History of England 1-6

In some left-wing boroughs, the children of immigrants were encouraged to read and write in their mother tongues rather than in English. Young, Gay and Proud was the title of a book for secondary school students. The honest impetus behind such initiatives did not protect them from attack. Indeed it was precisely the eclectic approach of such councils that led, some argued, to the Conservative victory of 1987. In its election campaign, the Conservative party placed some of the more provocative textbook titles with the question: ‘Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?’

Under Ken Livingstone, or ‘Red Ken’, the Greater London Council had proved particularly noxious to the prime minister, with its unabashed socialism, its sometimes uncritical support for fringe causes, and its wholehearted welcome of anything associated with ethnic minorities. That it was led by a true Londoner, who recognized that afternoon tea and scones had given way in the metropolis to curry and rice, did not sweeten matters. Happily for Thatcher, the GLC had its gun squarely trained on its own foot. When it transpired that the council had spent more on the advertising campaign to preserve its own existence than the money collected for the Ethiopian famine, its socialist credentials became harder to maintain.

No longer was there talk of the unions bringing down the government, but Nigel Lawson was not alone in feeling that the prime minister’s renewed self-confidence in the wake of the 1987 landslide was not entirely wholesome. And this self-confidence was now deployed in an arena where the foe had grown considerably more nimble. Thatcher’s last great achievement in Europe had been the Single European Act. Although it had included legislation that freed the Community from any internal trade restrictions, the act also paved the way for monetary union. It was perhaps an uneasy recognition of this that had led to the Bruges speech. But now an unsettling shift had occurred. Where before Thatcher had been at the heart of matters, pushing for ever fewer trade restrictions, she now seemed alone. It is possible that her very strength now seemed an anachronism; the new Europe, under Jacques Delors, had a warm embrace for biddable ciphers, not for those who knew their own minds, however flawed.

Unsuspected by Thatcher or Reagan, the eastern bloc had been steadily crumbling for years. The nations of central and Eastern Europe relied on Russia for their oil and gas, and on Western loans for much else. Russia itself needed Eastern Europe for raw materials. It could not continue. Eastern Europe faced bankruptcy and Hungary was the first to go, slipping away from the bloc in 1988 with so little fanfare that its pioneering defection is hardly remembered. In 1989, the harassed leader of East Germany announced that citizens from East Berlin would be allowed to cross the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was first climbed before being breached and then torn down. Czechoslovakia and Poland fell next. The nations closest to Russia, culturally and politically, took longer, but by that point it scarcely mattered to the West: a great shadow had lifted. Thatcher’s own contribution had been ancillary to the contest between Reagan and Gorbachev, but a midwife was still indispensable. Yet what role now for Britain in the uncertain world that had opened?

The European Community had changed too, but here also Britain’s role seemed diminished. Jacques Delors had imbued the increasingly tired and sclerotic EEC with his own sharply federalist vision, in which monetary union would render national currencies obsolete. More radically yet, such a union would be followed, in time, by its political equivalent. British statesmen since Macmillan had urged their colleagues to press on with European membership in order to influence the Community at its heart, confident that it could ‘steer Europe away from federalism’. To some extent, this promise had been fulfilled. On Britain’s insistence, the EEC had at last begun to consider those countries behind the Iron Curtain as European. And the Single European Act was a largely British project. But as Thatcher noted, there was no hope of a retreat from the federalist course, and with the unification of Germany looming, Britain’s pretensions to the status of paramount European power appeared self-deluding.