nationalized industries had conspicuously failed to do well in an opportunity climate. Sales of those state industries, on the other hand, presupposed a hunger for stakeholdership that was much less deeply rooted in British habits, and the subsequently mixed fortunes of those stocks did nothing to help change those habits. Most misguided of all was the decision to call a poll tax imposed on house and flat owners (the bitter pill to be swallowed by the newly propertied class) a ‘community charge’. Since the Thatcher government had specialized in liquidating metropolitan local governments, including London’s, especially where those authorities were Labour-dominated, few people were fooled by a regressive tax disguised as civic enthusiasm. In the end, Thatcher’s became just the latest in a succession of post-war British governments that had seen their assumptions rebound on them disastrously. Governments run by middle-class, aggressively anti-patrician Tory leaders like the grocer’s daughter from Grantham and the garden-gnome salesman’s son John Major (in both cases rightly proud of their origins), committed to ‘family values’, in Major’s notorious formula, as well as to economic self-sufficiency, ended up being overwhelmed by an aval
anche of sexual and financial scandals and blunders (sometimes perpetrated by the same people).

  By the late 1990s another indispensable marker of British identity, the monarchy, was looking shaky, perhaps even mortal. The strain of being simultaneously a ceremonial and a familial institution, a job description that, since the abdication of Edward VIII, was thought to require standards of personal behaviour well above the norm of late-20th-century expectations, was proving a bit much. Just as the monarchy had gained from its marriages, especially the filmed-for-television romance of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, whose wedding in 1981 had a world audience of at least 800 million, so it lost commensurately from the failure of those unions. The year 1992, referred to by a hoarse-voiced queen as her ‘annus horribilis’, saw not just the separation of Charles and Diana but a major fire at Windsor Castle in November. When the secretary for Scotland (for some reason) announced that the crown would pay only for the replacement and repair of items in the royal private collection, and that repairs to the fabric of the building would come from the tax-paying public, a serious debate was triggered about the monarchy’s finances. When polled, eight out of ten people asked thought the queen should pay tax on her private income, hitherto exempt. A year later, Buckingham Palace was opened to public tours and the crown did indeed agree to pay taxes. In 1994 the royal yacht Britannia, the floating emblem of the queen’s global presence, was decommissioned.

  The most difficult moment was yet to come. After Princess Diana’s death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, the royal family were criticized for following protocol (which prohibited the flying of flags at the Palace when the queen was not in residence) rather than fulfilling the deep need of a grief-stricken public to see the Union Jack fly there at half-mast. The crown lives and dies by such symbolic moments. And the immense outpouring of public emotion in the weeks that followed seemed both to overwhelm, and in some distinctive way be different from, the more conventional devotion to the queen herself and to her immediate family. The crisis was rescued by a speech made by the queen, striking for its informality and obviously sincere expression of personal sorrow. The tidal wave of feeling that swept over the country testified to the sustained need of the public to come together in a recognizable community of sentiment, and to do so as the people of a democratic monarchy.

  But was that country Britain or England? The relative indifference of the Tory ascendancy to the plight of industrial Scotland and Wales had transformed the prospects of the nationalist parties in both countries. Formerly just middle-class, rural and intellectual constituencies, Scottish and Welsh nationalists now made huge inroads into Conservative areas (where the Tories were wiped out in the 1997 general election) and even into the Labour heartland, and this despite three successive Labour leaders being Welsh, Scots and Scots again. In a 1992 poll in Scotland, 50 per cent of those asked said they were in favour of independence within the European Union. The devolution promised and instituted by Tony Blair’s new landslide Labour government in the late 1990s did seem to take some of the momentum out of the nationalist fervour, but apparently at the price of stoking the fires of English nationalism, resentful at having Scottish and Welsh MPs represented in their own parliament as well as in Westminster. The final logic of devolution would be to have an expressly English parliament as well. Where? York? Bath? Right in the heart of the country at Milton Keynes?

  Histories of modern Britain these days invariably come not to praise it but to bury it, celebrating the denationalization of Britain, urging on the dissolution of ‘Ukania’ into the constituent European nationalities of Scotland, Wales and England (which would presumably tell the Ulster Irish either to absorb themselves into a single European Ireland or to find a home somewhere else – say the Isle of Man). If the colossal asset of the empire allowed Britain, in the 19th and early 20th century, to exist as a genuine national community ruled by Welsh, Irish and (astonishingly often) Scots, both in Downing Street and in remote corners of the empire, the end of that imperial enterprise, the theory goes, ought also to mean the decent, orderly liquidation of Britannia Inc. The old thing never meant anything anyway, it is argued; it was just a spurious invention designed to seduce the Celts into swallowing English domination where once they had been coerced into it, and to persuade the English themselves that they would be as deeply adored on the grouse moors of the Trossachs as in the apple orchards of the Weald. The virtue of Britain’s fall from imperial grace, the necessity of its European membership if only to avoid servility to the United States, is that it forces ‘the isles’ to face the truth: that they are many nations, not one.

  But how many, actually? Why, in such a reduction of false British national consciousness to the ‘true’ entities of Scotland, Wales and England, stop with those acts of self-determination? Each of the sub-nations is, after all, just as much an invention as Britain, except that the inventions happened both earlier and, in terms of the ‘rediscovery’ of Celtic and Gaelic identities, also later. What possible grounds would there be in an independent Scotland for resisting the right of the Orcadians of Orkney, none of whom thinks they are Scots, to return to their Nordic roots and apply for reunion with Norway? Why should the still primarily Anglophone urbanized south Welsh feel they necessarily have more in common with the Welsh-speakers of mountainous Gwynedd than the English people of Gloucester or Bristol? Why should the Cornish be satisfied to remain the only Celtic culture obliged to co-exist within a country from which all other Celts have retreated to their ethno-linguistic heartland? Why should post-imperial Britain not resemble the happy patchwork of nations that is post-communist Yugoslavia?

  Because, of course, of the unhappy patchwork quilt of nations that is post-communist Yugoslavia. Or, rather, that what post-imperial Britain has going for it is precisely its resistance to the chilly white purism of Euro-nationalism. Just suppose that, instead of the cruel but just fate of empire being the punishing disintegration of the nation that engineered it in the first place, its reward for surviving that process was actually to make something positive, a fresh Britain, out of its memories; out of the peoples who had been touched, for good or ill, by it? Suppose, instead of listening to the paranoid rant of an Enoch Powell prophesying that a multi-racial Britain would end like Rome with the ‘River Tiber foaming with blood’, a multi-racial Britain actually took pride in what Colin MacInnes, the ‘rebel’ writer of the 1950s, called even then its ‘mongrel glory’?

  The story of the colouring of post-war Britain was not, of course, without its painful, even tragic, moments. It began as a hopeful arrival by the West Indian immigrants of the 1950s, spurred by the 1948 act of parliament that recognized Commonwealth citizenship as British citizenship and gave them the right of free entry. This was generous, but it was also self-interested. Both Labour and Conservative governments saw in those immigrants a population that would make up the shortage of unskilled, low-paid labour. Their presence when I was growing up in the 1950s, even in one of the most precociously multi-cultural areas of London, Golders Green, was still somehow furtively exotic. What were Jamaicans and Trinidadians doing in Salford playing professional cricket in something called ‘The Lancashire League’? When their number started to increase and move into Irish Kilburn and Notting Hill, as well as Brixton south of the river and Tottenham in the northeast, the result was explosive friction. In 1962 the Commonwealth Immigrants Act would be passed, severely restricting the categories of Commonwealth citizens allowed into Britain on grounds of both skills and degrees of blood relationship with native-born Britons. The same reason that immigrant labour was welcomed in the 1950s was now the reason for keeping it out.

  The effect of the announcement of these forthcoming restrictions was to accelerate the wave of immigration, so that by 1961 around 100,000 a year were arriving, both West Indian and, increasingly, Asian. Racist politics warmed up, despite the Labour government’s passage of race relations bills designed to stamp on crimes of hate and incitements to violence. There had already be
en riots in Notting Hill in 1958. There would be rioting again in Brixton in 1981. But there was also the annual Notting Hill carnival from 1959; and 41 years later, under the ill-fated but momentarily festive Millennium Dome, dancers from that carnival would sashay their stuff before the queen on New Year’s Eve 1999, one of the few moments from that memorably chaotic night that said something genuine about the future of 21st-century Britain.

  It is, of course, true that even though half of today’s British-Caribbean population and a third of the British-Asian population were born in Britain, they still constitute only a small proportion of the total population. It is also true that any honest reckoning of the post-imperial account needs to face up to racist calamities like the murder in London in 1993 of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and the appeal of separatist fundamentalism in Muslim communities, alongside the fact that in 2002 the captain of the England cricket team is of Anglo-Indian descent and there are black players in an England football team managed by a Viking. More important for a multi-coloured British future, a 1997 opinion poll found that 50 per cent of British-born Caribbean men and 20 per cent of British-born Asian men had, or once had, white partners. In 2000 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown found that, when polled, 88 per cent of white Britons between the ages of 18 and 30 had no objection to interracial marriage; 84 per cent of West Indians and East Asians and 50 per cent of those from Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds felt the same way.