A full explanation of how, over five centuries, England got Britain into the state it's in today, and all in brief podcasts of under ten minutes each. Or at most a minute or two over. Never more than fifteen.
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272. What a fine mess you've got us into (00:43:11)
This is the last episode in this main series of A History of England. I may add others on specific topics – by all means use the comments to suggest any you’d like me to examine – or in response to interesting new developments.This episode looks at what has happened since the 2024 election. There’s been a rise in xenophobia that sometimes shades into outright racism. A party of the hard right, Reform UK, is leading in the polls. Labour, in office though perhaps not in power, seems to have lost its sense of direction and has been pandering to Reform UK’s views in the hope of winning back voters it has lost to them, with little sign of success so far. Indeed, its own standing just keeps sliding downwards.After that, I recap the series, from the days of Henry VIII, showing how England grew from a minor state on the edge of Europe to a leading power. Then, having pushed through the union with Scotland to form Great Britain, it became the ruling power of a major global empire. However, while the empire enriched a minority of people back home, it left the mass of the people in poverty, often in misery. Imperial wealth made individuals rich but not society as a whole.The twentieth century saw the empire collapse and British society become much more equal. In need of a new role, Britain tried being the partner of the United States and also a major member of the European Union. But the ‘special relationship’ with the US seems pretty well dead in the water now and, in a major self-inflicted wound, the Brexit vote of 2016 took Britain out the EU. Now with a growing menace to the whole continent, including Britain, from Russia, the Starmer government is trying to put together new alliances without confronting its right-wing critics by working to rejoin the EU. Together with the anti-immigration stance it’s taking to try to woo Reform UK voters back, that policy is making a return to economic growth more difficult than ever. That only stokes the grievances felt by many at home, encouraging the hard right further.Britain seems to caught in a dilemma of its own making. The Starmer government has adopted policies that are making things worse not better. Sadly, the logic of its position means it can’t change those policies.Change though, and not the kind of change Reform UK proposes, is desperately needed to get Britain out of the mess that England has led it into.Quite a dilemma, as I said.Illustration: The British bulldog confused about the way forward. Image from ChatGPT.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
271. Breaking records (00:14:59)
Following the rather grim comedy of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives gave Britain the even more ridiculous spectacle of Liz Truss. She proceeded to push the British economy to the edge of the abyss, aided and abetted by her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi ‘Kamikwasi’ Kwarteng. Fortunately, her colleagues realised what a disastrous mess the Tory membership had made electing Truss leader, and chucked her out again, establishing a new record, previously held by George Canning since 1827, for the shortest tenure of any Prime Minister in office.To the delight of the Daily Star, which livestreamed a lettuce and a photo of Liz Truss, to see whether she could outlast the lettuce, it was the vegetable that won.It was Rishi Sunak who followed her into office, and he worked hard with his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to get the economy back on its feet. Unfortunately, they went back to the beginning of this long period of Tory rule, to austerity politics. They worked no better second time around than first and only cut the public deficit by a little over half, leaving debt still climbing. Meanwhile, immigration was raising its head again as a key question. Oddly enough, net migration – people in less people out – had risen since Brexit, which many had backed as a way to limit migration in the first place. The new election took place on 4 July 2022. It was an election of fragmentation, with the old dominant parties of Labour and the Tories plumbing new depths of their joint share of the popular vote, while smaller parties – the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the new kids on the block, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, surging forward.The success of Reform UK was the most striking. And the most ominous for the future of the other parties.Illustration: Liz Truss and the lettuce. Photo from the Daily StarMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
270. Phenomenal Boris (00:14:57)
It’s the time of Boris. This episode tracks Boris Johnson’s character, starting with a less than complimentary report from his housemaster at Eton to this parents, through his time in the rich kids’ Bullingdon Club in Oxford, followed by some disreputable incidents when he was Mayor of London, to his endorsing of claims he must have known were false in the Brexit campaign. This period is capped by his becoming Prime Minister, something he doubtless felt was no more than his entitlement.The episode then follows his work to complete Brexit, including his attempt to get parliament out the way so it couldn’t block him, an attempt that would eventually be ruled illegal. There was also his purging of the Parliamentary Conservative Party of leading pro-EU voices, making it more Eurosceptic than ever. That was confirmed by the December 2019 election, which he won handsomely, with none of the eleven purged Tories getting back into parliament. With a good majority, he was able to ‘get Brexit done’, his slogan in the election.Labour under its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, took a hiding, emerging with its lowest haul of MPs since 1935, breaking the dubious record previously set by the previous party leader from the left, Michael Foot, in 1983.As well as Brexit, what marked the rest of Boris’s time as Prime Minister was a series of scandals, which suggested irresponsible behaviour on his part and a desire to hide information that might confirm it publicly. Eventually, there was one scandal too many and his ministerial colleagues started to resign from government in droves, until he decided the game was up and stood down himself.Illustration: The Bullingdon Club in 1987, with David Cameron at left in the back row and Boris Johnson, at the right of the row of sitting figures. All are wearing the (expensive) Club clothing. Photograph: Mallams/Lucas Field Media, from the Guardian.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
269. Brexit (00:14:57)
In 2015, Cameron returned to office with a majority of his own even if it wasn’t particularly huge. At least it meant he no longer needed to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems, who’d taken a terrible beating. Labour too had done badly, losing further parliamentary seats.Cameron’s government still had to deal with two foreign wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, though both now involved far smaller numbers of troops, even if the emergence of ISIS in the Middle East might mean more might have to be sent.A far more immediate problem was the conflict within the Conservative Party, where Eurosceptics were beginning to become increasingly powerful. That was made worse by the rise of the harder right UKIP, actively campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, in what would come to be known as Brexit. To try to silence his critics, Cameron pledged before the 2015 election to hold another referendum on EU membership, confident that it would vote to stay in. He was mistaken. A mixture of generalised anger against government leading to a desire to cast a protest vote, together with concerns over poor economic conditions for which immigration was blamed by many, much of it from EU countries, produced a narrow majority in favour of Brexit. Cameron resigned as Prime Minister. Theresa May took over, Britain’s second woman in the post.Her challenge was to negotiate the Brexit terms with the EU. She tried to strengthen her position by holding another election in 2017 but, rather like the EU referendum, it didn’t produce the desired result. She lost seats and her majority.She struggled on for another couple of years but eventually gave up and resigned.It was the dawning of the time of Boris Johnson – the theme for next episode.Illustration: Boris Johnson by the Brexit campaign bus with its false claim that leaving the EU could save Britain £350 million a week for the NHS. Photo from the Irish TimesMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
268. The winners and the damned: peacetime coalition (00:14:58)
It’s 2007, and Tony Blair is out. In his place is Gordon Brown, who’d proved his capacity as a Chancellor. Sadly, he was now to show that promotion to Prime Minister was one step too many , since he simply didn’t have the skills needed for the top job. He might have won an election in the autumn of 2007, when he had a small poll lead. Instead, his nerve failed him and he called off the election the Labour Party had been preparing. That meant that he took the blame for the world crash that hit the following year, and though he and his Chancellor did well to get Britain back to growth, with the deadline for a new election bearing down on them, they had run out of time to build the party a new lead.The result of the 2010 election was to return a hung parliament, one in which no party had a majority in the Commons. Fraught negotiations finally led to the formation of a Conservative coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Dominated by the Tories, it pursued austerity policies to reduce the government deficit and public debt. It had some success in the first of these aims, but none in the second. Austerity created a fairly dismal atmosphere in the country and, for the LibDems, the policy turned toxic when it forced an increase in university fees which the party, now led by Nick Clegg, had vowed to abolish.When the next election was held, in 2015, the LibDems were severely punished, with their haul of MPs reduced from the respectable 57 won in 2010, to the miserable total of just eight.Labour had elected itself a hopeless, uncharismatic leader, Ed Miliband, an easy figure for Cameron to beat. Labour lost more seats from its low tally of 2010. Cameron, on the other hand, took his Conservatives to a majority in the Commons. The majority was small but enough to form a new government of Tories alone, with the LibDems once more consigned to the backbenches.So Cameron took office for the second time. Things looked good for him. Unfortunately, however, an explosion that would bring him down was building within his own party, as we'll see next week.Illustration: Cameron (left) of the Tories and Clegg of the LibDems, senior and junior leaders of the 2010 coalition government. Photo from the GuardianMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
267. Bliar (00:14:57)
As the title of this episode suggests, this is where we look at how Tony Blair’s reputation was wrecked by the growing awareness that he’d produced infamously bad justifications to launch Britain into war in Iraq. Many people now reversed the vowels in his name, making Blair into Bliar. For a man who’d once assured Britain that he was a ‘straight sort of guy’, being seen as a liar was quite a fall.Despite all that, Blair had racked up quite a series of achievements. This episode looks at some of them, particularly in education and healthcare. He was, however, very much a ‘yes, but’ Prime Minister: many of his achievements were associated with a failure, either immediately or stored up for the future, which rather qualified how admirable they would ultimately appear. So, alongside his achievements, the episode also looks at how often they were accompanied by a ‘but’.That and the terrible legacy of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were the background of Blair’s campaign for the election of 2005. He took Labour to its third victory in a row in that contest, an unprecedented accomplishment for the party. However, while it left his government with a strong majority, the win fell short of what would qualify as a landslide – he couldn’t pull off Thatcher’s trick of winning three straight landslide victories in a row.What’s more, he was under increasing strain. The shine had come off his government. And Gordon Brown, up till then his Chancellor of the Exchequer, was putting him under pressure to stand aside. After all, Brown had dropped campaign against him for the Labour leadership back in 1994; now it was his turn at the premiership.Two years into his third government, Blair agreed. In May 2017, he stood down. Gordon Brown at last got his chance to show what he could make of the top job. We’ll see how that went next week. Illustration: ‘Bliar’ button produced by the Stop the War Coalition, from the Imperial War Museum, which produced the photo.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
266. A time of dodgy dossiers (00:14:58)
When Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, as part of a US-led and rather limited coalition of nations, it was against the will of large numbers of Brits expressed in possibly the biggest demonstration in British history. He’d also decided to hold a vote in parliament as to whether to go into the war, something he didn’t strictly have to do since it was a so-called ‘prerogative power’, one of the powers inherited from the monarch though exercised, not by the whole of parliament, but by ministers with no need to obtain parliamentary approval. His decision set a new precedent in requiring parliamentary authority to go to war. He also made it a matter of confidence, so his government would have fallen had he lost.That didn’t stop a massive rebellion among Labou MPs, when nearly 40% failed to rally to the government’s support. That didn’t bring him down or prevent involvement in the war, because the Conservatives came to his rescue. It did, though, mean that he took Britain into the conflict in Iraq in the teeth of opposition both from around the country and from many within his own parliamentary party.To push for support, he’d presented parliament with two dossiers detailing the dangers represented by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Both have been shown to be shot through with false claims. That meant that the war was fought on false premises. Such a war, fought on that basis, marked the end of what Blair had once seemed to value, the government’s commitment to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. It’s no surprise that the architect of that policy, Robin Cook, and two other ministers resigned from the government.It also meant that he as well as the victims of the war would be paying a heavy price for having got involved in it. As we’ll discover in the next episode.Illustration: ‘45 mins from attack’: headline in the Evening Standard newspaper, in response to the September 2002 dossier on supposed weapons capabilities in Iraq.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
265. War in a unipolar world (00:14:58)
By the latter part of the twentieth century, the world had become unipolar. The Soviet Empire collapsed even more rapidly than the British one had after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. China was not yet the force it is today. The US was at the pinnacle of its global power.That made it all the more unbearable that it came under assault within its own borders by the terrorists of the 9/11 attack in 2001. A reaction was inevitable. We saw last time how it invaded Afghanistan, but that seemed barely justified since there’s no evidence of Afghan involvement in the attacks. By 2003, the US as ready to turn its military aggression against another nation in what it called its ‘war on terror’, a strange notion of waging war against an abstract noun. Concretely, its new target was Iraq. Sadly, however, Iraqi contact with the 9/11 attacks had proved as difficult to substantiate as Afghanistan’s. But the US put together an international coalition for war there, as it had once before in 1990-91, to throw Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait.This though would be much smaller coalition, with fewer nations prepared to support President George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s new campaign. It didn’t help that it looked suspiciously at least partly aimed at completing the work of his own father, George HW Bush, who’d been president during the previous war on Iraq, by bringing down the dictator Saddam Hussein.One of the nations right alongside the US was Britain. That would leave a lasting mark on Tony Blair’s legacy. Which might as a result not have been quite as glowing as he might have liked.Our subject for next week.Illustration: Government buildings burning in Baghdad following a US airstrike in March 2003. Photo Ramzi Haidar / AFP / Getty from ‘The Atlantic’Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
264. Ethics, votes and wars (00:14:58)
We saw in the last episode, that Britain’s involvement in the NATO intervention in Kosovo could be regarded as part of an ‘ethical foreign policy’, since its objective, many felt, was humanitarian, though others disagreed. Another military action, to support the government of Sierra Leone against rebellion, was more clearly humanitarian rather than self-serving, and so easier still to defend on ethical grounds.All this, together with a strong economy and some reforms that were beginning to bear fruit, in the social, educational and health arenas, but Blair’s Labour government in a strong position. So it called a general election in June 2001, when it would set out to do something the party had never achieved before: win a Commons majority, serve out a term in office, and then win another.And Blair pulled it off. Indeed, not only did Labour win, it took another landslide majority.Celebrations didn’t last long though. Within three months of the election win, terrorists attacked the US in the atrocity we now call 9/11. An attack that serious led to a massive response, but not against the nation from which most of the terrorists and their leader, Osama bin Laden, came, which was Saudi Arabia, but against the nation that offered bin Laden refuge, Afghanistan.That rather questioned the extent to which Labour was pursuing a foreign policy that could be called ethical. However, far worse was still to come. That, though, we’ll see in the next episode.Illustration: the Twin Towers ablaze on 9/11, 11 September 2001. Public domain.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
263. Tragedy at home, ethics abroad (00:14:58)
Divorce, contrary to what many believe, was not permitted by the Church of England. Henry VIII didn’t divorce two wives, he had the marriages annulled, declaring in effect that they’d never happened. The Church itself remained as opposed to divorce as the Catholics. That’s why Edward VIII had abdicated in the 1930s, so he could marry the divorcee he loved. It’s also why Queen Elizabeth II, as head of the Church of England – just as Henry VIII had been – forbade her sister Princess Margaret’s marriage to a divorcee, a decision that blackened the rest of Margaret’s life.That’s why it’s such an irony that three of Elizabeth’s four children had marriages that led to divorce. Indeed, her eldest son Charles, now king himself and head of the Church, not only divorced his wife, Princess Diana, but married the love of his life, Camilla, herself divorced and happily settled as queen.His strained marriage and ultimate divorce caused great pain to Diana. That led to her rather wild last years, culminating in the terrible car crash in Paris that caused her death. That turned into a real crisis for the British monarchy, when the queen and royal family reacted with apparently complete tone deafness to the sorrow that swept across Britain and indeed into other countries too. It was a crisis from which the Blair government helped the monarchy emerge and get back to on the road to a return to its traditional popularity, which enjoys again today.Just as he helped modernise, a very little, one traditional British institution, Blair also worked on another, the British army. He adopted what he called an ethical foreign policy but his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, referred to less ambitiously as a foreign policy with an ethical dimension. The way it worked was shown in the NATO operation in Kosovo, presented by its supporters as essentially a humanitarian mission, though its detractors wouldn’t agree.What the operation certainly did do, however, was provide a telling example of the principle that military men sometimes achieve their goals most effectively by not opening fire, rather than provoking a violent confrontation. That’s a great story, well worth the telling. Illustration: Diana, the people’s princess. Photo credit: Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/Cover ImagesMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
262. Uncool (00:14:57)
In the early years of Blair’s premiership, his supporters liked to refer to Britain as ‘Cool Britannia’, in a play on the title of the song ‘Rule Britannia’. Last week, we talked about some of the cooler things the Blair government did at this time, including the breakthrough in the Northern Irish peace process, specifically the Good Friday Agreement.This week, we look at some of the distinctly uncool aspects of its rule and, funnily enough, we’ll focus for much of the episode on Northern Ireland again. This time, though, we’ll talk about what happened to the person who, perhaps more than any other, made sure the Agreement was reached, Mo Mowlam. And her treatment might well be regarded as far from cool.One of the uncool parts of it was that she was replaced by Peter Mandelson. He’s been in the news again in our time, forced to resign for the third time from a political appointment, this time as ambassador to the US. But the first time he was forced to resign, over a financial scandal which was uncool enough, it was just ten months before he came back into government, taking over from Mowlam, which made it uncooler still.Just as uncool was the Ecclestone scandal, where Blair tried to help out the boss of Formula 1 racing, who’d made a large contribution to the Labour Party. What made that particularly uncool was that Blair denied that he’d made the decision to help Ecclestone very quickly, before handing back his donation, and the truth only came out thanks to a Freedom of Information request. And though he introduced the Freedom of Information Act, he later kicked himself for doing it, which was even more uncool.Plenty that wasn’t cool, then, in Cool Britannia. For the passage on Northern Ireland, and specifically on Mo Mowlam, from the video of Blair's speech to the 1998 Labour Conference, take a look at:https://www.c-span.org/program/international-telecasts/labour-party-conference/118168Illustration: A photo taken shortly before the bomb blast in Omagh. It’s uncertain who the photographer was. The remains of the camera were found in the rubble after the bomb exploded. Image currently displayed by the Irish historian Wesley Johnston on his website: http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/omagh/before.htmlMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
261. Cool Britannia (00:14:57)
The Blair government threw itself into action as soon as it was formed.Rather confirming the existence of a deal between them, something they’ve never confirmed, Blair quickly appointed Gordon Brown Chancellor. As well as steps, such as making the Bank of England independent and introducing a minimum wage, on which they fully agreed, there’s also evidence that, as suspected, Blair had promised Brown authority of his own, unprecedented for a Chancellor, over social security. Brown focused on families with children and on pensioners, and his reforms did bring in a significant redistribution of wealth, increasing the incomes of the poorest at the expense of the richest. Strangely, however, this led to no reduction in inequality: since the 1980s, the time of Thatcher and Reagan, the pressure towards growing inequality, whose effect we feel strongly today in the power of so-called oligarchs, had been sustained and was apparently irresistible. The Blair government acted to improve gay rights, equalising the age of consent for straight and gay sex, abolishing the notorious Section 28 and introducing civil partnerships for gay couples.It also worked on devolution, with parliaments set up for both Scotland and Wales, with substantial powers though nothing like independence, and a new strategic authority for London, which had been without one since Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council in 1986.When it came to Northern Ireland, there was still a lot of work to do. Referendums in both the Republic and in the North endorsed the Good Friday Agreement, despite far lower enthusiasm among Northern Protestants than among Catholics in the province and citizens of the Republic. Now there was some hard, detailed work to do to implement the agreement. That would include a sad collateral casualty. That, though, is something which we’ll talk about next week.Illustration: Blair and Brown, working in partnership. For now, Photo from 'The New Statesman’.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
260. New Dawn (00:14:57)
It was a new dawn. Or at least so Tony Blair said, as he emerged from his landslide victory in the 1997 General Election. It’s what he would say, isn’t it?Still, there was some truth to the claim. It was the end of eighteen years of Conservative rule. Eleven of them had been under the Iron lady, Maggie Thatcher. And whatever her achievements, she had certainly been the most divisive leader since the Second World War, as she made clear by explicitly breaking with the consensus politics that had marked the postwar scene up to her. It was also revealed in the deeply divided reactions to her death in 2013, with tributes from some (including Tony Blair) and celebration (Ding-dong, the witch is dead) from others.She’d been followed by John Major, in a government marked above all by division within his own party, as well as some blunders. Also marked, however, by one big breakthrough: the beginning of a peace process in Northern Ireland which he couldn’t take through to completion, but which got some momentum behind it all the same.That’s the theme the episode concludes with, because it fell to Tony Blair’s government to take that process forward. Its work would lead to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That would only be possible thanks to the unflagging support of the governments in both Dublin and London and, indeed, in Washington DC.As well as to the courage and willingness to go out on a limb of an extraordinary woman, the first female Northern Ireland Secretary and someone of outstanding firmness of will combined with willingness to negotiate to anyone she needed to win around. And who was she?Why, she was Mo Mowlam.Illustration: Mo Mowlam. Photograph: Paul McErlane/AP from 'The Guardian'Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
259. Major error, major success, Major’s out (00:14:58)
We’re just about ready to move on from John Major but, before we do, we need to spend a few moments on two major events of his second premiership. One was a significant breakthrough, in Ireland, even if it didn’t go to completion under his administration; the second, his back-to-basics campaign, was an unqualified disaster.The first of the two problems with ‘back-to-basics’ is that going backwards isn’t a slogan that appeals much to voters. The second is that it feels like an appeal to morality, and there couldn’t have been a worse time for that kind of appeal in the Conservative Party: it was engulfed over the coming years by a whole string of scandals, many sexual but some more simply corrupt, involving such actions as MPs taking money to ask helpful parliamentary questions.On Ireland, Major got the peace process really motoring, with support not just from the Republic of Ireland but even more significantly, from the US. If things ground somewhat to a halt in the last year or so of his premiership, that was mostly down to the Provisional IRA ending its ceasefire, in response to Major’s apparent over-readiness to accommodate the Northern Ireland Unionists. That, in turn, was mostly down to his having lost his parliamentary majority and therefore having to depend on the Unionists to cling on to office.That he did, calling the 1997 general election at very close to the last possible moment. But the atmosphere of sleaze created by the scandals, the unpopularity of moves such as railway privatisation, and the perception that the Tories were increasingly split (over Europe) sank his party in voters’ views. The election, on 1 May 1997, gave a landslide Commons majority, even larger than Thatcher’s, to Tony Blair and Labour – or, to use his language, New Labour. He reckoned Labour had won thanks to ‘a vote for the future’. It looks like going forward to the future resonated better with voters than heading back to basics.Illustration: John Major at the 1993 Conservative party conference, detail from a photograph by Malcolm Gilson/Rex Features, from 'The Guardian'Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
258. Major’s bastards and Labour’s deal (00:14:58)
By winning the 1992 general election, John Major had gained his own mandate to form a government, instead of imply inheriting Margaret Thatcher’s. He’d shown himself capable of leading the Conservative Party to success, as he led it to a fourth successive election win. He’d emerged somewhat from the shadow of his Iron Lady predecessor. And then things immediately started going wrong. Black Wednesday, just months after the election, saw a major run on the pound that turned George Soros into ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and drove Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Major’s positive poll ratings collapsed overnight and never really recovered.Then his own party began to creak as its seams, as a growing group began to emerge and express an increasingly strident Euroscepticism. That group mounted a rebellion against the government’s proposal to ratify what came to be known as the Maastricht Treaty, which converted the European Economic Community into the European Union, with more ambitious aims towards integration (from some of which Major obtained British opt-outs). Though eventually the sceptics voted with their own party’s government to avoid bringing it down, their behaviour had been so objectionable to Major that, in an unguarded moment with a journalist, he referred to them as ‘bastards’.Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, John Smith, the well-respected leader who’d replaced Neil Kinnock after the general election defeat, died suddenly of a heart attack. There were two frontrunners to take over from him, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. It seems clear that they came to a deal whereby Brown would stand down as a candidate for the leadership to give Blair a clear run, in return for a big role in a future Labour government.Blair took over from Smith. He’d be leading Labour against Major’s Conservatives at the next general election. Our subject for next week.Illustration: promotional image for Stephen Frears’ The Deal, showing David Morrissey as Gordon Brown and Michael Sheen as Tony BlairMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
257. Iron Lady out, Grey Man in (00:14:59)
With the poll tax, Thatcher took one bad decision to many. From the point of view of orthodox Thatcherite thought, it sounded like a good idea. She’d been working for years to shrink the state but, while she could herself cut public spending at national level, local government could keep racking it up if it so chose. She’d introduced rate capping to limit how far local councils could raise local taxes. The poll tax – officially the Community Charge – was the next step. In the old system, with local taxation based on house values, it was the rich that paid the most even though it was the poor that mainly benefited from local services. A flat rate tax per head – which the Community Charge was, hence the derogatory name Poll Tax – would, the theory suggested, give poor voters a direct relationship with local taxation and expenditure, making them less likely to vote for council candidates who would push for increased local spending.In fact, the tax was seen as unfair and its introduction led angry protests that on occasion led to rioting.It wasn’t, though, the poll tax that directly ended Thatcher’s time at the top. Instead, it was another row with one of her closest colleagues. Already Michael Heseltine, in 1986, and Nigel Lawson, in 1989, had been significant figures – so-called ‘big beasts’ – leaving her government. Now, in the autumn of 1990, she fell out with Geoffrey Howe. He too resigned and in his resignation speech talked about how his loyalty was divided between Thatcher herself and the country or party. The day after his resignation, Heseltine announced he would challenge Thatcher for the Tory leadership. In the resulting election, like Heath against her, she won the first round but by too narrow a margin to prevent a second round. Like Health against her, she resigned.It wasn’t Heseltine, however, who replaced her. On the contrary, much to many people’s surprise, it was John Major, who’d only been elected to parliament in 1979 and only served in cabinet since 1986, who came through as the compromise candidate Tory MPs could rally behind. He became party leader and Prime Minister.And then, much to everyone’s surprise again, he went on, partly helped by campaigning errors by Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party, to win the election in 1992. The Tories had won four general elections in a row. But now that would return the grey man to Downing Street rather than the Iron Lady.A very different proposition…Illustration: Geoffrey Howe delivering his resignation speech to the Commons, 13 November 1990, with Nigel Lawson sitting next to him. Photo PA from the Guardian.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
256. Maggie losing it (00:14:58)
Having looked last week at how Maggie Thatcher was running out of options for how to carve out a new role for Britain on the world stage, this week we look at how things were going at home. After all, she’d won a second landslide Commons majority in 1987, and that ought to be enough for anyone to shape politics to their wishes.Well, it turned out not be that easy. Though it didn’t go far at this time, this was when the first stirrings for devolution, and eventually perhaps even independence, began to emerge in Scotland and Wales. After all, they’d been held together with England in Britain when there was a British Empire, and with that Empire gone, what held them together now?And then there was the crisis over the HIV/AIDS worldwide pandemic. It had led to a surge in homophobia, as many mistakenly labelled the condition ‘the gay disease’. Some Labour-contraolled local councils had reacted by working with organisations from the gay community and even funding some of them. This was repugnant to Thatcher, who shared a widespread view that the family was the bedrock of society, and acceptance of gay lifestyles was a major threat to it. The result was the adoption of what came to be known as ‘Section 28’ banning the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local councils or in schools. No prosecution of a local authority under Section 28, but its mere existence and the uncertainty of just what constituted ‘promotion’ put a chill on work to support people suffering discrimination and to encourage safe sexual practices.Then there was Northern Ireland, and one of the weirder Thatcher initiatives. This was to try to deny terrorist or terrorist-associated organisations what she thought of as ‘the oxygen of publicity’. She banned the broadcasting of the voices of the leaders of these organisations which led to the ludicrous state of affairs where actors were used to repeat the words of those leaders, as though somehow banning the voice mattered more than banning the words.And then there was the economy. Things were beginning to turn a little nasty with unemployment and inflation both climbing worryingly. One approach favoured by some of Thatcher’s collaborators, notably her Chancellor of the Exchequer, was to ‘shadow’ the German currency, the Deutschemark. Since the Mark had joined the EEC’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, setting exchange rates between European currencies which were only allowed to vary by 6% above or below that rate, Britain was in effect accepting the constraints of the ERM without being a member.When Lawson realised that advisers to Thatcher inside Downing Street were mocking his approach, he decided that he was being undermined in his work and resigned from the government.After Michael Heseltine in 1986, this was the second Tory big beast to leave her Cabinet. One loss of a minister might be regarded as a misfortune, two looked like carelessness. A third one would start to look very bad, as we’ll discover next week.Oddly, after Lawson had gone, to be replaced by his deputy, a man who’d made a remarkably rapid rise through the ranks of the government, John Major, Thatcher allowed herself to be persuaded to take Britain into the ERM. Sadly, because sterling went in at far too high a value, this only limited options for dealing with the worsening economic position.So, as with foreign affairs, Thatcher was facing shrinking options on the domestic front too.Illustration: 9 February 1988 Protest against Section 28. Photo by Maggie HoneyMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
255. Maggie: lioness or poodle? (00:14:57)
Maggie Thatcher in 1987 pulled off a trick that had eluded all other British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century: she won three general elections in a row. Even more, she won a second Commons landslide down from the 144 seats in 1983, but still massive at 102 seats. It was a remarkable feat, to set alongside her being the first woman Prime Minister of Britain, though she always preferred to present herself as the first scientist.With that huge majority, she seemed well placed to pursue her policy agenda to make Britain great again. But that’s where she ran into problems. This week, we’re going to talk about what the obstacles to her were in foreign affairs, before turning to the domestic ones next week.She had three main paths to choose between: she could go all in on the Atlantic Alliance with the US, banking on the special relationship; she could go with the Commonwealth, using that association of former imperial possessions to rebuild British global power; or she could throw the country’s lot in with Europe, sacrificing some British sovereignty to the EEC, in return, as Harold Macmillan had written quarter of a century earlier, for sharing in the sovereignty the other nations had given up.The problem was, as experience would show, that the special relationship with the US had become deeply one-sided, with the US treating Britan as very much a junior partner (which, to be fair, it was). While her backers praised her for standing up against those in parliament who resented granting the US permission to fly bombing raids against Libya from British bases, calling her a lioness in a den of Daniels, those opponents regarded her as a poodle doing the bidding of the American president. As for the Commonwealth, this loose association of nations with no real structure for taking or acting on decisions, was never going to get Britain anywhere. And when it came to Europe, Thatcher grew increasingly sceptical about the EEC as time went on, resenting any granting of authority to it outside the purely economic area.That, sadly, left Thatcher with no real option for taking things forward. Majority or not, she was increasingly boxed in. Lioness or poodle, she found her way blocked in every direction.Illustration: 'You lead and I'll follow': Thatcher dancing with Reagan, a special relationship in which the US calls all the shots. Photo by Charles Tasnadi from the Globe and Mail.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
254. Maggie reaching the top (00:14:58)
Thatcher’s victories, including a general election landslide and breaking the miners’ strike, emboldened her to launch another phase in the reduction of the role of the state in the British economy. Nationalised industries were privatised, with encouragement given to individuals to buy the shares, which they did with enthusiasm. This came on top of the continuing success of council house sales under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. Extending home and share ownership to far more people, from far more modest backgrounds than ever before, Thatcher claimed, was opening an era of popular capitalism.The reality, however, was more nuanced. Many buyers of shares in privatised companies sold them again, taking a quick profit, because the share price on flotation had been low and it climbed dramatically afterwards. Many owners of former social housing also sold their properties, leading to a large minority ending back again as rentals, but with private landlords not bound by the policy of affordable rents that councils had applied.Similarly, another great initiative of the Thatcher government, the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, seemed to go brilliantly. London regained its status as a major financial centre. It would only be twenty or so years later that some of the downside emerged, when the encouragement to banks to engage in speculation became a contributing factor to the 2008 crash.The IRA was running a terrorist campaign in Britain too, one that nearly claimed Thatcher's own life, when a bomb was planted in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, where she and many leading Tories were staying for the party conference. Thatcher reacted with commendable courage and resolution at the time, and later even went so far to negotiate an Anglo-Irish agreement, again giving the Republic a consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. It didn't go far enough, as the Good Friday agreement would a decade later, but it was an important step,And then there was the Westland affair, when a British helicopter manufacturer ran into difficulties, and a dispute broke out in cabinet over which two options, American or European, to back for a rescue. Ultimately, that led to the Minister of Defence, Michael Heseltine, openly defying Thatcher. That was an ominous event, a first crack in the previously apparently indestructible fortress of support for Thatcher among her colleagues.It was a foretaste of unpleasantness ahead but for the moment that was still quite a way in the future.Illustration: Margaret Thatcher in defiant mood, speaking out against terrorism at the 1984 Conservative Party conference, after the bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Photo from The Guardian. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
253. The Enemy Within (00:14:58)
What had converted Maggie Thatcher from something of a lame duck into a front runner for the next British general election?While the economy had begun to pick up, that had been patchy at best, with some parts of Britain suffering badly while the general picture was improving. That’s what made me feel then, and leaves me feeling now, that it was the victory in the Falklands that made her more or less unassailable, far more than any economic achievements.The election, when it came, gave her a landslide majority in the Commons, making her the only British Prime Minister in the twentieth century to have improved her majority at her second election. But that disguises the fact that her popular vote actually fell slightly, mostly down to the impact of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, taking far more votes than the Liberals alone at the previous election. That won them a disappointing number of MPs, because of the perversity of the first past the post system, while giving her a huge victory, down to the exactly the same thing.Next, having defeated an enemy without, the Argentinians, she took on what she regarded as a more serious threat, the enemy within. That was the trade union movement and more particularly the miners. When they struck against mine closures, her smart work preparing the ground for resisting even a long strike, combined with the incompetence of a radical but inept leader of the miners’ union, Arthur Scargill, she was able to crush the strikers. A second victory in three years. But not against an external enemy. This was against the enemy within, a once proud and powerful working-class movement, now reduced to impotence.Illustration: A scene from the Battle of Orgreave between mineworker pickets and police. Photo from the Doncaster Free Press. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
252. Iron Lady (00:14:57)
Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office was one of the great get out of jail events. She came into office intent on braking with the Keynesianism and social democracy of the postwar consensus. She drew on the ideas of the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (both briefly discussed in this episode), with their championing of the free-market and, in Friedman’s case, of monetarism. Initially, however, things didn’t go well: unemployment soared, the economy shrank and even inflation, the very issue monetarism set out to tackle shot up. She maintained, however, that she had no intention of changing tack, declaring ‘the lady’s not for turning’. By 1981, she was sitting on the worst favourability ratings of any Prime Minister since records had been kept.But then the economy started to come back from recession, helped by the fact that oil began to flow from Britain’s North Sea fields, inflation fell, and her ‘right-to-buy’ scheme allowing tenants of council housing to buy their homes proved popular. Nothing, though, helped her as much as the behaviour of two enemies.Labour kept up its drift leftwards leading to its split, with the Social Democratic Party launched by some senior figures leaving the party, most notably Roy Jenkins. In alliance with the Liberals, they represented a dangerous splitting of the anti-Tory vote.Even more helpful for Thatcher, was the invasion of the Falkland Islands – or Islas Malvinas – launched by the Argentinian junta under General Galtieri. By responding with military force, and winning, she was able to turn herself into a victorious war leader and a hero to many in Britain. Her approval rating surged to 51%.Suddenly, from someone expected to lose the next general election, she’d become a practically unbeatable leader for it.Illustration: British paratroopers entering Port Stanley – Puerto Argentino – in the Falkland Islands – las Islas Malvinas – at the end of the war against Argentina for their possession. Public Domain.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
251. Unlucky Jim (00:14:57)
In 1976, Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party and British Prime Minister. He was a competent politician, though not an outstanding one. He did his job well, but he was far from up to taking on an adversary as forceful as the leader of the Conservative Party, Maggie Thatcher.Callaghan’s was the last government of the post-war consensus, based on a belief in a generalised social democracy, seeking to provide the social services needed to ensure that everyone could count on a safety net when one was needed, and built on a foundation of Keynesian economics. Thatcher rejected both social democracy and Keynesianism, which she held responsible for the decline of Britain, militarily, economically and even morally. Her objective was to end the postwar consensus and look for a radically new type of politics (and economics).The other huge innovation she oversaw was an entirely new approach to communication in politics. Using a remarkably talented advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, she and the Conservative party ran devastating campaigns against her opponents. The most famous was focused on a poster of a queue of people in front of a banner marked ‘Unemployment Office’ and with the legend ‘Labour isn’t working’.As well as her powerful and effective campaigning, Labour was brought low by a series of errors made by Callaghan, many of which played into her hands. It was just possible that he might have won an election in 1978, or at least done less badly, but he lacked the foresight to call it (a mistake he later acknowledged). That meant that he went through the season of strikes that came to be known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and, instead of choosing the timing of the election himself, was forced to call one when Thatcher brought in a no confidence motion in the Commons, carried by just one vote.The subsequent election, on 3 May 1979, saw the Conservatives win a solid majority of 43. Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. And, as we’ll start to see next week, launched herself on a programme of radical change.Illustration: Rubbish piling up in the streets as a result of the municipal workers' strike of the during the 'Winter of Discontent'. Public Domain.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
250. Return of the crisis man (00:14:58)
When Harold Wilson formed his second government, he immediately faced a major crisis inherited from Heath’s administration: the coalminers were on strike, a state of Emergency (Heath’s fifth in four years) was in place and Britain was on a three-day week. That gave Wilson some quick wins as he dealt with all three.Other things proved less straightforward. Heath had brought in a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland, under the so-called Sunningdale Agreement, between the Protestant and Catholic communities. Soon after Labour came back to power, however, a strike by Protestant organisations brought the Sunningdale Agreement to an ignominious end.Wilson also came under sustained press attack over scandals in which he seems to have played no reprehensible role (though his cleverness and deviousness did tend to leave him open to accusations of not being entirely straight).He also had to deal with his pledge to renegotiate the terms on which Britain had joined the Common Market. The renegotations achieved little but their real aim was simply to be seen to have been undertaken before the referendum was held. The process, however, left Wilson more convinced than ever that Britain had to stay in. That lost him support on the left of Labour, while the right behaved in ways that left Wilson suspicious of what it was up to.All these pressures became hard to sustain and Wilson, who’d long said he’d go by the time he was sixty, stood down both from the premiership and from the Labour Leadership just a few weeks before reaching that age. That marked the end of an era.Illustration: Ian Paisley addressing a crowd during the Ulster Workers Council Strike against the Sunningdale Agreement. Photo from the Irish News.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
249. Who governs Britain? (00:14:58)
How did Heath end up calling an election on the question of who governed the country? Especially as the choice he seemed to be offering was between him and the minders. This episode traces the impact of two major shocks, the ending of Bretton Woods in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973, combined with the inflation that followed a last Tory attempt to manufacture a boom from Keynesian economics, that drove Heath to that decision. It also shows how all this led to the unravelling of the postwar consensus, particularly on economic policy, and the emergence of a new, radical current in the Conservative Party seeking to replace the consensus by a new departure in economic thinking.When Heath, having lost the February 1974 election, lost the next one, in October, too, the pressure against him became irresistible. He called a leadership election for early 1975. The self-destruction of the campaign of the initial darling of the right, Sir Keith Joseph, opened the door to the first possible ascent to leadership of a major British party by a woman. The brilliant election tactics of Airey Neave, ex-intelligence operative, ensured that she achieved it.Illustration: A Tory leader and his successor: Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Photo from the Guardian, PA Archive/Press AssociationMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
248. Withered Heath (00:14:58)
Ted Heath’s government had to deal with two problems drawn from Britain’s postimperial standing: • adapting to its loss of global status, by negotiating, at the third time of asking and for the first time successfully, Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community, which happened on 1 January 1973• dealing with a hangover from the imperial past, as violence surged in Northern Ireland, addressed by direct rule of the province from London, internment without trail and with violent action by British troops, including some massacres, culminating in Bloody Sunday in Derry/Londonderry (‘Stroke City’) on 30 January 1972. As well as being significantly bloodier, Health's way of dealing with Northern Ireland proved far less successful than his negotiations with European partners.This episode ends with Heath’s attempts to solve economic problems and with the double confrontation he had with the miners. The second of these would cause him to pose the very question of who ruled the country. The answer from voters was going to disappoint him.Illustration: Ian Paisley, the outspoken Protestant Ulsterman, campaigning against Catholicism (‘Jesus Saves, Rome Enslaves’). Detail from a photo in Covert History, https://coverthistory.ie/2024/04/06/bombs-spooks-and-child-abuse-the-sordid-secret-history-of-the-dup/.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
