History of England 1-6

The Bosnian civil war had exercised Major’s considerable energies, but to little avail. Among other leaders, he had stood out for his calmness and sense of purpose. He had drawn up a plan to reconcile the warring parties, but assumed that all would act from their best impulses. When David Owen drew up a plan for the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines, the Serbs, in particular, would have none of it. Theirs was a world in which the Ottoman Empire was still in place. They referred to Muslim Bosnians as ‘Turks’. A prominent Serb cleric stated that the Vance-Owen plan would ‘drive the Serbs back into the hills’. It must have seemed unsettlingly redolent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

For all its limitations, ‘Operation Irma’ proved a ‘light after dark’, as one UN official put it. Major had been appalled by the plight of Irma, a Muslim girl rendered paraplegic by a Serb bomb in Sarajevo. He ordered an airlift, and momentum gathered for a wider operation. When his government was attacked for its perceived tokenism, Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, said, ‘It’s better to do something for someone than nothing for anyone.’ The Major government’s decision to impose an arms embargo upon all parties equally only served to restrict the Bosniaks, who, unlike the Serbs or Croats, had no neighbours to assist them.

Sadism and violence had been unleashed at home, too, all the more shocking for their domestic setting. In Gloucester, Fred West was discovered to have buried the bodies of countless girls, including his own daughter, in various places around his house and elsewhere. He hanged himself in prison. Rosemary West, his wife, was sentenced to ten terms of life imprisonment. Their house was razed to the ground, the only conceivable commemoration.

In the BSE crisis of March 1996 may be seen the stirrings of a wider crisis, which touched on Britain’s relations with the EU and raised troubling questions of national identity. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, was a condition that affected cattle whose fodder had been adulterated with animal matter. The symptoms, which included erratic behaviour and loss of motor control, gave the condition the name ‘mad cow disease’. The EU acted swiftly, voting for a ban on British beef, a decision challenged by the National Farmers’ Union. Thus fell what was termed ‘a beef curtain’ across Europe, but the effects of the ban on the farmer could not be laughed away. Having insisted that ‘we cannot continue’, John Major urged a compromise, though one that required a mass slaughter of British cattle. The action was fiercely and deeply resented. Why, some asked, was the government at Westminster so bluntly indifferent to rural needs? Was Britain merely a nation of burghers? From this sense of grievance the Countryside Alliance was born, a long and near intractable thorn in the side of government.

Other divisions were evident. The armed forces minister, Nicholas Soames, informed the House that the British army would oppose any move to remove the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. Four ex-service personnel planned to challenge the ban in the House of Lords, but on 9 May 1996, parliament maintained the ban, despite warning that ‘action in the European Court of Human Rights would force a change in policy within three years’. Westminster once again seemed caught between the forces of modernity and those of tradition, with no rudder to guide it beyond the ambiguous influence of Brussels. The Referendum party was one of the many manifestations of a prevailing desire to cut the Gordian knot. That party, among others, spelt more local election disasters for the Tories. And the froideur between John Major and his predecessor intensified. Some comfort for the Tories was derived from Jonathan Aitken’s exoneration of complicity in the sale of weapons to Iran.

On Saturday, 15 June 1996, the IRA ended yet another ceasefire by detonating a bomb in Manchester. As far as they were concerned, Major had broken faith in demanding the immediate decommissioning of arms. The bomb was the largest ever detonated in peacetime, yet none were killed. It appeared that this was quite deliberate; prominent buildings and government morale had been the only intended victims. The IRA had alerted the police to the bomb’s presence over an hour before the explosion: enough time to remove residents and shoppers from the vicinity. Such finesse illustrated a change: together with an undimmed readiness to use force, there seemed a new willingness to spare life.

62

The unhappy year

The winds of the time blew fitful and contrary. On 15 July 1996, the Conservatives tightened asylum legislation, in spite of an amendment proposed in the Lords. In the same month, ministerial salaries rose, with attendant protest. Industrial unrest resumed with a postal dispute and a strike of underground train drivers. British Energy was at last completely privatized, with still controversial nuclear power involved.