VI.

History

The kingdom of Great Britain was formed by the Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland. England (including the principality of Wales, annexed in the 14th century and legally unified with England in the 16th century) and Scotland had been separate kingdoms since the early Middle Ages. However, since the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 the same monarch had ruled both lands. In 1707 they gained a single legislature and London became the capital of the entire island. Great Britain from then on had not only a single Parliament, but also a single system of national administration, taxation, and weights and measures. All tariff barriers within the island were ended. England and Scotland continued, however, to have separate traditions of law and separate established Churches—the Presbyterian in Scotland, the Anglican in England and Wales. For the history of Great Britain before 1707, see Britain, Ancient; England; Scotland; Wales.

A.

A Century of Conflicts

One of the chief purposes of the Act of Union was to strengthen a land preoccupied with the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). Under the leadership of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, England, and then Great Britain, and its allies had won many battles against France, then the most populous and powerful European state. By 1710, however, it seemed clear that not even Marlborough could prevent Louis XIV of France installing a Bourbon relation on the Spanish throne. Marlborough and his political allies were replaced by members of the Tory Party, who in due course made peace with France. In the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Great Britain acknowledged the right of the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish Crown (see Utrecht, Peace of). At the same time France ceded to Great Britain the North American areas of Hudson Bay, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Spain ceded Gibraltar and the Mediterranean island of Minorca, and granted British merchants a limited right to trade with Spain’s American colonies; until 1750 the Spanish concession included the asiento—the right to import African slaves into Spanish America.

Because Queen Anne had no surviving children, she was succeeded, according to the Act of Settlement (1701), by her nearest Protestant relative. This was the Elector of Hanover, who came from Germany in 1714 and was accepted as George I of Great Britain. A new era of British history began.

A.1.

Government in the 18th Century

Although the first years of George I’s reign were marked by two major crises—the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 by followers of Queen Anne’s half-brother, James Edward Stuart, and the South Sea Bubble, a stock market crash of 1720—Great Britain was actually entering two decades of relative peace and stability. Local government was left largely in the hands of country gentlemen owning large estates. As justices of the peace they settled the majority of legal disputes. They also administered roads, bridges, inns, and markets, and supervised the local operation of the Poor Laws—aid to orphans, paupers, the very old, and those too ill to work.

At the national level, many Britons came to take pride in their mixed government, which combined monarchical (the hereditary ruler), aristocratic (the hereditary House of Lords), and democratic (the elected House of Commons) elements, and also provided for an independent judiciary. The reign of Queen Anne had been marked by parliamentary elections every three years and by keen rivalry between Whig and Tory factions. With the coming of George I, the Whigs were given preference over the Tories, many of whom were sympathetic to the claims of the Stuart pretenders.

Under the Septennial Act of 1716, parliamentary elections were required every seven years rather than every three, and direct political participation declined. Parliament was made up of 122 county members and 436 borough members. Virtually all counties and boroughs sent two members to Parliament, but each borough, whether large city or tiny village, had its own tradition of choosing its members of Parliament. Those Britons (a majority) who lacked the right to vote could claim the rights of petition, jury trial, and freedom from arbitrary arrest. Full political privileges were granted only to members of the Anglican Church, but non-Anglican Protestants could legally hold office if they were willing to take Anglican communion once a year.

A.2.

The Era of Robert Walpole

Although the king could appoint whomsoever he wished to his government, he found it convenient to select members of Parliament who could exercise influence there. Such was the case of Robert Walpole, who was appointed First Lord of the Treasury (and came to be known as “prime minister”) in 1721 in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble. The Bubble was sparked by the financial collapse of the giant South Sea Company. The crash slowed down the commercial boom of the previous three decades, a time when the Bank of England had been founded, the concept of a long-term national debt formulated, and many large joint-stock companies established.

George I could not speak English and both he and his son, the future King George II, were often in Hanover, Germany, which they continued to rule. As a result, Walpole was able to build up and dominate a government machine. He presided over an informal group of ministers that came to be known as the Cabinet, and he controlled Parliament by his personality, his policies, and his use of patronage. His influence, however, had limits. Hoping to curb smuggling, Walpole in 1732 and 1733 sought to replace a land tax and customs duties on imports with an excise tax on wine and tobacco collected from retailers. Parliamentary critics and popular rioters protested against the army of tax collectors which the bill would have created, and Walpole was ultimately forced to give up his plan.

During his administration (1721-1742), Walpole was largely successful in keeping Great Britain out of war, and even Anglo-French relations remained cordial. In the late 1730s, however, a war party emerged in Parliament. Its members sought revenge against Spain for the harassment by Spanish coast guards of British merchants wishing to trade with Spanish colonists in the Americas. In 1739, against Walpole’s better judgement, Great Britain declared war on Spain; almost three years later parliamentary pressure forced Walpole to resign.

A.3.

Two Decades of Conflict

Between 1739 and 1763, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. The war against Spain, known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, soon merged with the War of the Austrian Succession, which began in 1740, pitting Prussia, France, and Spain against Austria. Great Britain became Austria’s chief ally, and British armies and ships fought the French in Europe, in North America, on the high seas, and in India, where the English and French East India companies competed for influence.

In 1745 the Scottish Jacobites, taking advantage of Great Britain’s involvement on the Continent, made their last attempt to recover the British throne for the Stuart dynasty (see The Forty-Five). Prince Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) landed in Scotland, won the allegiance of thousands of Highlanders, and in September captured Edinburgh and proclaimed his father King James III. Marching south with his army, Charles came within 161 km (100 mi) of London, but failed to attract many English or lowland Scots supporters. In December he retreated to Scotland. The following April he and his Jacobites were defeated at the Battle of Culloden and he fled to France.

The War of the Austrian Succession ended with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which, as far as Great Britain was concerned, restored the territorial status quo. By then, a series of short-lived ministries had given way to the relatively stable administration of Henry Pelham. During the mid-1750s the British found themselves fighting an undeclared war against France both in North America (see French and Indian War) and in India.

In 1756 formal war broke out again. The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) pitted Great Britain, allied with Prussia, against France in alliance with Austria and Russia. For Great Britain the war began with a series of defeats in North America, in India, in the Mediterranean, and on the Continent, where the French overran Hanover. Under strong popular pressure, George II then appointed the fiery William Pitt the Elder as the minister to run the war abroad, while his colleague, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, and brother of Henry Pelham, oiled the political wheels at home. Pitt was an expert strategist and conducted the war with vigour. The French fleet was defeated off the coast of Portugal, the British East India Company triumphed over its French counterpart in Bengal and elsewhere, and British and colonial troops in North America captured Fort Duquesne (on the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and Quebec and Montreal in Canada.

Although Pitt was forced from office in 1761 and Great Britain negotiated separately from Prussia, the Treaty of Paris (1763) was a diplomatic triumph. All French claims to Canada and to lands east of the Mississippi River were ceded to Great Britain, as were most French claims to India. Spain, which had entered the war on the French side in 1762, ceded Florida. The Treaty of Paris established Great Britain’s 18th-century empire at its height.

A.4.

Population Growth, Urbanization, and Industrialization

During the first half of the 18th century, the population of Great Britain increased by less than 15 per cent. Between 1751 and 1801, the year of the first official census, the number rose by two thirds to 10.7 million. Between 1801 and 1851, the population doubled. The reasons include a decline in deaths from infectious diseases, especially smallpox after Edward Jenner developed a smallpox vaccine in 1796; an improved diet made possible by more efficient farming practices and the large-scale use of the potato; and earlier marriages and larger families, especially in those areas where new industries were starting up.

A quickening of economic change was noticeable by the 1780s, when James Watt, the Scottish engineer, perfected the steam engine as a new source of power. New inventions mechanized the spinning and weaving of imported cotton. Between 1760 and 1830 the production of cotton textiles increased twelvefold, making the product Great Britain’s leading export. At the same time, other inventions raised the production of iron by similar amounts, while the amount of coal mined increased fourfold. By 1830 this Industrial Revolution had turned Great Britain into the “workshop of the world”.

The towns that spread across north-western England, lowland Scotland, and southern Wales accustomed a generation of workers to factory life. The advantages were more regular hours, higher wages than those received by handicraft workers or farm labourers, and less dependence on human muscle power; many machines could be operated by women and children. The disadvantages included the devaluation of old artisan skills; poor and often dangerous working conditions; a novel emphasis on discipline and punctuality; less personal working relationships; long hours; and in many areas an almost feudal dependence on the local industrialist. For several decades also, such civic amenities as water and sewerage systems did not keep pace with population growth.

London remained Great Britain’s largest city, a centre of commerce, shipping, justice, and administration more than of industry. Its population, estimated at 600,000 in 1701, had grown to 950,000 by 1801, and to 4.5 million by 1881, making it the largest city in the world. By then, Great Britain had become the first nation to have more urban than rural inhabitants.

A.5.

The Early Years of George III

In 1760, the 76-year-old George II died and was succeeded by his 22-year-old grandson, George III. The new, British-born king had a deep sense of moral duty and tried to play a direct role in governing his country. To this end he appointed men he trusted, such as his one-time Scottish tutor, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, who became the prime minister in 1762. Bute was not a success, however, and four short-lived ministries followed. In 1770, George III found in Lord North a leader pleasing both to him and to the majority of Parliament.

During the 1760s, politicians out of office spurred a campaign of criticism against George III’s use of his patronage powers. A sharply critical newspaper publisher, John Wilkes, was convicted of seditious libel (1764), imprisoned, and barred from the parliamentary seat to which he had been repeatedly elected. An organization of his followers, the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights, provided a model for subsequent radical reform movements. Their programme included freedom of the press, the abolition of “rotten boroughs”, a widening of the franchise (right to vote), and an increase in the frequency of meetings of Parliament.

A.6.

American War of Independence

The fears expressed by Wilkes’s supporters confirmed the more radical American colonial leaders in their suspicion of the British government. Long accustomed to a considerable degree of self-government and freed, after 1763, from the French danger, they resented the attempts by successive British ministries to make them pay a share of the cost of imperial defence in the form of assorted taxes and duties. They also resented British attempts to enforce mercantilistic regulations and to treat colonial legislatures as secondary to the government in London. American resistance led in due course to the calling of the First Continental Congress (1774) and the beginning of hostilities (1775). Although parliamentary critics such as Edmund Burke continued to urge conciliation, George III and Lord North felt the rebellious colonists had to be brought to their senses.

British governmental authority in the 13 colonies collapsed in 1775 at the start of the American War of Independence. Although British forces were able to occupy first Boston and later New York (1776) and Philadelphia (1777), the Americans did not give up. After the defeat of General John Burgoyne at Saratoga (1777), the civil war within the British Empire became an international conflict. First the French (1778), then the Spanish (1779), and the Dutch (1780) joined the anti-British side, while other powers formed a League of Armed Neutrality.

For the first time in more than a century, Great Britain was diplomatically isolated. Following the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis after the Siege of Yorktown (1781), opposition at home to the frustrations and high taxation brought on by the American war compelled Lord North to resign (1782) and his successors to sign a new Treaty of Paris (1783). The 13 colonies were recognized as independent states and were granted all British territory south of the Great Lakes. Florida and Minorca were ceded to Spain and some islands in the West Indies and some African ports to France.

A.7.

Pitt, Reform, and Revolution

In the wake of the war, many old institutions were re-examined. The Economical Reform Act (1782) reduced the patronage powers of the king and his ministers. The Irish Parliament, controlled by Anglo-Irish Protestants, won a greater degree of independence. The India Act (1784) gave ultimate authority over British India to the government instead of the British East India Company. The India Act was sponsored by William Pitt the Younger, who late in 1783 became Britain’s youngest-ever prime minister at the age of 24.

Pitt remained in office for most of the rest of his life (1783-1801 and 1804-1806) and did much to shape the modern prime-ministership. In the aftermath of the American War of Independence, he restored faith in the government’s ability to pay interest on the much-increased national debt, and he set up the first consolidated annual budget. Pitt was also sympathetic to political reform, to the repeal of restrictions on non-Anglican Protestants, and to the abolition of the slave trade, but when these measures failed to win a parliamentary majority he dropped them.

Reformers such as Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine were inspired by the revolution that began in France in 1789; others, such as Edmund Burke, became fearful of all radical change. Pitt was less concerned with French ideas than actions, and when the French revolutionary army invaded the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and declared war on Great Britain in February 1793, a decade of moderate reform in Britain gave way to 22 years of all-out war.

A.8.

Napoleonic Wars

In the 1790s, the wars of the French Revolution merged into the Napoleonic Wars, as Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) took over the French revolutionary government. Pitt’s First Coalition (with Prussia, Austria, and Russia) against the French collapsed in 1796, and in 1797 Great Britain was beset by naval defeat and mutiny, and by French invasion attempts.

The war caused a boom in farm production and in certain industries. At the same time it caused rapid inflation: wage rates lagged behind prices, and Poor Law expenses grew. In 1797 the Bank of England was forced to take Britain off the gold standard (that is, the system of fully backing paper money with an equivalent amount of gold), and Parliament voted the first tax on income.

Rebellion and a French invasion threat led to the Act of Union with Ireland (1801), and the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Dublin legislature was abolished and the 100 Irish representatives became members of the Parliament in London; only an Irish viceroy and a London-appointed administration remained in Dublin.

Despite the defeat of the French at the Battle of the Nile (1798), the war did not go well for Britain. The Second Coalition collapsed in 1801, and in the Treaty of Amiens (1802) Britain made peace with Napoleon. War broke out again the following year, but between 1805 and 1807 the Third Coalition also collapsed. Napoleon’s plans to invade Britain were foiled by the British naval victory under Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar (1805).

Napoleon then sought to drive the United Kingdom into bankruptcy with his policy of trade blockage known as the Continental System. Difficulties in enforcing the blockade prompted Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. This led to the Fourth Coalition (Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia) and to Napoleon’s downfall two years later. Britain’s contribution included an army led by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, fighting in Spain (1809-1813), and, after Napoleon’s return from exile in Elba, the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. The War of 1812 with the United States was for the United Kingdom a sideshow that brought no territorial changes.

B.

A Century of Peace

In 1811 George III, by then suffering apparent delirium probably caused by the metabolic disorder porphyria, was succeeded by his eldest son, who reigned first as Prince Regent and then from 1820, as George IV. Although a patron of art and Regency architecture, George IV became unpopular partly because of his profligacy and extravagance, but mainly because of his treatment of his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, including his attempt to divorce her in 1820 and his refusal to allow her to attend his coronation in 1821.

B.1.

Post-War Government (1815-1830)

Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, presided as Tory prime minister (1812-1827) over a Cabinet of luminaries including Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, who represented Britain at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Former Dutch possessions such as Cape Colony and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) were added to the British Empire, and a balance of power was restored to continental Europe. Although eager to consult its European partners about possible territorial changes, Britain soon made it clear that it had no desire to join the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) and become a policeman of Europe (see British Foreign Policy Since 1800).

Rapid demobilization after the wars, economic depression, and bad harvests led to rioting in 1816. The Liverpool government sought to aid landlords with protective tariffs (the Corn Laws of 1815), and to aid other supporters by repealing the wartime income tax (1817) and restoring the gold standard (1819). The so-called Six Acts (1819) curbed the freedom of the press and the rights of assembly. A huge political reform demonstration near Manchester (1819) was broken up and 11 people were killed by the militia in an incident which came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre. The economy recovered during the early 1820s, and government policies became more moderate.

George Canning, who replaced Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary (1822-1827), welcomed the independence of Spain’s South American colonies and aided the Greek rebellion against Turkish rule—a cause also supported by the Romantic poet Lord Byron. William Huskisson at the Board of Trade cut tariffs and eased international trade. Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, reformed the criminal law and instituted (1829) a modern police force in London. Barriers to trade union organization were also reduced (1824-1825).

Despite an early 19th-century religious revival, especially among Methodists and other non-Anglican Protestants, Tory ministries remained reluctant to challenge religious and political fundamentals. In 1828 Parliament agreed, however, to end political restrictions on Protestant dissenters; one year later the government of the Duke of Wellington (1828-1830) was challenged in Ireland by a mass movement called the Catholic Association to press for the full emancipation of Catholics tacitly promised by Pitt at the time of the Act of Union. Wellington, fearing civil unrest in Ireland, granted Roman Catholics the right to become members of Parliament and to hold public office (1828, 1829), but in so doing split the Tory Party (see Catholic Emancipation Act). In November 1830, after the election prompted by the death of George IV and by the accession of his brother, William IV, a predominantly Whig ministry headed by Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, took over.

B.2.

Reforms of the 1830s

The great political issue of 1831 and 1832 was the Whig Reform Bill. After much debate in and out of the House of Commons, and after a threat by the government to swamp a reluctant House of Lords with new and sympathetic peers, the measure became law in June 1832. It provided for a redistribution of seats in favour of the growing industrial cities and a single property test that gave the vote to upper-middle-class men. In England and Wales the electorate grew by 50 per cent. In Ireland it more than doubled, and in Scotland it increased by 15 times. The bill set up a system of registration that encouraged political party organization, both locally and nationally. The measure weakened the influence of the monarch and the House of Lords.

Other reforms followed (see Factory Reform Acts). The Factory Act (1833) limited the working hours of women and children and provided for central inspectors. Slavery was abolished in the same year, and the controversial New Poor Law (1834) also involved supervision by a central board. The Municipal Corporations Act (1835) provided for elected representative town councils. An Ecclesiastical Commission was set up in 1836 to reform the established Church, and a separate statute (1836) placed the registration of births, deaths, and marriages in State rather than Church hands.

In 1837 the elderly William IV died and was succeeded as monarch by his 18-year-old niece, Victoria. She and her husband, Albert, ultimately came to symbolize the so-called Victorian virtues: a close-knit family life, a sense of public duty, and respectability. Victorian beliefs and attitudes were also moulded by the revival of evangelical religion, and by utilitarian notions of efficiency and good business practice (see Victorian Britain).

B.3.

Chartism, the Corn Laws, and the Irish Famine

The Whig reform spirit ebbed during the ministry of Lord Melbourne (1835-1841), and an economic depression in 1837 brought to public attention two powerful protest organizations. The supporters of Chartism, known as Chartists, urged the immediate adoption of the People’s Charter, which would have transformed Britain into a near political democracy (with universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, and secret ballots) and which was somehow expected to improve living standards as well. Millions of workers signed Charter petitions in 1839, 1842, and 1848, and some Chartist demonstrations turned into riots. Parliament repeatedly rejected the People’s Charter, but it proved more receptive to the creed of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League. League leaders such as Richard Cobden expected the repeal of tariffs on imported food to advance the welfare of manufacturers and workers alike, while promoting international trade and peace among nations.

Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative ministry (1841-1846) became active in reducing Britain’s tariffs but brought back income tax to make up for lost revenue. In the winter of 1845-1846, spurred on by a disastrous outbreak of potato blight in Ireland and the consequent Irish Famine, Peel proposed the complete repeal of the Corn Laws. With Whig aid the measure passed, but two thirds of Peel’s fellow Conservatives condemned the action as a sell-out of the party’s agricultural supporters. The Conservatives divided between Peelites and protectionists, and the Whigs returned (1846) to power under John Russell, 1st Earl Russell.

The repeal of the Corn Laws did nothing to alleviate the suffering in Ireland. The blight returned in the winter of 1846, and the wheat harvest in Great Britain and continental Europe was poor. Weakened by starvation and eviction by absentee landlords, an estimated one million people are thought to have died between 1847 and 1851, despite the return of good potato harvests for one quarter of the population. An estimated further two to three million emigrated, many of whom died en route.

During the Peel and Russell years the trend towards free trade continued, aided by the repeal (1849) of the Navigation Acts, and a system of administrative regulation was gradually established. Women and children were barred from underground work in mines (1842) and limited to 10-hour working days in factories (1847). Regulations were also imposed on urban sanitation facilities (1842) and passenger-carrying railways (1844). Commissions were set up to oversee prisons, asylums for the insane, merchant shipping, and private charities. Attempts to subsidize elementary education, however, were hampered by conflict over the Anglican Church’s role in running schools.

B.4.

Mid-Victorian Prosperity

From the late 1840s until the late 1860s, the British people were less concerned with domestic conflict than with an economic boom that was only occasionally affected by wars and threats of war on the Continent and overseas. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London symbolized Great Britain’s industrial supremacy. The 10,600-km (6,600-mi) railway network of 1850 more than doubled during the mid-Victorian years, and the number of passengers carried each year went up sevenfold. It was a period of great inventions; the telegraph provided instant long-distance communication; inexpensive steel was made possible by the process invented by Sir Henry Bessemer (1856); and a boom in steamship building began in the 1860s. The value of British exports tripled, and overseas capital investments quadrupled. Working-class living standards also improved, and the growth of trade unionism among engineers, carpenters, and others led to the founding of the Trades Union Congress in 1868.

In the aftermath of the Continental revolutions of 1848, a Britain governed by the Peelite-Liberal coalition (1852-1855) of Lord Aberdeen drifted into war with an autocratic, expansionist Russia. In alliance with the France of Napoleon III, Britain entered the Crimean War in 1854. Parliamentary criticism of army mismanagement, however, caused the downfall of Aberdeen. He was replaced by Lord Palmerston, a staunch British nationalist and champion of European liberalism, who saw the war to its conclusion—a limited Anglo-French victory in 1856.

In 1858 the Indian Mutiny was for the most part suppressed, and Britain enacted legislation that made British India a Crown Colony, abolishing the rule of the East India Company. In contrast, domestic self-government was encouraged in Britain’s white settler colonies: Canada (federated under the British North America Act of 1867), Australia, New Zealand, and Cape Colony (South Africa). Britain maintained a difficult neutrality during the American Civil War (1861-1865). It encouraged the unification of Italy, but witnessed with apprehension the creation of a German empire under Prussian domination by Prince Otto von Bismarck.

B.5.

The Gladstone-Disraeli Rivalry

During the 16 years after Palmerston’s death in 1865, the rivalry between William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli dominated British politics. Both had begun as Tories, but in 1846 Gladstone had become a Peelite and had thereafter gradually moved towards liberalism. As Palmerston’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had won popular appeal by ending the paper tax (thereby making cheaper newspapers possible) and by advocating an expansion of the franchise.

Disraeli had become the Conservative leader of the protectionists in the House of Commons in the late 1840s, and had served in the brief minority ministries of Lord Derby in the 1850s. After a political reform bill proposed during Lord Russell’s second ministry (1865-1866) and introduced by Gladstone was defeated, a Conservative Cabinet headed by Lord Derby (1866-1868) ultimately came up with the Reform Bill of 1867, which Disraeli successfully piloted through the House of Commons. The measure enfranchised more than one million male urban workers. It almost doubled the English and Welsh electorates and more than doubled the Scottish. It also launched the era of mass political organization and of increasingly polarized and disciplined parliamentary parties.

Disraeli succeeded Derby as the nation’s prime minister early in 1868, but a Liberal election victory in December of that year gave the post to Gladstone. Gladstone’s first Cabinet (1868-1874) was responsible for numerous reforms: the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; the creation of a national system of elementary education; the full admission of religious dissenters to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; a merit-based civil service; the secret ballot; and judicial and army reform. During the Disraeli ministry that followed (1874-1880), the Conservatives passed legislation advancing “Tory democracy”—trade union legalization, slum clearance, and public health—but Disraeli became more concerned with upholding the British Empire in Africa and Asia, and scoring a diplomatic triumph at the Congress of Berlin (1878).

A whistle-stop campaign by Gladstone in 1879 and 1880 restored him to the prime ministership. His second Cabinet (1880-1885) curbed electoral corruption (1883) and, with the Reform Act of 1884, extended the vote to almost all males who owned or rented housing, including some two million agricultural labourers. The measure made the single-member parliamentary constituency the general rule.

Gladstone became increasingly concerned with bringing peace and land reform to Ireland, which was represented in Parliament by the Irish Nationalist Party of Charles Stewart Parnell. When Gladstone became a convert to the cause of home rule—the creation of a semi-independent Irish legislature and Cabinet—he divided the Liberal Party and led his brief third ministry (1886) to defeat. A second effort to enact Irish home rule during Gladstone’s fourth ministry (1892-1894) was blocked by the House of Lords.

B.6.

Late Victorian Economic and Social Change

The same agricultural depression that led to unrest among Irish tenant farmers in the second half of the 19th century also undermined British agriculture and the prosperity of the country squires. The mid-Victorian boom gave way to an era of deflation, falling profit margins, and occasional large-scale unemployment. Both the United States and Germany overtook Great Britain in the production of steel and other manufactured goods.

At the same time, Britain remained the world’s prime shipbuilder, shipper, and banker, and a majority of British workers gained in purchasing power. Trade union membership grew, and significant attempts were made to organize the semi-skilled; the London Dockers’ Strike (1889) was the result of one such effort. Social investigators and professed socialists discovered large pockets of poverty in the slums of London and other cities, and the national government as well as voluntary agencies were called on to remedy social evils and disease.

Despite a high level of emigration to British colonies and the United States—more than 200,000 people each year during the 1880s—the population of England and Wales doubled between 1851 and 1911 to more than 36 million; that of Scotland grew by more than 60 per cent to almost 5 million. In Ireland, where emigration was highest, the population was reduced by migration to about 2 million; between 1847 and 1861, in the aftermath of the famine, more than 2 million people crossed the Atlantic to the United States. Both death rates and birth rates in Great Britain declined somewhat, and a series of changes in the law made it possible for a tiny minority of women to enter universities, vote in local elections, and keep control of their property when they married.

B.7.

The Late Victorian Empire

A relative lack of interest in empire during the mid-Victorian years gave way to increased concern during the 1880s and 1890s. The raising of tariff barriers by the United States, Germany, and France made colonies valuable again as trade outlets, ushering in an era of rivalry with Russia in the Middle East and along the Indian frontier, and a “scramble for Africa” that involved the carving out of large claims by Great Britain, France, and Germany. Hong Kong and Singapore served as centres of British trade and influence in China and the South Pacific.

The completion of the Suez Canal (1869) led indirectly to a British protectorate over Egypt in 1882. Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1877, and both Victoria’s golden jubilee (1887) and her diamond jubilee (1897) celebrated imperial unity. The Conservative ministries of Lord Salisbury (1885, 1886-1892, and 1895-1902) were preoccupied with imperial concerns as well. The policies of Salisbury’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, contributed to the outbreak of the South African War (Boer War) in 1899. Britain suffered initial reverses in this war but then captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in 1900. Only after protracted guerrilla warfare, however, was the conflict brought to an end in 1902. By then Queen Victoria was dead.

B.8.

The Edwardian Age (1901-1914)

In the aftermath of the South African War, the United Kingdom signed a treaty of alliance with Japan (1902) and ended several decades of overseas rivalry with France in the Entente Cordiale (1904). After Anglo-Russian disputes had also been settled, this link became the Triple Entente (1907), which faced the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.

As the reign of Edward VII began, however, most Britons were more concerned with domestic matters. The Education Act (1902), introduced by the administration of Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour, helped meet a demand for national efficiency with the beginnings of a national system of secondary education, but the measure stirred old passions. In the course of Balfour’s ministry (1902-1905) the Conservative Party was divided between tariff reformers, who wanted to restore protective duties, and free traders.

The general election of 1906 gave the Liberals an overwhelming majority. Trade union influence led to the appearance of a small separate parliamentary Labour Party of 29 members as well. The Liberal government, headed first by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905-1908) and then by Herbert Henry Asquith (1908-1916), gave internal self-government to the new Union of South Africa (1910) and partial provincial self-government to British India (1909).

Under the inspiration of David Lloyd George and Sir Winston Churchill, it also laid the foundations of the welfare state. Its programme included the introduction of old-age pensions (1908), government employment offices (1909), unemployment insurance (1911), a contributory programme of national medical insurance for most workers (1911), and boards to fix minimum wages for miners and others (1909, 1912). Lloyd George’s controversial, so-called people’s budget (1909), designed to pay the costs of social welfare and naval rearmament, was blocked by the House of Lords and led in due course to the Parliament Act of 1911, which left the Lords with no more than a temporary veto over legislation. The Conservatives made a comeback, however, in the general elections of 1910, and the Liberals were thereafter dependent on the Irish Nationalists to stay in power.

Although the economy seemed to be booming, wages scarcely kept up with rising prices, and the years 1911 to 1914 were marked by major and divisive strikes of miners, dock workers, and transport workers. Women in the suffragette movement staged violent demonstrations in favour of female enfranchisement. When the Liberals sought to enact home rule for Ireland, non-Catholic Irish from the northern province of Ulster threatened force to prevent the British government from compelling them to become part of a semi-independent Ireland. In the midst of these domestic disputes, a crisis in the Balkans exploded into World War I.

C.

The Era of World Wars

Although the competitive naval build-up of Great Britain and Germany is often cited as a cause of World War I, Anglo-German relations were actually cordial in early 1914, and Britain was Germany’s best customer. It was Germany’s threat to France and its invasion of neutral Belgium that prompted Great Britain to declare war.

C.1.

Great Britain in World War I

A British expeditionary force was immediately sent to France and helped stem the German advance at the Marne. Fighting on the Western Front soon became mired in a bloody stalemate, amid muddy trenches, barbed wire, and machine-gun emplacements. Battles to push the Germans back failed repeatedly at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Efforts to outflank the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, and Turkey) in the Balkans, notably the Gallipoli Campaign (1915-1916), also failed. At the Battle of Jutland (1916), British forces prevented the German fleet from venturing into the North Sea and beyond, but German submarines threatened Britain with starvation early in 1917; merchant-ship convoys guarded by destroyers helped avert this danger.

In May 1915, Asquith’s Liberal ministry became a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives, and a few Labour Party members. Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions. Continued frustration with the nation’s inability to win the war, however, led in December 1916 to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George, heading a predominantly Conservative coalition. The 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, resulted in several hundred dead. By 1918 the United Kingdom’s annual budget was 13 times that of 1913; tax rates had risen fivefold, and the total national debt, fourteenfold.

Although many British people welcomed the end (1917) of tsarist rule in Russia, they saw the Bolshevik decision to make a separate peace with Germany (1918) as a sell-out. However, the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917 tipped the balance of power, making possible the successful tank offensive engineered by General Douglas Haig in the summer of 1918, and the German surrender in November.

The election called immediately after the armistice gave the Lloyd George coalition an overwhelming mandate. The Labour Party, now formally pledged to socialism, became the largest opposition party, while the Asquith wing of a divided Liberal Party was almost wiped out. By then the Reform Act of 1918 had granted the vote to all men over the age of 21 and all women over 30.

C.2.

Changes Wrought by the War

Lloyd George represented Britain as one of the Big Three (together with France and the United States) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The resulting treaties enlarged the British Empire as former German colonies in Africa and Turkish holdings in the Middle East became British mandates. At the same time, Britain’s self-governing dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—became separate treaty signatories and separate members of the new League of Nations.

The fight for independence and an intermittent, bitter civil war in Ireland ended with a treaty negotiated by Lloyd George, and finalized in December 1921. Most of the island became, in 1922, the Irish Free State, independent of British rule in all but name and allegiance to the Crown. The six counties of Northern Ireland continued to be represented in the British Parliament, and they were also granted their own provincial parliament (see Partition of Ireland). The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The immediate post-war years were marked by economic boom, rapid demobilization, and much labour unrest. By 1922, however, the boom had petered out. In that year a rebellion by a group of Conservative members of Parliament ended the prime ministership of Lloyd George, which was succeeded by the wholly Conservative ministry of Andrew Bonar Law.

C.3.

The Inter-War Era

During the early 1920s a major political shift took place in Britain. The general election of 1922 gave victory to the Conservatives; a second election, called a year later by Stanley Baldwin, Bonar Law’s successor as Conservative leader, left no party with a clear majority. As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party leader, became the first professed socialist to serve as prime minister of the United Kingdom. His first ministry (1924) rested on Liberal acquiescence and lasted less than a year. Yet another election brought back Baldwin’s Conservatives. Lloyd George’s and Asquith’s efforts at Liberal reunion failed to restore the party’s fortunes, and it has remained a minor party in British politics.

The Baldwin ministry (1924-1929) had to face an unprecedented demonstration of trade union solidarity in the form of the 1926 General Strike. Undertaken in support of the miners who were resisting the imposition of lower pay and longer hours, the strike was frustrated by the use of troops to maintain essential services, and in the event lasted only nine days. At the time, however, it was interpreted as a direct challenge to the state and led to changes in trade union legislation requiring workers to contract into a union, rather than having a membership levy automatically deducted from their pay.

The Baldwin government, however, also enacted several social reform measures, including the Widows’, Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act (1925), established a national electric power network (1926), and reformed local government (1929). In 1928 women were given equal voting rights to men.

Between 1929 and 1932 the effects of the severe economic recession known as the Great Depression were to more than double an already high rate of unemployment in Britain. In the course of the three years, both the levels of industrial activity and of prices declined by a quarter, while industries such as shipbuilding collapsed almost entirely. Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government (1929-1931) found itself unable to cope with the depression. In 1931 it gave way to a national government headed first by MacDonald and then by Baldwin (1935-1937), and made up mostly of Conservatives. The Labour Party denounced MacDonald as a traitor, but the national government won an overwhelming mandate in the general election of 1931. It took the United Kingdom off the gold standard, restored protective tariffs, and subsidized the building of houses.

Between 1933 and 1937 the economy recovered steadily, with the car, construction, and electrical industries leading the way. Unemployment remained high, however, especially in Wales, Scotland, and northern England. Inter-war society was influenced by the radio (monopolized by the BBC, founded in 1927) and the cinema, but British life was little affected by the Continental ideologies of communism and fascism. The empire remained a fact, even though the Statute of Westminster (1931) proclaimed the equality of Commonwealth nations such as Canada and Australia. Religious attendance declined, but George V (reigned 1910-1936) maintained the prestige of the monarchy. When his son, Edward VIII, insisted on marrying a twice-divorced American, abdication (1936) proved to be the only acceptable solution. Under Edward’s brother, George VI, the monarchy again provided the model family of the land.

C.4.

The United Kingdom and World War II

Memories of World War I left Britons with an overwhelming desire to avoid another conflict, and the country played a leading role in the League of Nations and at inter-war disarmament conferences, such as those in Washington (1921-1922) and London (1930) which limited naval size. Conscious also that Germany might have been unfairly treated at the 1919 peace conference and Treaty of Versailles, the British government followed a policy of appeasement in dealing after 1933 with Germany and its leader, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s decisions to leave the League of Nations (1934), rearm (1935), and remilitarize the Rhineland (1936) in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles were accepted. So was the German annexation of Austria (1938) in pursuit of Anschluss. In his efforts to keep the peace at all costs, the prime minister Neville Chamberlain also acquiesced to the Munich Pact of 1938, which gave Germany the Sudeten portion of Czechoslovakia. Only after the German annexation of Prague (March 1939) did Britain make pledges of military support to Poland and Romania.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war (see World War II). The defeat of Poland and half a year of relative quiet (“the phoney war”) were followed in the spring of 1940 by the German invasion of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. In May of that year, Winston Churchill, a leading opponent of appeasement who had rejoined the Cabinet in 1939, replaced Chamberlain as head of a War Cabinet (1940-1945) that included all three main political parties. After the surrender of France in June 1940, Britain stood alone. Under Churchill’s direction, war mobilization in Britain became more comprehensive than that achieved by any other power. Although a German invasion plan was foiled by British air supremacy, large parts of London and many other cities were destroyed in the Blitz—bombing raids that killed 60,000 civilians. Beginning early in 1941, the still-neutral United States granted Lend-Lease aid to Britain.

The direction of the war changed with the German invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Churchill then forged the “Grand Alliance” with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt against Germany, Italy, and Japan, the so-called Axis Powers. In the immediate aftermath of the Japanese entry into the war, much of the British Empire in South East Asia was overrun, but late in 1942 the tide turned. The British contribution included the Battle of the Atlantic against the German submarine menace and the campaign led by General Bernard Montgomery, later Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, against the German army in North Africa. Britain’s alliance with the United States strengthened, and British forces were heavily involved in the invasion of Sicily and Italy (1943), the Normandy Campaign (1944), and the ultimate defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945.

D.

The Winds of Change

The general election of 1945 gave the Labour Party, for the first time, a majority of the popular vote and an overwhelming parliamentary majority. The result was less a rebuke of Churchill’s wartime leadership than a popular desire to ensure that the return of peace would see reforms benefiting the majority of Britons, in contrast to the aftermath of World War I, when the government failed to live up to its promises to build a “land fit for heroes”.

D.1.

Clement Attlee’s Ministry (1945-1951)

During the years that followed, Labour, led by Clement Attlee, sought to promote social equality in Britain, while surviving post-war austerity, dismantling the empire, and adjusting to the Cold War with the USSR.

The two measures that established a welfare state in Britain, the National Insurance Act of 1946 (a consolidation of benefit laws involving maternity, unemployment, disability, old age, and death) and the National Health Service, set up in 1948, were widely popular. Both drew on the wartime reports of William Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge of Tuggal, a Liberal. The nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal industry, gas and electricity, the railways, and most airlines proved relatively non-controversial, but the Conservatives vigorously if vainly opposed the nationalization of the road-freight, and the iron and steel industries.

In 1948 Labour eliminated the last remnants of plural voting (that is, the right to vote in more than one constituency) by abolishing the university seats, and reduced the delaying powers of the House of Lords from two years to one.

These changes were instituted in the midst of a post-war era of austerity. As a result of the war, the national debt had tripled, and for the first time since the 18th century Britain had become a debtor nation. With the end of US Lend-Lease aid in 1945, the British import bill had risen abruptly long before military demobilization and reconversion to peacetime industry had been accomplished. Wartime regulations, therefore, had been kept; food-rationing in 1946 and 1947 was more restrictive than during the war.

Post-war Germany was divided into occupation zones among the USSR, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, but efforts to reach agreement on a peace treaty with Germany broke down as it became clear that the USSR was converting all of eastern Europe into a Soviet sphere of influence. Britain, assisted by the US-sponsored Marshall Plan (1948-1952), joined other Western powers and the United States in NATO in 1949 in order to counter the Soviet threat.

The British government felt less able, however, to play an independent role in the Middle East; in 1948 it gave up its Palestinian mandate, which led to the establishment of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War. Aware of the country’s depleted coffers and unable to withstand the widespread demand for self-rule, the Labour government granted independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, and to Burma and Ceylon in 1948.

D.2.

Conservative Rule (1951-1964)

Its programme of social reform apparently accomplished, the Labour government’s parliamentary majority was sharply reduced in the general election of 1950, and the election of 1951 enabled the Conservatives under Winston Churchill to slip back into power. Except for denationalizing iron and steel, the Conservatives made no attempt to reverse the legislation or the welfare-state programme enacted by Labour. The early 1950s brought steady economic recovery. As income tax rates were reduced and the framework of wartime and post-war regulation largely dismantled, housing construction boomed and international trade flourished.

With a veteran world statesman heading Britain’s government, the accession of a young queen drew the attention (and the still-novel television cameras) of the world to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953. During these years Britain perfected its own atomic and hydrogen bombs and was a pioneer in the generation of electricity by nuclear power. Churchill’s hopes for another diplomatic summit meeting were disappointed, but the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR, led to a slight easing of the Cold War tension, which never reached the levels felt in the United States, which had replaced Britain as the world’s most powerful nation.

Churchill’s successor, Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden (1955-1957), led his party to a second election victory in the spring of 1955. In the same year he helped negotiate an Austrian peace treaty and participated in a summit conference at Geneva.

Eden’s tenure as prime minister, however, was cut short by the crisis that followed Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. British forces had been withdrawn from the canal only a year earlier, and an Anglo-French reoccupation in 1956 was halted by Soviet-US pressure. The Suez Crisis led both to the loss of much of Britain’s remaining influence in the Middle East and to Eden’s resignation. His successor, Harold Macmillan (1957-1963), later the Earl of Stockton, presided over a period of renewed consumer affluence. In 1959 he led his party to its third successive election victory.

Macmillan’s government followed a deliberate policy of decolonization in Africa. The Sudan had already become independent in 1956, and during the next seven years Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed suit. Most of these states remained members of a highly decentralized multiracial Commonwealth of Nations, but the Union of South Africa, dominated by a white minority, left the Commonwealth in 1961 and declared itself a republic. Independence was also given to Malaysia, Cyprus, and Jamaica during Macmillan’s tenure.

Even as imperial ties loosened, large numbers of immigrants—especially from the West Indies and Pakistan—arrived in Britain, many persuaded to come by active recruitment campaigns to work in, for example, public transport. They found themselves less than welcome in many areas, however. The heightening of racial tensions led to government efforts to limit sharply further immigration, while ensuring legal equality for the immigrants and their descendants.

As British people 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 neighbours. In 1961 Macmillan applied for British membership in the European Community (EC), or Common Market (now called the EU). 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.

D.3.

Britain in the 1960s

During the 1960s, Britain experienced a widespread mood of change. Much of this centred on young people, who had spending power for the first time. Opposition to conventions of the past—in dress, in music, in popular entertainment, and in social behaviour—did not only come from the young, however, but from designers, authors, and other celebrities. The phenomenon had its positive consequences in helping to make “swinging” London a world capital of popular music, media, theatre, and fashion. With the worldwide popularity of the Beatles, Liverpool became for a time as well known. Among the negative side-effects, however, were a rising crime rate and a spreading drug culture.

Harold Wilson’s Labour government (1964-1970) sympathized with some of these trends. It sought both to expand higher education opportunities and to end a secondary 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 eased, 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 towards inflation, an unfavourable balance of trade, and unbalanced government budgets led to a wage-and-price freeze in 1966 and attempts thereafter to secure so-called severe restraint. These actions eased certain economic problems, but at the price of alienating many of Labour’s trade union supporters. In 1970 the Conservatives returned to power under Edward Heath.

E.

The 1970s

E.1.

Heath, Inflation, and the Miners

A major theme of British history since the mid-1960s was the battle to eliminate double-digit inflation. Heath’s policy of deliberate economic expansion did not accomplish this goal, however, and the attempt to curb the legal powers of trade unions (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. The world oil crisis served to compound economic problems. Heath hoped to solve some of them 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 the EC 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 result was indecisive. A revival in the popular vote of the Liberal Party, enabled Harold Wilson to form a minority Labour government that under his leadership and, from 1976, that of James Callaghan, lasted five years.

E.2.

Northern Ireland

During the 1970s successive British governments faced mounting difficulties in Northern Ireland. A civil rights movement supporting social equality for the Roman Catholic minority there clashed violently with Protestant extremists. In 1969 the British government sent troops to keep order, and in 1972 it suspended 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; the Protestant majority continued to support Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. British measures, such as internment, failed to halt the wave of bombings and killings in Northern Ireland and England. The troops remain, although their numbers were reduced during the IRA ceasefire in 1994 (see The Troubles).

E.3.

Scottish Nationalism

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party scored impressive gains in the elections of 1974, and Callaghan’s ministry (1976-1979) attempted to set up a semi-independent parliament in Edinburgh (see Scottish Nationalism). When only 33 per cent of the Scottish electorate supported the plan in a 1979 referendum, however, the project died, at least temporarily.

E.4.

Economic Difficulties Under Labour

The Labour government of 1974 to 1979 began by ending all legal restrictions on wage and price rises. However, after the annual inflation rate topped 25 per cent in 1975, the government succeeded in obtaining some trade union restraints on wage claims in return for an end to legal restraints on union power and more government finance for housing and other social services. The inflation rate declined somewhat between 1976 and 1979.

By the late 1970s, British politics seemed to be polarizing between the left wing of the Labour Party, which sought a larger role for the state in order to create greater social equality, and the Conservatives, who hoped to restore a greater role to private enterprise and to reduce the public sector. By the beginning of 1979 Callaghan’s government was dependent on two minority parties. A winter of labour unrest and a series of damaging strikes undercut his claims to be able to deal successfully with the unions, and a vote of no-confidence in March 1979 went against him.

F.

Conservative Rule (1979-1997)

In the election of April 1979, the Conservative Party under its new leader Margaret Thatcher emerged with a substantial majority of parliamentary seats. Thatcher, the first woman prime minister in British or European history, remained in office for the next 11 years, making her the longest continuously serving prime minister 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 one 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. Thatcher sent a British counter-invasion force which succeeded in recapturing the islands in June (see Falklands War). She strengthened Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, notably by the stationing by US forces of intermediate-range nuclear missiles at the Greenham Common airbase at the end of 1983.

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 per cent of the total popular vote in 1983 and 23 per cent in 1987—splitting the opposition to the Conservatives and influencing Tory victories. In the 1983 and 1987 elections Labour gained 28 and 31 per cent of the vote respectively; the Conservatives 42 per cent on both occasions.

The years between 1982 and 1988 were depicted by many as economic boom years for the United Kingdom. Much of this boom was consumption-led. The living standards of many British people rose, particularly for those in the category known as “middle England” voters, and among entrepreneurs and in lower-middle-class occupations. However, poverty increased for many. In addition, compared to many European countries, the quality of life declined in Britain’s inner cities—the phenomenon often called “private wealth, public squalor”.

The rate of unemployment remained at a peak of more than 3 million for much of the decade. British industries became more efficient, although the manufacturing sector shrank as many companies closed. London maintained its role as one of the world’s top financial centres. The direct participation of government in the economy 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, electricity, and water. Council-house tenants were strongly encouraged to buy the houses they rented. In the meantime, the power of trade unions was severely curtailed by legislation, and membership declined as a result of high unemployment and the shrinking of the industrial sector.

Although Thatcher had not abolished the welfare state, in the eyes of her opposition critics the “Iron Lady” had short-changed social services such as education and the NHS. Policies such as the abolition of the metropolitan councils, notably the Greater London Council, were also viewed as dictatorial. Her resignation in November 1990 was the result of a revolt within the Conservative Party. Thatcher’s downfall, however, was primarily attributed to the enactment of an unpopular “poll tax” (as a substitute for local government property-based taxes), and the alienation of some members of her Cabinet over the prime minister’s increasingly critical attitude towards cooperation with her EU (previously the EC) colleagues.

Thatcher was succeeded as Conservative Party leader and prime minister by John Major, who continued all her policies, including that of maintaining close ties with the United States. British troops fought as part of the multinational coalition in the Gulf War. In 1992, despite a deepening economic recession, Major led his party to victory in the April general election, although with a substantially reduced majority. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, who had gradually moved his party back from the far left towards the ideological centre, resigned after the election and was replaced by John Smith.

Following the election, Major’s government faced a growing financial crisis exacerbated by the pound’s weakening in the currency market, high inflation and unemployment, and a nationwide recession. As a result, Major received the lowest approval rating, 14 per cent, of any prime minister in British history.

In 1993 news of contacts between the Major government and Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, appeared in the press.

F.1.

The IRA Ceasefire and Beyond

On August 31, 1994, the IRA declared an unconditional ceasefire, agreeing to suspend all military operations in favour of Sinn Féin participating in peace talks. In October, Loyalist (Protestant) paramilitaries also announced a ceasefire. In response to the ending of terrorist activity, British troop patrols in Northern Ireland were gradually reduced; in March 1995 regular daytime patrols were completely suspended throughout the province. However, moves towards a full round-table discussion on the future of Northern Ireland, including all parties, were slowed by the hostility of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to countenance change and by the insistence by the Major government that the IRA give up its weapons. Nevertheless, direct talks between the British government and Sinn Féin were initiated in December 1994.

In February 1995 John Major and the Irish prime minister John Bruton announced a joint framework document on all-party talks on the future of Northern Ireland, with the British government insisting that Sinn Féin participation was conditional on the decommissioning of IRA weapons. With the IRA and Sinn Féin refusing to concede, in November 1995 both governments announced a forum chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell to discuss the issue; and US President Bill Clinton visited Northern Ireland to great acclaim. Mitchell’s report of late January 1996 did not support the British position, and the British government rejected its disarmament plan.

In February 1996, the IRA ended its 17-month ceasefire by exploding a huge bomb in London’s Docklands, killing 2 people and injuring more than 100: Sinn Féin blamed British procrastination over the promised peace talks. In response, the British and Irish governments announced a timetable for negotiations and a specific date for the start of all-party talks. This was viewed as a concession by Major, but the plan also included an elected assembly, a concession to Unionists. Both governments agreed that, with no decommissioning of arms, Sinn Féin could only attend the all-party talks and proximity talks to discuss details of the assembly. However, the IRA did not renew its ceasefire.

In elections in May to the elected “forum”, intended to discuss Northern Irish affairs and select negotiating teams for all-party talks, Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and the DUP scored the best results. Despite its electoral success, the IRA’s continuing refusal to resume the ceasefire kept Sinn Féin out of the forum, while the DUP leader Ian Paisley threatened to boycott the talks if they were chaired as planned by George Mitchell.

In the 1997 general election Sinn Féin candidates won an increased share of the vote (16 per cent) in Northern Ireland, including two constituency gains for its main candidates, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. However, due to their refusal to swear the oath of allegiance to the Crown, as required of all new MPs, it is unlikely that they will take their seats in the House of Commons.

In May 1994, Labour Party leader John Smith died suddenly from a heart attack. His successor, Tony Blair, completed the work of transforming the Labour Party into a centre-left organization, begun by Kinnock and furthered by Smith. In April 1995, at a special conference, the party voted to end its traditional commitment to nationalization, enshrined in Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution. This and other changes, notably the distancing of the party from the trade unions, were widely considered to have made Labour once more a potential party of government.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, were beset by persistently low opinion polls, resounding defeats in local elections in April and May 1995, and a series of scandals that persisted up until, and including, the 1997 general election. However, their most serious problem was the growing rift within the party over policy towards Europe. In November 1994 eight so-called “Euro-rebel” Conservative members of Parliament lost the party “whip”, and another voluntarily resigned it, after refusing to support the government on a vote over British financial contributions to the EU. In June 1995, in an effort to restore cohesion within the Conservative parliamentary party, John Major resigned as leader of the party, forcing an election for a new leader, held on July 4. Major won against an anti-European opponent, but one third of the party voted against him or abstained.

The Conservative Party remained split between a pro-European left wing and an anti-European (“Eurosceptic”) right, with the latter especially pressuring Major over policy, while deaths and defections eroded the Conservatives’ slim Commons majority. One MP left the party in protest over government handling of the report by High Court judge Richard Scott, commissioned to investigate government complicity in arms sales to Iraq contravening a UN embargo. The report, released in February 1996, found that ministers had misled Parliament and the public, but exonerated them of conspiracy. After careful management of its release and intensive lobbying of MPs, the government won a vote on the report by one vote, just avoiding an early general election.

In March 1996 the government announced new findings by an independent committee, based on ten fatalities apparently caused by a new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), over apparent links between CJD in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow” disease) in British cattle. This statement, directly contradicting previous government assurances, caused the collapse of the domestic and export markets for British beef. On March 27 the European Commission imposed a global ban on exports of British beef and cattle products. Despite some British measures including limited culling, by mid-1997 the EU ban on British beef exports had still not been relaxed. However, in June 1996, EU governments had agreed on a plan to gradually reduce the ban on the various categories of British beef exports, in return for a much greater culling of the British beef herd. A further 51,574 cattle were destroyed by December 1997, and by early 1998 the European Commission gave Northern Ireland the green light to resume export of at least some beef. The government banned the sale of beef on the bone in December after research showed there was a risk that BSE could be transmitted through bones. It is estimated the BSE crisis will have cost the British government £5 billion.

G.

Labour Government

On May 1, 1997, following Britain’s longest-ever general election campaign, Labour won its biggest-ever majority of 179 seats. The Conservative Party suffered its worst electoral defeat of the century and John Major resigned as Conservative Party leader. The main Cabinet appointments made by the new prime minister, Tony Blair, included Gordon Brown (Chancellor of the Exchequer); Robin Cook (Foreign Secretary); George Robertson (Defence Secretary; who left in 1999 to become NATO’s secretary-general); Jack Straw (Home Secretary); Margaret Beckett (President of the Board of Trade); John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport, and the Regions). In June 1997 the Conservative Party chose a Eurosceptic candidate, William Hague, as its new leader, rather than his closest rival, the more experienced and pro-European Kenneth Clarke. At 36, Hague became the youngest party leader this century.

A month after electoral victory, the new prime minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went to Hong Kong to witness the end of British rule in the colony as it returned to Chinese control. In August politics were pushed to the back of the national agenda with news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Princess was fatally injured in a car crash in Paris, in which her friend and fellow passenger Dodi Fayed was also killed. Her death provoked an unprecedented outpouring of national grief, and the funeral service, held at Westminster Abbey, was watched by 1 billion people worldwide.

In September the government put to the test its manifesto promise for devolution in Scotland and Wales. In referendums on the issue, Scotland voted overwhelmingly for the proposal of a Scottish parliament (74.3 per cent for and 25.7 per cent against) and for the parliament to have tax-varying powers (63.5 per cent for and 36.5 per cent against). The Welsh voted only by the narrowest of margins for the proposed Welsh assembly (50.3 per cent for and 49.7 per cent against), which was to have fewer powers than the Scottish parliament. Plans for the election of a London mayor and a Greater London assembly were also given the green light following a strong “yes” vote from Londoners in the May 1998 referendum.

In the autumn of 1997, the Labour government, like the Conservatives before them, was harried in the Commons following speculation on government policy on European Monetary Union (EMU). The Chancellor Gordon Brown was forced to make a statement on the issue in October. He stated that the government was committed to taking the United Kingdom into the EMU, but would not enter in the first wave of January 1, 1999, but at a later date after further economic convergence with fellow European countries and after a referendum on the issue.

The honeymoon period of the new administration was fairly short-lived and various criticisms of the government included some of its plans for the reform of the welfare state. The left of the Labour Party was strongly opposed to some of the suggested measures, particularly the plan to cut some of the financial provisions for lone parents, which was eventually withdrawn. The Foreign Secretary Robin Cook also came under fire, in May 1998, over arms shipments to Sierra Leone. The arms were supplied to Sierra Leone’s deposed president by a British-registered company in contravention of a UN arms embargo. Cook denied that he or his officials had approved gun-running.

G.1.

Northern Ireland Peace Agreement

The Northern Ireland peace process was given fresh impetus when the IRA restored its 1994 ceasefire in July 1997. The way was finally cleared for peace talks in September when the Unionists abandoned their demand for guaranteed IRA disarmament. In October Tony Blair met Gerry Adams, the first encounter between British and Sinn Féin leaders in 76 years. The new Northern Ireland secretary of state Mo Mowlam sought to keep Protestants within the peace talks when she met imprisoned Protestant paramilitaries in early 1998. The peace talks were strained throughout the first half of 1998, and Sinn Féin was temporarily expelled when the IRA was officially held responsible for two murders in Belfast. However, in April 1998 agreement was reached on radical new arrangements for an Ulster assembly, a council of ministers linking Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and limited cross-border bodies to facilitate joint decision-making. A British-Irish council linking devolved assemblies in the United Kingdom and the London and Dublin governments was also proposed. It was agreed that all terrorist prisoners linked to the IRA and mainstream loyalist groups would be released within two years. The so-called Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 22. In the north the 'Yes' vote was 70 per cent of the poll. Following the August bombing of the town of Omagh in Northern Ireland, a series of tough new anti-terrorism laws were introduced to the United Kingdom.

In November Elizabeth II, in her annual Queen's Speech at the opening of parliament, announced the government's intention to introduce a bill to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Tony Blair became the first British prime minister to address the Irish parliament, the Dáil, since Partition in 1922. In December 1998 Cabinet members Peter Mandelson and Geoffrey Robinson resigned over a scandal involving their personal finances.

The first anniversary of the Good Friday Peace Agreement passed, but still the talks were deadlocked over the crucial issue of the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. In the May 1999 elections to the new Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, the Labour Party emerged as the largest party in each legislature, although without an overall majority in either. In Scotland Labour entered into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, while in Wales the party opted to form a minority administration. In August Charles Kennedy was declared the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, replacing the outgoing Paddy Ashdown. The three-year worldwide ban on British beef was lifted. In October President Jiang Zemin of China arrived in Britain on a state visit—the first to the United Kingdom by a Chinese leader. Peter Mandelson was reinstated to the Cabinet as the new Northern Ireland Secretary. In November more than 650 hereditary peers in the House of Lords had their seats permanently abolished as part of Labour's commitment to restructure and reform governing institutions in the UK. Ninety-two hereditary peers, who were chosen by their fellow hereditary peers in a special election, will temporarily remain in the House of Lords (with about 500 life peers) until reform of the upper chamber is complete.

G.2.

Entering the New Millennium

In May 2000 the MP Ken Livingstone, a Labour Party member until expelled from the party for standing against the official Labour Party candidate Frank Dobson in the London mayoral election, won the election as an independent and took office.

Donald Dewar, the first minister of the Scottish Parliament, died in October 2000; he was succeeded by Labour MSP Henry McLeish. Also in Scotland, Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP for 10 years, retired; his deputy John Swinney was elected in his place (Salmond became party leader once more in 2004).

G.3.

Northern Ireland Weapons Decommissioning and Prisoner Releases

On December 1, 1999, Northern Ireland's executive and general Assembly met for the first time, with David Trimble as the first minister. The Assembly was suspended in February 2000 because of the impasse over a formal and precise deadline for decommissioning; direct rule from Westminster was temporarily re-imposed before the Assembly was reconvened in late spring 2000, with the UUP voting to rejoin a provincial power-sharing government with Sinn Féin, after the IRA pledged to begin disarmament. Peter Mandelson’s tenure as Northern Ireland Secretary was shortlived and he resigned from the post in January 2001 over an unrelated row over passports. Blair replaced him with John Reid.

In May 2000 the IRA pledged to put its weapons “completely and verifiably beyond use” in return for the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The IRA also agreed to permit regular inspections of its weapons stockpiles by an international panel supervising disarmament. In June the inspectors made their first report: former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and ex-secretary-general of the African National Congress, Cyril Ramaphosa, stated that they were “satisfied with the cooperation extended to us by the IRA to ensure a credible and verifiable inspection”.

On October 22, 2001, Gerry Adams issued a statement in which he announced that he and Martin McGuinness had called for the IRA to make a “ground-breaking move” on arms and, amid great expectations, the IRA stated that it had indeed begun to decommission arms in order to “save the peace process” and to “persuade others of our genuine intentions”. De Chastelain confirmed that the process had begun and Trimble welcomed it as a positive move, to which he responded by returning to the assembly he had quit in July 2001. The UK government, also welcoming the move, set about dismantling British army watchtowers in the province. In April 2002, the IRA announced a second significant move in the decommissioning of weapons. However, the talks stalled once more and the Assembly was suspended, for the fourth time, in October 2002. Later that same month John Reid was replaced by Paul Murphy as Northern Ireland Secretary. In elections to the Assembly held in November, 2003 (even though the Assembly remained suspended) the Democratic Unionist Party, which has argued that the Good Friday Agreement should be renegotiated, replaced the UUP as the largest group. Sinn Féin overtook the Social Democratic and Labour Party as the main representative of the nationalist community.

G.4.

Illegal Immigrants

The issue of illegal immigration into Britain was heightened in June 2000 with the discovery at Dover port of a lorry in which 58 illegal Chinese immigrants had died. A Dutch lorry driver was convicted in February 2000 of causing their deaths by closing an air vent that allowed them to breathe during the journey. The tragedy was discovered to be part of a much larger racket involving “human trafficking” of individuals from China and elsewhere into the West for large sums of money. The issue of illegal immigration escalated and hundreds of cases came to light of refugees attempting to enter Britain on foot via the Channel Tunnel.

G.5.

Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Just as the farming community was recovering from the BSE crisis, the agricultural industry was struck in February 2001 with the first case of foot-and-mouth disease to hit Britain since 1967. At the end of September the number of animals slaughtered amounted to nearly 4 million. The government, and the Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown, were criticized variously for inaction in the early days of the crisis, for alarmist statements over the countryside being closed to the population for fear of spreading the disease, for the decision to create “funeral pyres” on which to burn the carcasses of hundreds of thousands of dead animals, and for using the army to create mass graves to bury the remains. See also Agriculture, above.

G.6.

Labour’s Second Term

Labour won an historic second term in power at the general election of June 7, 2001—an election notable for the extent of voter apathy. The Liberal Democrats profited most, gaining six seats overall. Labour lost three seats on the party’s total of 1997, but the Conservative Party failed to mount an effective challenge and gained a single seat over the result of 1997. In the aftermath of the defeat the party leader William Hague resigned. In Blair’s expected Cabinet reshuffle David Blunkett was promoted to Home Secretary and Jack Straw replaced Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary.

The Conservative Party membership voted in Iain Duncan Smith as their new leader in September. Smith, a relative political unknown, came from the right wing of the party with a pledge to unify the dissenting factions of the Conservative Party before the next election. In Scotland, the First Minister Henry McLeish resigned in a row about the improper use of his political offices. He was replaced by the former education minister to the parliament, Jack McConnell.

G.6.a.

The War Against Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, four US passenger airliners from Boston, Newark, and Washington airports were hijacked by suicide terrorists. Two of the aeroplanes were deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse and burying 3,000 victims. A further aeroplane crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., killing nearly 200 more, and the fourth aeroplane crashed near Pittsburgh. British citizens were among the victims of the twin towers’ collapse.

World opinion was almost unanimous in condemning the atrocities and President Bush sought wide support for what he declared to be a war against terrorism. The chief suspect behind the attacks was believed to be Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, who was in hiding in Afghanistan. As the US prepared for military action against Afghanistan, securing the support of neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime showed reluctance in compelling bin Laden to leave. Meanwhile, Tony Blair, avowing to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the US in rooting out world terrorism, began an intensive round of diplomatic negotiations that took him first to North America to visit the site of the disaster in New York and then to a host of Muslim countries to gain their support and backing for action against the terrorists. His itinerary included Pakistan, India, Oman, and Egypt. To help further the allied coalition he also made visits to Russia, Berlin, Paris, and the EU in Brussels.

Beginning on the night of October 7-8, 2001, military air strikes by US and UK forces in the region bombarded the Afghan cities of Kabul, Kandahār, Mazār-e Sharīf, and Jalālābād, pinpointing air defences, airports, and suspected Al-Qaeda bases. Mindful of calls for restraint and conscious of the deteriorating situation for Afghan civilians in a country already suffering famine and drought, the allies also dropped humanitarian aid as part of the mission. Despite this, hundreds of thousands of Afghans headed for the border with Pakistan.

British troops were deployed as part of the peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan in December as the new interim government was installed. Early in April 2002, 1,700 combat troops were sent to the country to help force the final surrender of Al-Qaeda suspects and to join the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In June command of ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan was passed to Turkey.

World attention in 2002 turned to Iraq and likewise British foreign policy. Blair was a strong advocate of military action against the Iraqi government to enforce disarmament of a country that was believed to hold stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, thereby threatening world security. Britain was a strong supporter in getting weapons inspectors readmitted to the country (from where they had been expelled in 1998) and in November the UN Security Council passed such a resolution, threatening “serious consequences” if Iraq did not disarm. Iraq agreed to comply with the resolution, and weapons inspections started that same month. Allied closely with the Bush administration once more and distancing him from fellow European leaders, including Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and from many in the Labour Party, Blair argued that if the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq continued developing weapons of mass destruction (including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons), then they could be used by terrorist groups. The argument failed to prevent the largest parliamentary revolt of his premiership in February 2003 and massive demonstrations around the United Kingdom protesting against the possible war. British forces joined the invasion of Iraq on March 20, despite the failure to secure a UN resolution explicitly sanctioning the action.

The regime of Saddam Hussein was declared toppled in mid-April but despite the taking of Baghdad and the surrender of most of Saddam’s forces he remained at large. Full-scale warfare ended but coalition troops continued to be fired upon for the rest of the year as they attempted to re-establish order in the country. Baghdad, the capital, and the UN headquarters in particular were subject to repeated bombings as the problems of creating a new government and repairing the infrastructure were tackled. To date, weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq. Public sentiment over the war remains sharply divided.

G.6.b.

The Dossier Affair and the Hutton Inquiry

In May 2003 a BBC defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, claimed on a radio programme that the government had “sexed up” information pertaining to weapons of mass destruction in a dossier that was published in 2002 and that it was used to strengthen the government’s case for going to war in Iraq. The prime minister’s press secretary Alastair Campbell found himself at the centre of allegations. Gilligan gave evidence to a foreign affairs select committee and revealed he had been briefed by a Ministry of Defence (MOD) official, who was later identified as Dr David Kelly, an MOD microbiologist. The select committee’s report cleared Campbell and also concluded that Kelly was not the source of Gilligan’s story. However, days later in mid-July Kelly committed suicide and the prime minister ordered an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death. The inquiry was chaired by Lord Hutton, who delivered his report early in 2004. It cleared the government but criticized the behaviour of the BBC. As a result both the chairman and the chief executive of the BBC resigned shortly afterwards. Blair visited Libya and Colonel Qaddafi in March after Libya announced earlier in the year that it would abandon its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.

G.6.c.

Domestic and Foreign Politics

While Blair continued to receive criticism over the war, the Conservatives replaced Iain Duncan Smith as the leader of their party in November 2003 after a vote of no confidence in his leadership. Former home secretary Michael Howard replaced him unopposed. The Butler Report was published in July 2004 and testified on the failings of British intelligence in the run-up to the War on Iraq. Most criticism was reserved for the source of (and belief in) the claim that Iraq had the capability to launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes—one of the premises on which the war was prosecuted. Further controversy dogged the Labour government over legislation it tried to pass in the spring of 2005. The Prevention of Terrorism Bill was hurriedly introduced in March, just before the expiration of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime & Security Act 2001 (ATCSA), passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The Bill states that, among other objectives, terrorist suspects can be placed under house arrest; controversially, the orders could be given by a politician (the home secretary) rather than is traditional by a judge. After one of the longest-ever sittings of the House of Lords and a number of amendment proposals (including reverting to orders being given by a judge), the Bill was passed. Weeks afterwards, Blair called a general election for May 5; opinion polls put the parties closer than at any time over the past eight years and predicted a close election. In the event, Labour lost a considerable number of seats but retained a healthy majority of 67 seats in the House of Commons. Gains were made at the party’s expense by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and several smaller parties. Blair, who had endured a torrid time during the campaign over his decision to take the country to war, saw his personal standing in the country slide dramatically but was returned in his own constituency and thus led the party to an unprecedented third electoral term.

G.7.

Labour’s Third Term

In the immediate aftermath of the Conservative Party's defeat in the general election, its leader Michael Howard stood down. The party held a protracted leadership campaign in which David Cameron, the shadow secretary for education and skills, won the final ballot against the other contender David Davis in December 2005. Cameron's relative youth and vigour were seen by Tory supporters as an antidote to the tiring policies of the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats also underwent a leadership change in early 2006 after Charles Kennedy stepped down after admitting to a drink problem. Rather than going down the 'youthful' route as taken by the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats opted to replace him with the veteran Sir Menzies Campbell, who stood in the leadership election against the party chairman Simon Hughes and relative newcomer Chris Huhne. Meanwhile, questions about the future leadership of the Labour Party continued to exercise Westminster, since Blair had intimated that he would step down some time before the end of Labour’s third term. It was widely accepted that he would be replaced by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, but speculation about the exact timetable escalated during early 2006, especially after a combination of poor local election results in May and controversy surrounding several of Blair's ministers and their departmental policies. Blair responded by making the most wide-reaching government reshuffle of his tenure in early May.

G.7.a.

London Bombings

On July 7, 2005, London’s transport system was hit by a series of bomb explosions, timed to coincide with the morning rush-hour. Underground trains at Aldgate, Edqware Road, and Russell Square and a bus at Tavistock Square were attacked by suicide bombers. Fifty-two people were killed and more than 700 injured. Exactly two weeks afterwards, a second series of attacks took place in the city but on this occasion the devices failed to go off. Suspects were swiftly detained and held for trial in late 2006. In both coordinated incidents disaffected men of Asian origin were held to be responsible. Meanwhile, in a separate incident, a Brazilian national named Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on an Underground train in a case of mistaken identity, with police officers taking him for a potential suicide bomber.

G.7.b.

Home and Foreign Politics

In July 2005, the IRA announced a formal ending to its armed campaign; General John de Chastelain reported in September that the IRA had decommissioned its weapons. The United Kingdom hosted the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in July and also held the EU presidency.