working practices, privatizing state monopolies and forcing the notions of good housekeeping and profitability on both the public and private sectors. And New Labour’s macroeconomic thinking is not a million miles from Mrs Thatcher’s.
Blair’s honeymoon period has extended well beyond 100 days, although some of his high-profile showbiz supporters (e.g. the Gallagher brothers of Oasis) have already deserted him to protest against reforms of the welfare system. And there must be some doubts as to whether the Cool Britannia aura will survive untarnished until the new millennium – after all, fashion is fickle.
But, as Landor London affirms, the British at large have a sense of optimism, believe that the country is changing and that New Labour is modernizing it. So Tony Blair and the British people may well still find themselves on an extended honeymoon when the millennium turns. In any event, with a landslide majority behind him, Blair is one of the few current world leaders who can be confident of being in his job when the year 2000 dawns. For Britain, it’s a fair bet that the years straddling the turn of the millennium will go down in history as ‘The Blair Years’.
United? Kingdom? For the first time in many, many years, there is a real prospect of London handing over or ‘devolving’ powers to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, provided that mutually acceptable formulas can be devised. In the case of Northern Ireland, it would be a truly millennial achievement to leave behind violent civil conflict and find a formula acceptable to both the Republicans, who want the province to join the Republic of Ireland, and the Unionists or Loyalists, who want it to remain part of the United Kingdom. The early years of the next millennium are unlikely to see any substantial alteration in the sovereignty of Wales and Scotland. Any change in the composition of the United Kingdom will come with Northern Ireland.
As for the monarchy, the tragic death of Princess Diana in August 1997 triggered a heated debate about her estranged in-laws, the Royal Family and the continuing loyalty of the British to the monarchy. Polls at the time showed a marked cooling off of feeling towards ‘the Royals’ and their relevance to modern British life. (Then again, this is an era in which the Royals are reputed to employ paid spin doctors whose remit goes far beyond that of the traditional press secretaries, and in which the Blairs appear to be professionally styled prior to major appearances.) On a less emotional tone, would-be constitutional reformers used the occasion to renew discussion about whether it is appropriate for the people of a modern, postindustrial nation to be ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’.
The future of the monarchy, at least for the first half of the next century, is likely to be decided by emotional criteria. Public discussion of the Royals – meaning street level rather than media – tends to focus not on constitutional issues, but on personalities and, occasionally, on money. Recent polls have indicated that Prince Charles has recovered a lot of the ground he lost at the time of his ex-wife Diana’s death, while Prince William has inherited his mother’s good looks and goodwill. According to a report in the San Francisco Examiner, ‘Recent polls have shown that about 60 percent of Britons want the monarchy to continue. In the aftermath of Diana’s death, support for the monarchy dropped to between 40 and 50 percent, the lowest level in modern times. Analysts note that William’s father, Prince Charles, has been able to take advantage of the public’s affection for William and his younger brother, Harry, to restore at least a portion of his own image, heavily damaged by his stormy divorce from Diana and his admitted affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.’
So, provided the Royals perform well for the media (think showbiz dynasty) and provided they are discreet with their money, they can probably count on the sort of public goodwill that will keep the monarchy show running and running, and keep the K in UK. On the other hand, media editors must be drooling for the day when the young prince starts dating and, inevitably, screening for a wife. The precedents don’t bode well.
Identity and Change Some world powers are the product of revolution – France, the United States, Russia, China, India. Others have recast themselves after the turmoil of war or civil conflict – Germany, Italy and Japan being obvious examples. Almost alone among the world’s great industrial nations, Britain has no ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Liberation Day’ to celebrate.
Modern Britain is the product of evolution, not revolution. The British have never had a violent break with their past, never had to sit down together and write out a constitution or think up a completely new way of governing themselves. The legal system goes back centuries, with sedimentary layers of laws and modifications of laws. The British way has been to look to the past and tweak what worked before, rather than undertake a radical makeover.
This approach seemed to pay dividends for a long time. Over the centuries, the country amassed an empire that spanned the globe. Older Brits still recall nostalgically school atlases in which every continent had large areas of pink to mark British possessions, an era when ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’. But all that changed with World Wars I and II, which depleted the country and for ever loosened its grip on its colonial possessions.
Over the last fifty years, Britain has been forced to rethink itself, to abandon some cherished tenets of its self-mythology and to allow a new identity to emerge. The process has been long and painful, but it’s irreversible. In the mid 1990s, then Prime Minister John Major tried to stem the tide with a call for a ‘Back to Basics’ approach, along with a dewy-eyed evocation of old maids on bicycles and cricket on the village green. The country ridiculed his vision and voted him out at the next opportunity.
The British seem increasingly prepared, or perhaps resigned, to face a harsher future in which old maids won’t ride around on bicycles and the state won’t try to provide for all needs. ‘In the UK, a sea change is occurring,’ reports Gavin Heron, former strategic planning director at TBWA London, now based in Hong Kong. ‘People are moving from a dependency mindset to that of personal responsibility or control. They no longer believe the government will provide for them as it used to. The millennium is acting as a catalyst for a break with the past. It represents the future as now.’
Embracing Foreigners Britain is in the process of consciously becoming a multicultural country – a huge change from the days of the empire.
The United States forges its nationhood in schools with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. In France, immigrants are expected to put aside their origins and ‘assimilate’ French ways – as happened in France’s former colonies. The British, in contrast, have never expected foreigners to become British, so they were pretty much left to retain their own ethnic identities, as used to happen in British colonies. In Britain, immigrant groups have tended to retain their own ethnic flavour as they have found their way into society.
Absorbing immigrants has gone against the grain for many British people. Racial issues have been debated hard for many years and the anti-immigrant National Front enjoyed a brief spell of limited support in the 1980s. But an indication of the progress made can be seen in Mike Leigh’s award-winning feature film Secrets and Lies (1996), in which a working-class English woman is tracked down by the daughter who was taken from her at birth. The fact that the daughter is black and the mother is white is barely mentioned and has little relevance to the story, which is about family relationships and is virtually colour blind. Had the film been made ten years earlier, it would probably have been about race.
Much of Britain’s self-mythology has been about a plucky little country resisting foreign attempts to invade it – the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the French under Napoleon in the nineteenth century, and the Germans under Hitler this century. The country’s history of military and imperial success bred a feeling that Britain had little to learn from foreigners.
This British sense of effortless superiority has been severely eroded and even turned on its head. Over the last fifty years, as Britain has slipped down world rankings in all sorts of areas – GDP, income, standard
