By Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour Party member
Andrew Marr’s final programme on the history of modern Britain starts with the replacement of Thatcher with John Mayor as Tory leader and Prime Minister. The boom of the late 80s gave way to a recession and unemployment was at levels not seen since the early 80s.
Major’s chances of winning the 1992 General Election were boosted by scrapping the poll tax and the quick victory in the First Gulf war. This was a UN-backed coalition, led by US forces, forcing Iraq to withdraw its army from Kuwait. Major won the 1992 election with the highest number of votes ever and the turnout was the highest since the 1951 General Election.
The first problem facing Major was signing up to the European Maastricht Treaty, which sought to establish a single currency, and the European social charter which included minimum standards on workers’ rights.
Andrew Marr suggests that Major was successful in securing an opt-out in both cases, but initially the UK was part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). However, a run on the pound forced Britain’s ignominious exit, and there has been no attempt since then at monetary alignment with what became the Euro and the pound was devalued. This was the beginning of the end for Major.
In an attempt to stop the fall in sterling, the Government announced interest rate rises that crippled both business and mortgage holders. At one stage, the Bank of England was pouring money into propping up the currency, according to Marr, as much as £2m an hour. But what Marr failed to point out was that speculators made a fortune out of what was dubbed as Black Wednesday.
Fortunes made out of ‘Black Wednesday’
As a result of the poverty caused by the early 90s recession, attention was focused on a perceived growth of crime and violence. The murder of a toddler, Jamie Bulger, by two 10-year olds gave credence to the idea of a ‘moral decline’ and Major launched his ‘back to basics’ campaign, although this was gradually undermined as the Tories were engulfed by one scandal after another, involving sleaze and double standards.
Following the sudden and unexpected death of Labour leader John Smith, Tony Blair was elected the leader. Four successive election defeats and the collapse of so-called ‘communism’ in Eastern Europe resulted in a sharp turn to the right in the leadership of the Labour Party.
Blair did what Hugh Gaitskell had failed to do in the 1950s and removed the socialist Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution, which had been on every membership card for decades. He also opposed the renationalization of the railways, despite the dismemberment of British Rail in the last weeks of Major’s premiership. Blair embraced the so-called ‘free market’ and re-branded Labour as New Labour. After eighteen years of Tory government, the electorate were sick and tired of them and any Labour leader would have won in 1997. As it happens, it was Blair who won the biggest landslide in Labour history. According to Marr, Blair embodied a more ‘liberal’ Britain, but that was only ‘liberal’ with a small ‘l’. Blair, one of the UK’s youngest-ever Prime Ministers, was at the heart of what Marr described as ‘cool Britannia’.
The death of Princess Diana
Soon after Blair’s victory, the death of princess Diana saw an extraordinary outpouring of national grief, at least if the press and TV were to be believed. It was certainly mass hysteria in Fleet Street. Even TV news reporters were in tears. On the other hand, not to be cynical about the fall-out of her death, the monarchy came in for criticism on a scale that was completely new, given the Queen’s apparent early indifference. The tradition of deference and doffing the cap to one’s betters were certainly not evident here. Tony Blair spoke of Diana as the People’s Princess and posthumously she had an approval rating of 90 % among the electorate.
Labour’s second election victory in 2001 was almost as convincing as 1997 and was on the back of a boom and some modest reforms like the introduction of a statutory minimum wage. It should be noted that the number of workers on the statutory minimum in those days was relatively small and it was seen as a ‘safety net’. Nowadays, of course, it is applied to literally millions of workers and where it was once the minimum, for many employers now it is the ‘norm’.
Devolution in Scotland, Wales and the GFA
The programme briefly deals with the referendums for devolved powers in both Scotland and Wales and it was under a Labour government that the Scottish and Welsh assemblies first met. There was also the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland. In reality, the agreement reflected the exhaustion and war-weariness of the whole population and it was a crushing refutation of the bombing and so-called ‘war’ strategy of the Provisional IRA. The Provos had utterly failed to drive out the British state and the GFA was an admission of that fact. What was worse was that the agreement enshrined sectarian in law, by stipulating a ‘power-sharing’ pact between the largest Unionist and Nationalist parties. Despite the GFA, to this day sectarian is deeply rooted in Northern Irish society and, if anything, it is worse now than it was twenty years ago.
Marr could not fail to mention, in his review of modern Britain, the emergence of the World Wide Web, which revolutionized communications. In the early 90s, a British computer programmer invented a system that allowed computers to communicate with each. This was Tim Berners-Lee, who gave out the to all, free of charge.
Surprisingly, Marr failed to mention the break-up of Yugoslavia in this period and the subsequent bitter sectarian and national wars in the Balkan states that had previously made up that country. This was the first conflict on mainland Europe since the Second World War and it led to some bloody episodes of ethnic cleansing and atrocities, many of which have still not been uncovered or resolved to this day.
Marr did raise the question of the Bernie Ecclestone affair: he is the boss of the Formula 1 racing circuit and was a donor to New Labour. Apparently, he got Blair to exempt his racing events from the general ban on tobacco advertising that the government had introduced. The charge of sleeze had come direct to Blair’s front door.
Millennium celebrations
An important political turning point that Marr features was the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. People were saying, even as it was happening, that, “politically, this changes everything”. And they were right. Bush announced his so-called “war on terror”, which was a pretext for beefing up all the security services and the police and for introducing a wide range of legalised surveillance mechanisms – which are still effective today, thanks to the cooperation of the big social media giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Although everyone in the security services knew that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, Bush used it as a pretext to attack, having first supported a variety of Afghan tribal groups to overthrow the Taliban in Kabul. Iraq was the main prize…because of its oil and it was described by Bush as part of the “axis of evil”.
‘Dodgy dossier’ a pretext for a war already agreed
Blair’s support for the war was the beginnings of his undoing. There was more than a suspicion that Blair had offered Bush his full support first and that he would find a pretext for doing it second. The pretext was actually a dossier, forever known as the ‘dodgy dossier’ from the then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had ‘a source’ suggesting that Iraq had a chemical weapons capability and they could be launched within 45 minutes. There wasn’t the slightest evidence for this, beyond some bloke in Iraq saying it, but it was enough for Blair to dramatically suggest in the chamber of the House of Commons that Britain was only forty-five minutes from Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”. MPs, including many Labour MPs had the wool pulled over their eyes and most didn’t have the political courage to challenge the spurious sources used by Dearlove and Blair.
The threat of a war brought about the largest demonstration ever against war with around million participating in London and with demonstrations in many other parts of the world. But having already made a commitment to Bush, Blair was not swayed in the slightest and took Britain to war. There had been no real evidence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and Blair and Bush even ignored the denials of the UN’s Hans Blix, who was the head of the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq. The bitter legacy of the war in Iraq is evident today, in a country still in a state of economic destitution, divided along sectarian lines and with its Sunni population open to recruitment to groups like ISIS. That is apart from the millions of Iraqi dead, the big majority civilians, and the thousands of British and US service personnel killed and maimed. And the trillion dollars it took to ‘win’ the war.
It was really a war for oil and for strategic control of an important part of the Middle East, although, ironically, the fall-out has been so unpredictable and militarily unsustainable that both the major invading powers, the US and UK are now going through an effective withdrawal programme, albeit spun out over a few years. Marr concluded that there had been no plan for what to do after the invasion and he described it as Britain’s worst foreign policy decision since Suez.
Watch the series…but with a critical eye
It was on the back of a consumer boom and the building of new hospitals and schools – largely through PFI, a massive scam for which we are still paying today – that Labour was able to win three election on the trot. Marr concluded the series with the odd comment that to be born in Britain is a ‘stroke of luck’. Not, we might add, if you happen to be of Afro-Caribbean or Asian heritage. But still, Marr’s conclusions are somewhat premature. The 2008 recession has resulted in the stagnation of income and austerity and the biggest squeeze in living standards for generations. Any gains made in the Labour years have more than been compensated by cuts that have taken place since. ‘Reforms’ are never permanent or guaranteed under capitalism, and we can see they can quickly become counter-reforms. And there is no doubt that the coronavirus crisis will result in further attempts to drive down living standards and the folly of a no-deal Brexit will only add to Britain’s woes. We can only look forward to a Socialist Britain to end this spiral of decline.
For younger comrades who are new to the labour movement, it is worth looking at Andrew Marr’s programmes for a quick refresh of what has happened in politics generally since the Second World War. But as it is with most TV, you have to have a critical eye and you must supplement the viewing with the analysis you will find in socialist literature.
Andrew Marr’s history series can be found on BBC i-player here.
June 15, 2020
