History of England 1-6

On 29 April 1995, a special conference of the Labour party voted to restore Clause IV, on the need for thorough nationalization, but the new dynamic of the party could not be halted. In the following month, the Conservatives sustained their worst local council defeat in post-war electoral history. On 22 June 1995, with the flourish that he kept in reserve for crises, Major unexpectedly resigned in order to begin a leadership contest and acquire a fresh mandate. With the leadership open, he was challenged by John Redwood, a prominent Eurosceptic and right-winger. But for all his populism, he seemed too much the mandarin. In the event, Major won the leadership contest on 4 July. His mandate in the country might be withering, but the party was his once more. A further cabinet reshuffle ensued, though it did not encourage confidence. The tally of by-election defeats lengthened further, with the loss of Littleborough and Saddleworth to the Liberal Democrats.

Elsewhere, there were riots in Luton and Leeds after rumours that police had beaten up a thirteen-year-old boy. The early release of Private Lee Clegg, a British army paratrooper serving a life sentence for murder for shooting a Catholic teenager riding in a stolen car, also led to three days of rioting. It is noteworthy that the Major government, under a man whose mission had been to unite, suffered more such disturbances than its defiantly anticonsensual predecessor. In August, ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ was launched in London to crack down on mugging. Sir Paul Condon, who had claimed that 70 per cent of muggers were black, said that he expected this operation to result in the arrest of large numbers of black youths. Under the most auspicious circumstances, such a move would have been controversial, but the circumstances were anything but auspicious. Memories of the death of Jamaican-born Joy Gardner, who had died while resisting deportation, were still fresh. In a manner that was to become familiar, the three officers concerned were acquitted. Riots in the city of Bradford were one result.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal of troops continued in Northern Ireland; once again there were no further concessions from the IRA. Despite Major’s good intentions, it seemed to many that the Republicans were dictating terms. In September, the government began ‘reviewing’ its support for the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR had condemned the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar. The Convention was to prove a growing irritant to the Eurosceptic wing of the party, and even to the country as a whole. Its judgements were generally admitted to be humane and sensible, but the propriety of its attempts to overrule parliament was increasingly called into question.

In the meantime, Alan Howarth, a Tory MP, defected to Labour, citing the strengths of Tony Blair and the ‘arrogance of power’ he considered endemic in his own party; Emma Nicholson followed suit later in 1995, though she defected to the Liberal Democrats. The defections were enough to create unease that would soon sharpen into fear.

The phenomenon of ‘benefit tourism’ increasingly seized the headlines in an England where anxieties about the foreign wastrel elided easily with fears of the creeping power of the EU. The High Court ruled against two ‘benefit tourists’, saying that local authorities were not obliged to house vulnerable homeless nationals from other EU countries. Nevertheless, the Appeal Court was to rule a year later that local councils had a legal obligation to provide food and shelter for asylum seekers whose right to claim social security benefits had been withdrawn. The Queen’s Speech in November showed itself strongly tough on crime and illegal immigrants, a transparent attempt to ape and subvert the Labour party’s stated intention of being ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. The home secretary, Michael Howard, announced new measures against bogus asylum seeking. And as if to remind the electorate of the one area in which the Tories could still claim popularity, the government lowered income tax in that year’s budget. But certain poltergeists seemed reluctant to depart the House; on the question of standards in public life, the government suffered a fifty-one-vote defeat. MPs would now have to declare what financial benefits they received from consultancy agreements.

In December 1995, at the Madrid Summit, the introduction of the ‘euro’ was announced. On majority voting and the powers of the European Parliament, the UK found itself once more isolated. The government’s overall majority was now reduced to three and it found itself defeated on the Common Fisheries Policy, but the vote had no direct effect on its policy – it no longer seemed to matter that the government was worsted so often in the Commons.