Chapter 23

The age of uncertainty

The new international order

During the war the Allies had started to think of ways in which a new world order

could replace the failed League of Nations. Even before it joined the war against the

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Axis powers, the United States had agreed an "Atlantic Charter" with Britain. The

basis of this new charter was US President Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms": freedom of

speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from fear; and freedom from

want.

Britain still considered itself to be a world power, and this confidence was

strengthened by three important technical developments in the 1950s which increased

its military strength. These developments were in research into space, in the design of

nuclear weapons, and in the design of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

However, by the early 1960s Britain was increasingly interested in joining the new

European Community (EC). Britain wanted to join the Community because of the

realisation that it had lost political power internationally, and because of a growing

desire to play a greater part in European politics.

The welfare state

In 1918 there had been a wish to return to the "good old days". There was no such

feeling during the Second World War, when Winston Churchill had told the nation,

"We are not fighting to restore the past. We must plan and create a noble future."

In 1944, for the first time, the government promised free secondary education for all,

and promised to provide more further and higher education. In 1946 a Labour

government brought in a new National Health Service, which gave everyone the right

to free medical treatment. Two years later, in 1948, the National Assistance Act

provided financial help for the old, the unemployed and those unable to work through

sickness. Mothers and children also received help.

The Labour government went further, taking over control of credit (the Bank of

England), power (coal, iron and steel), and transport (railways and airlines). These acts

were meant to give direction to the economy. But only 20 per cent of British industry

was actually nationalised, and these nationalised industries served private industry

rather than directed it.

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The Royal Festival Hail was among the best of 1950s architecture. It was built as part of the Festival of Britain

celebration in 1951, one hundred years after the Great Exhibition. But its real importance was to mark the end of the

hardships caused, by the war. It was a popular celebration of national recovery, with a new concert hall on London's

South Bonk and funfair further upstream at Battersea.

For the next quarter century both the Conservative and Labour parties were

agreed on the need to keep up the "welfare state", in particular to avoid unemployment.

Britain became in fact a social democracy, in which both main parties agreed on most

of the basic values, and disagreed mainly about method.

Youthful Britain

Like much of post-war Europe, Britain had become economically dependent on

the United States. Thanks to the US Marshall Aid Programme, Britain was able to

recover quickly from the war.

Working people now had a better standard of living than ever before. There was

enough work for everyone. Wages were about 30 per cent higher than in 1939 and

prices had hardly risen at all.

People had free time to enjoy themselves. At weekends many watched football

matches in large new stadiums. In the evenings they could go to the cinema. They

began to go away for holidays to low-cost "holiday camps". In 1950, car production

was twice what it had been in 1939, and by 1960 cars were owned not only by richer

people but by many on a lower income. It seemed as if the sun shone on Britain. As

one Prime Minister said, "You've never had it so good," a remark that became famous.

A popular monarchy

During the twentieth century the monarchy became more popular than ever

before. George V, the grandson of Victoria, had attended the first football Cup Final

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match at Wembley Stadium, and royal attendance became an annual event. On

Christmas Day, 1932, he used the new BBC radio service to speak to all peoples of the

Commonwealth and the empire. His broadcast was enormously popular, and began a

tradition. In 1935 George V celebrated his Silver Jubilee, and drove through crowded

streets of cheering people in the poorest parts of London. "I'd no idea they felt like that

about me," he said, "I'm beginning to think they must really like me for myself." To his

own great surprise, George V had become a "people's king".

However, in 1936 the monarchy experienced a serious crisis when George V's

son, Edward VIII, gave up the throne in order to marry a divorced woman. Divorce

was still strongly disapproved of at that time, and the event showed how public

opinion now limited the way the royal family could act in private life. At the time it

caused much discussion, and has remained a matter for heated argument.

During the Second World War George VI, Edward's brother, became greatly

loved for his visits to the bombed areas of Britain. He and his wife were admired for

refusing to leave Buckingham Palace even after it also had been bombed. Since 1952,

when Elizabeth II became queen, the monarchy has steadily increased in popularity.

The Beatles were an example of the new popular culture. They came from an ordinary suburb of Liverpool, and

quickly became world famous for their music from 1964 onwards.

The loss of empire

At the end of the First World War, the German colonies of Africa, as well as

Iraq and Palestine in the Middle East, were added to Britain's area of control. Its

empire was now bigger than ever before, and covered a quarter of the entire land

surface of the world.

In India there had been a growing demand for freedom during the 1920s and

1930s. This was partly because of the continued mistrust and misunderstanding

between the British rulers and the Indian people.

By 1945 it was clear that British rule in India could no longer continue. It

was impossible and extremely expensive to try to rule 300 million people without

their co-operation. In 1947 the British finally left India, which then divided into a

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Hindu state and a smaller Muslim state called Pakistan. Britain also left Palestine,

where it was unable to keep its promises to both the Arab inhabitants and the new

Jewish settlers. Ceylon became independent the following year.

Britain, Europe and the United States

After the Second World War the value of European unity was a good deal

clearer. In 1946 Churchill called for a "United States of Europe", but it was already

too late to prevent the division of Europe into two blocs. In 1949 Britain joined

with other Western European countries to form the Council of Europe, "to achieve

greater unity between members", but it is doubtful how far this aim has been

achieved. Indeed, eight years later in 1957, Britain refused to join the six other

European countries in the creation of a European Common Market. Britain was

unwilling to surrender any sovereignty or control over its own affairs, and said it

still felt responsibility towards its empire.

When Britain tried to join the European Community in 1963 and again in 1967, the

French President General de Gaulle refused to allow it. Britain only became a

member in 1973, after de Gaulle's retirement.

De Gaulle's attitude to Britain was not only the result of his dislike of "les

Anglo-Saxons". He also believed that Britain could not make up its mind whether

its first loyalty, now that its empire was rapidly disappearing, was to Europe or to

the United States.

After the war, Britain found itself unable to keep up with the military arms

race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It soon gave up the idea of an

independent nuclear deterrent, and in 1962 took American "Polaris" nuclear

missiles for British submarines. The possession of these weapons gave Britain, in

the words of one Prime Minister, the right "to sit at the top of the table" with the

Superpowers. However, Britain could only use these missiles by agreement with

the United States and as a result Britain was tied more closely to the United States.

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Troops on the front line in Belfast. Ulster. When the conflict broke out in 1969 police faced civil rights protesters.

After the IRA started its campaign of shootings and bombings, the Ulster police was unable to maintain authority

unassisted and the British army was drawn into the fight. Civilian protesters and rioters became younger and

younger, making it harder for the army and police to keep control. The use offered against twelve-year-old

demonstrators looked bad on television. Those who believed Britain should continue to govern Northern Ireland

saw the conflict as a security struggle, while those who believed Ulster should become part of the Republic of

Ireland saw it as a liberation struggle.

Northern Ireland

When Ireland was divided in 1921, the population of the new republic was only

5 per cent Protestant. But in Ulster, the new province of Northern Ireland, 67 per cent

of the people were Protestant. For many years it seemed that almost everyone accepted

the arrangement, even if some did not like it.

However, many people in Northern Ireland considered that their system of

government was unfair. It was a self-governing province, but its government was

controlled by the Protestants, who feared the Catholics and kept them out of

responsible positions. Many Catholics were even unable to vote.

Suddenly, in 1969, Ulster people, both Catholics and Protestants, began to

gather on the streets and demand a fairer system. The police could not keep control,

and republicans who wanted to unite Ireland turned this civil rights movement into a

nationalist rebellion against British rule.

In order to keep law and order, British soldiers were sent to help the police, but

many Catholics saw them as a foreign army with no right to be there.

Scotland and Wales

In Scotland and Wales, too, there was a growing feeling by the 1970s that the

government in London had too much power. In Wales, a nationalist party, Plaid

Cymru, the party of "fellow countrymen", became a strong political force in the 1970s.

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But Welsh nationalism lost support in 1979 when the people of Wales turned down the

government's offer of limited self-government.

The years of discontent

During the 1950s and 1960s Britain remained a European leader economically

as well as politically. But Britain suddenly began to slip rapidly behind its European

neighbours economically.

Compared with its European neighbours, however, Britain was certainly doing

less well. In 1964 only West Germany of the six European Community countries

produced more per head of population than Britain. Thirteen years later, however, in

1977, only Italy produced less. Britain eventually joined the European Community in

1973, hoping that it would be able to share the new European wealth.

Britain also experienced new social problems, particularly after the arrival of

immigrants in Britain. All through British history there have been times when large

numbers of immigrants have come to settle in the country. But until recently these

people, being Europeans, were not noticeably different from the British themselves. In

the fifties, however, the first black immigrants started to arrive from the West Indies,

looking for work. By 1960 there were 250,000 "coloured" immigrants in Britain and

also the first signs of trouble with young whites.

Later, Asian immigrants started to arrive from India and Pakistan and from East

Africa. Most immigrants lived together in poor areas of large cities. Leicester's

population became 16 per cent immigrant, Wolverhampton and Bradford about 8 per

cent each. By 1985 there were about five million recent immigrants and their children

out of a total population of about fifty-six million.

As unemployment grew, the new immigrants were sometimes wrongly blamed.

In fact, it was often the immigrants who were willing to do dirty or unpopular work, in

factories, hospitals and other workplaces. The relationship between black immigrants

and the white population of Britain was not easy. Black people found it harder to

obtain employment, and were often only able to live in the worst housing. The

government passed laws to prevent unequal treatment of black people, but also to

control the number of immigrants coming to Britain.

There were other signs that British society was going through a difficult period.

The Saturday afternoon football match, the favourite entertainment of many British

families, gradually became the scene of frightening and often meaningless violence.

British football crowds became feared around the world. In 1984 an English crowd

was mainly responsible for a disaster at a match in Brussels in which almost forty

people were killed. People were shocked and ashamed, but still did not understand the

reason for the violence. The permissive society and unemployment were blamed, but

the strange fact was that those who started the violence were often well-off members

of society with good jobs.

Women, too, had reasons for discontent. They spoke out increasingly against

sexism, in advertising, in employment and in journalism. They also tried to win the

same pay and work opportunities as men.

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The new politics

Few of the problems of the 1980s were entirely new. However, many people

blamed them on the new Conservative government, and in particular, Britain's first

woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher had been elected in 1979 because

she promised a new beginning for Britain.

This basic change in British politics caused a major crisis for the Labour Party.

Labour was no stranger to internal conflict, nor to these conflicts being damagingly

conducted in public. In the 1930s the party had turned against its own first Prime

Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed a national government with the

Conservatives to handle the financial crisis of 1931. Four years later it had again been

split between its traditional antiwar members and those who recognised the Nazi

danger. In 1959 Labour had again publicly disagreed about two issues, nationalisation

and nuclear weapons, which a large section of the party wished to give up, whether

other nuclear armed nations did so or not. This time, however, the disagreements

between the party's left and right were far more damaging. The 1979 election result

was the worst defeat since 1931. Worse, however, was to follow, and as the bitter

conflict continued, many people ceased to believe in the parry's ability to govern itself,

let alone the country.

Margaret Thatcher had come to power calling on the nation for hard work,

patriotism and self-help. She was not, however, a typical Conservative. As one of her

ministers said, "I am a nineteenth-century Liberal, and so is Mrs Thatcher. That's what

this government is about. " There was much truth in the remark, for she wanted free

trade at home and abroad, individual enterprise and less government economic

protection or interference. She wanted more "law and order" but was a good deal less

willing to undertake the social reform for which later nineteenth-century Liberals were

noted.

By the beginning of 1982 the Conservative government had become deeply

unpopular in the country. However, by her firm leadership during the Falklands War

Thatcher captured the imagination of the nation, and was confidently able to call an

election in 1983.

As expected, Thatcher was returned to power with a clear majority of 144 seats in the

650-seat Parliament. It was the greatest Conservative victory for forty years.

Thatcher had promised to stop Britain's decline, but by 1983 she had not

succeeded. Industrial production since 1979 had fallen by 10 per cent, and

manufacturing production by 17 per cent. By 1983, for the first time since the

industrial revolution, Britain had become a net importer of manufactured goods. There

was a clear economic shift towards service industries. Unemployment had risen from

1.25 million in 1979 to over 3 million.

Thatcher could claim she had begun to return nationalised industries to the

private sector, that she had gone even further than she had promised. By 1987

telecommunications, gas, British Airways, British Aerospace and British Shipbuilders

had all been put into private ownership

The most serious accusation against the Thatcher government by the middle of

the 1980s was that it had created a more unequal society, a society of "two nations",

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one wealthy, and the other poor. According to these critics, the divide cut across the

nation in a number of ways. The number of very poor, who received only a very small

amount of government help, increased from twelve million in 1979 to over sixteen

million by 1983. In the meantime, reductions in income tax favoured the higher

income earners.

The division was also geographical, between prosperous suburban areas, and

neglected inner city areas of decay.

More importantly, people saw a divide between the north and south of the

country. Ninety-four per cent of the jobs lost since 1979 had been north of a line

running from the Wash, on the east coast, to the Bristol channel in the west.

The black community also felt separated from richer Britain. Most blacks lived

in the poor inner city areas, not the richer suburbs, and unemployment among blacks

by 1986 was twice as high as among the white population.

In spite of these problems, Thatcher's Conservative Party was still more

popular than any other single party in 1987.

There were other reasons why the Conservative Party, with only 43 per cent of

the national vote,

The 1987 election brought some comfort, however, to two underrepresented

groups. In 1983 only nineteen (3 per cent) of the 650 members of Parliament had

been women, almost the lowest proportion in western Europe. In 1987 this figure

more than doubled to forty-one women MPs (6.5 per cent), a figure which suggested

that the political parties realised that without more women representatives they might

lose votes. Blacks and Asians, too, gained four seats, the largest number they had

ever had in Parliament, although like women they remained seriously

underrepresented.

Britain: past, present and future

By the late 1980s most British people felt that the future was full of

uncertainty. These doubts resulted from disappointment with lost economic and

political power. Many people looked back to the "Swinging Sixties" as the best ten

years Britain had had this century.

However, people were divided concerning the nation's future possibilities.

Some, those who had voted for Thatcher, were optimistic. They believed that material

wealth was vital for national renewal, and that economic success was about to

happen.

Others were unhappy with the direction the nation was taking. They believed

that the emphasis on material wealth encouraged selfishness, and a retreat from an

ideal of community to a desire for personal gain. They were worried by the

weakening of the welfare state, particularly in the educational and health services.

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The royal family celebrates the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. In the 1980s the royal family became

"world property" in a way it had not been before. Members of the royal family became the subject of journalistic

investigation, both in their public and private lives, and began to mirror television "soap operas" in their entertainment

value.

Britain has more living symbols of its past than many countries. It still has a

royal family and a small nobility. Its capital, cities and countryside boast many ancient

buildings, castles, cathedrals, and the “stately homes” of the nobility. Every year there

are historical ceremonies, for example the State Opening of Parliament, the Lord

Mayor’s Show, or the meeting of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor each St

George’s Day. It is easy to think these symbols are a true representation of the past.

Britain;s real history, however, is about the whole people of Britain, and what has

shaped them as a society. This means, for example, that the recent story of black and

Asian immigration to Britain is as much a part of Britain's "heritage" as its stately

homes. Indeed more so, since the immigrant community's contribution to national life

lies mainly in the future.

When looking at Britain today, it is important to remember the great benefits

from the past. No other country has so long a history of political order, going back

almost without interruption to the Norman Conquest. Few other countries have enjoyed

such long periods of economic and social wellbeing.

It is also important, however, to remember the less successful aspects of the past.

For example, why did the political views of the seventeenth-century Levellers or

nineteenth-century Chartists, which today seem so reasonable, take so long to be

accepted? Why did the women's struggle to play a fuller part in national life occur so

late, and why was it then so difficult and painful? Why is there still a feeling of

division between the north and south of Britain? Is Britain, which in many ways has

been a leader in parliamentary democracy, losing that position of leadership today, and

if so, why?

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The questions are almost endless, and the answers are neither obvious nor easy. Yet it

is the continued discussion and reinterpretation of the past which makes a study of

Britain's history of value to its present and its future.

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