given to Malaysia, Cyprus, and Jamaica during Macmillan’s tenure.
Even as imperial ties loosened, tens of thousands of immigrants—especially
from the West Indies and Pakistan—poured into Britain. Their arrival caused
intermittent social strife and led to efforts to limit further immigration
sharply, while ensuring legal equality for the immigrants and their
descendants.
As Britons turned their attention away from their overseas empire, they
became increasingly aware that their economy, although prospering, was
growing less rapidly than those of their Continental neighbors. In 1961
Macmillan applied for British membership in the European Community (EC), or
Common Market (now called the European Union). Many Britons felt unprepared
to cast their lot with continental Europe, but for the moment their
feelings proved immaterial, because the application was vetoed by President
Charles de Gaulle of France. In 1963 Macmillan was replaced as Conservative
prime minister by Sir Alec Douglas-Home. In the general election of 1964,
however, the latter was narrowly defeated by the Labour Party, headed by
Harold Wilson.
The Permissive Society
During the 1960s, Britain experienced a widespread mood of rebellion
against the conventions of the past—in dress, in music, in popular
entertainment, and in social behavior. The phenomenon had its positive
consequences in helping to make “swinging” London a world capital of
popular music, theater, and, for a time, fashion. Among the negative side
effects, however, were a rising crime rate and a spreading drug culture.
Harold Wilson’s Labour government sympathized with some of these trends. It
sought both to expand higher education opportunities and to end a high
school system that separated the academically inclined from other students.
During the later 1960s, laws on divorce were eased, abortion was legalized,
curbs on homosexual practices were ended, capital punishment was abolished,
equal pay for equal work was prescribed for women, and the voting age was
lowered from 21 to 18.
In economic life the Labour government became more rigorous. A persistent
trend toward inflation, unfavorable balance of trade, and unbalanced
government budgets led to a wage-and-price freeze in 1966 and attempts
thereafter to secure “severe restraint.” These actions eased certain
economic problems but at the price of alienating many of Labour’s union
supporters, and in 1970 the Conservatives returned to power under Edward
Heath.
Battle Against Inflation
A major theme of British history since the mid-1960s has been the battle to
eliminate double-digit inflation. Heath’s policy of deliberate economic
expansion did not accomplish that goal, however, and the attempt to curb
the legal powers of labor unions in 1971 evoked a mood of civil
disobedience among union leaders. More working days were lost because of
strikes in 1972 than in any year since the general strike of 1926. Heath
hoped to solve economic problems by “floating the pound,” that is, by
freeing Britain’s currency from earlier fixed rates of exchange with other
currencies, and by again seeking British admission to the EC. Britain did
join in 1973, and two years later the first national referendum in British
history approved the step by a 2-1 margin. An attempt by Heath in 1972 and
1973 first to freeze and then sharply to restrain wage and price increases
was defied by the miners. When Heath appealed to the public in the general
election of February 1974, the results were indecisive. A revival in the
popular vote of the Liberal Party, however, enabled Harold Wilson to form a
minority Labour government that lasted five years under his leadership and
that of James Callaghan.
Irish and Scottish Problems
During the 1970s, successive British governments also faced difficulties in
Ireland and Scotland. A civil rights movement supporting social equality
for the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland clashed violently with
Protestant extremists. In 1969 the British government sent troops to keep
order, and in 1972 it abolished Northern Ireland’s autonomous parliament. A
campaign of terrorism by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) followed; its aim
was to unite Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic in defiance of the
wishes of a majority of the Northern Irish people. British measures
gradually curbed but could not totally halt the wave of bombings and
killings in Northern Ireland and England. In Scotland, a Scottish
Nationalist Party scored impressive gains in the elections of 1974, and
Callaghan’s ministry attempted to set up a semi-independent parliament in
Edinburgh. When only 33 percent of the Scottish electorate supported the
plan in a 1979 referendum, the project died, at least temporarily.
Economic Woes Under Labour
The Labour government of 1974 to 1979 began by ending all legal
restrictions on wage and price rises, but after the annual inflation rate
topped 25 percent in 1975, the government did succeed in obtaining some
trade union restraints on wage claims in return for an end to some
voluntary restraints on wage claims; the inflation rate declined somewhat
between 1976 and 1979. In return, union leaders demanded an end to legal
restraints on union power and more government subsidies for housing and
other social services. By the late 1970s, British politics seemed to be
polarizing between left-wing Labourites, who sought an ever larger role for
the state in order to impose social equality, and Conservatives, who hoped
to restore a greater role to private enterprise and individual achievement.
By the beginning of 1979, Callaghan’s government was dependent on two minor
parties. A winter of labor unrest undercut his claims to be able to deal
successfully with the unions, and a vote of no confidence in March 1979
went against him.
The Thatcher Decade
In the elections of April 1979 the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher,
emerged with a substantial majority of parliamentary seats and with the
first woman prime minister in British or European history. She was to
remain in office for the next 11 years, making hers the longest continuous
prime ministership since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Thatcher’s first years were difficult. She sought to halt inflation by a
policy of high interest rates and government budget cuts, rather than of
wage and price freezes. By 1981 and 1982 those policies were showing some
success, but only at the cost of the highest unemployment rates since the
1930s. The government was jolted in April 1982 when Argentina forcibly
occupied the Falkland Islands, a British-held archipelago in the South
Atlantic that Argentina had long claimed. When U.S. mediation efforts
failed, Thatcher sent a British counterinvasion fleet, and in June that
force succeeded in recapturing the islands.
The decisive Conservative victories in the elections of June 1983 and June
1987 were the consequence not only of widespread popular support for the
government’s Falklands policy, but also of a sharp division in the ranks of
the political opposition. In 1980 a group of Labour Party members headed by
Roy Jenkins and David Owen broke away and in 1981 formed the Social
Democratic Party. The new party joined with the Liberals to constitute an
influential alliance that ultimately won relatively few parliamentary seats
but did garner 25 percent of the total popular vote in 1983 and 23 percent
in 1987 (compared to 28 and 31 percent for Labour and 42 percent in both
elections for the Conservatives).
The years between 1982 and 1988 were economic boom years in Britain. The
living standards of most Britons rose and the rate of unemployment
gradually ebbed. British industries became more efficient, and London
maintained its role as one of the world’s top three centers of finance. The
economic role of government declined as Thatcher promoted privatization—the
turning over to private investors of government monopolies such as British
Airways, the telephone service, and the distribution of gas and water.
Public housing tenants were strongly
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inflation, the enactment of an unpopular “poll tax” (as a substitute for
local government real estate taxes), and the alienation of some members of
her cabinet over the prime minister’s increasingly critical attitude toward
cooperation with her EC colleagues.
John Major
Thatcher was succeeded as Conservative Party leader and prime minister by
John Major, who continued Thatcher’s policy of maintaining close ties with
the United States. British troops fought as part of the multinational
coalition led by the United States in the Persian Gulf War (1991). In 1992,
despite an economic recession, Major led his party to victory in the April
general elections, though with a reduced majority. Opposition leader Neil
Kinnock, who had gradually moved his Labour Party back from the left toward
the ideological center, resigned after the election. Following the
Conservatives’ election victory, Major’s government faced a growing
financial crisis as the pound weakened in the currency market, inflation
and unemployment grew, and the nation entered a recession. As a result,
Major received the lowest approval rating, 14 percent, of any prime
minister in British history.
One of John Major’s main accomplishments in office occurred in 1993, when
he was instrumental in opening a dialogue between the British government
and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Major and Irish prime minister Albert
Reynolds issued a statement requiring the IRA to cease terrorist activities
for three months, after which time Sinn Fein, the organization’s political
wing, would be invited to join talks on the future of Northern Ireland. In
August 1994 the IRA announced a cease-fire, bringing to a halt the violence
that is estimated to have killed more than 3000 people in the previous 25
years. In May 1995 representatives from the British government and the IRA
met face-to-face for the first time in 23 years.
Despite this breakthrough, the Conservative Party continued to lose ground.
Though beset by low opinion polls, large defeats in local elections in
April and May 1995, and a series of scandals, its most serious problem was
the growing rift within the party over policy toward Europe and the
European Union (EU). Many Conservatives felt that closer British relations
with the EU would undermine British sovereignty, and the constant internal
conflict over this issue severely damaged the party. In July 1995, in an
attempt to solidify the party, John Major resigned as leader of the
Conservatives, forcing an election for a new leader. Major won against an
anti-European opponent, but one-third of the party voted against him or
abstained. Dissatisfaction with the progress of the Northern Ireland talks
led the IRA to resume its campaign of violence in February 1996 by setting
off a large bomb in London that injured more than 100 people.
In March and April of 1996 the government disclosed that a link may exist
between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow
disease), an infection that had been found in some British cattle, and
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a degenerative human brain disorder. This
disclosure led the European Union to ban British beef, which devastated the
British cattle industry, further damaging the Conservatives’ popularity. In
April the Conservatives suffered a substantial loss in local parliamentary
elections to the opposition Labour Party, headed by Tony Blair. This loss
trimmed the Conservative parliamentary majority to just one seat.
During the second half of 1996 and early 1997 Major struggled to regain
support for his party, but was unsuccessful. The split within the party
over the issue of European relations, most specifically the question as to
whether the economic and monetary union (EMU) proposed by the European
Union would damage the British economy, continued to widen. In national
elections in May 1997 the Conservatives were swept out of office in a
landslide. The Labour Party won almost 45 percent of the vote and came away
with 419 seats and a 179-seat majority in the House of Commons. The
Conservatives had their worst showing in over 150 years, receiving about 33
percent of the vote and losing almost half of their seats, to finish with
165. Labour leader Tony Blair became prime minister, and after the
election, John Major announced that he would resign as head of the
Conservative Party as soon as a replacement could be found.
