Nippy Metro People: Britain from 1990
Thatcher’s children? By the time she left office, only a minority were true believers. Most would have voted her out had her cabinet ministers not beaten them to it. History is harshest to a leader just as they fall. She had been such a strident presence for so long that many who had first welcomed her as a gust of fresh air now felt harried. Those who wanted a quieter leader were about to get one. Yet most people had in the end done well under her, not just the Yuppies and Essex boys, but also her snidest middle-class critics. Britons were on average much wealthier than they had been at the end of seventies. The country was enjoying bigger cars, a far wider range of holidays, better food, a wider choice of television channels, home videos, and the first slew of gadgets from the computer age. Yet this was not quite the Britain of today.
More people smoked. The idea of smoke-free public areas, or smoking bans in offices and restaurants, was lampooned as a weird Californian innovation that would never come here. People seen talking to themselves with a wire dangling from one ear would have been considered worryingly disturbed. There were no Starbucks: coffee shops were still mainly locally owned places selling instant coffee, tea, fried food or cakes. Lunch had been under threat for some years in the City and the days of midday drinking were beginning to die in other professions too. The chic sandwich bar had begun to spread since the early eighties, when BLTs, avocado and blue cheese began to be regularly offered, alongside the traditional fillings of cheese, ham and egg. At a by-election outside Liverpool in 1986 a Labour activist had allegedly pointed to the mushy peas in a local chip-shop and asked for some of the ‘avocado dip’ too: it was a story, perhaps an urban myth, much re-told as symbolizing the gap between real Britain and the new metropolitan Britain of the south. The habit of urbanites carrying bottled water wherever they went had not yet taken off, though meaningless corporate language was already sullying business life. The ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation was in its infancy. Passengers, rather than ‘customers’, travelled on British Rail trains, with the double-arrow symbol which had been familiar since 1965. On the roads were plenty of flashy Ford Sierras, Austin Montegos and nippy Metros.
For a wealthy country, the mood was uneasy. An old jibe, ‘public affluence, public squalor’, was much heard. The most immediate worry was economic as the hangover effects of the Lawson boom began to throb. Inflation was rising towards double figures, interest rates were at 14 per cent and unemployment was heading towards two million. Over the next four years a serious white-collar recession was to hit Britain, particularly in the south, where house prices would fall by a quarter. An estimated 1.8 million people found that their homes were worth less than the money they had borrowed to buy them in the heady easy-credit eighties. During 1991 alone, more than 75,000 families would have their homes repossessed. With hindsight it is generally accepted that the Thatcher revolution reshaped the country’s economy and prepared Britain well for the new age of globalization waiting in the wings, but in 1990 it did not feel quite like that.
There were other changes too. The British were fewer than they are today. The population was smaller by at least three million souls. Also, the ethnic mix of the country was simpler. Of the roughly three million non-white British, the largest groups were Indian (840,000), black Caribbean (500,000) and Pakistani (476,000), pretty much what an extrapolation from the seventies would have predicted. No serious concern was expressed politically about whether Muslims could fully integrate. In the interests of keeping an eye on troublemakers, and maintaining Britain’s traditions of tolerance, a number of the most radical Islamic militants, on the run from their own countries, had been given safe haven in London. The largest white migrant group was from Ireland, which was still relatively poor. Any Poles or Russians in Britain were diplomats or refugees from communism. The term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ would have met with a puzzled frown. Looking to east or west, Britain was far less penetrated by overseas culture and people than she would soon become.
Britain was also about to go to war again as the junior partner to the Americans in the first Gulf conflict, which freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion and immolated the Iraqi army’s Republican Guard. Despite British forces losing lives and the use by Saddam of human shields, the war generated nothing like the controversy of the later Iraq war. It was widely seen as a necessary act of international retribution against a particularly horrible dictator. After the controversies and alarms of the Thatcher years, foreign affairs generated less heat, except for the great issue of European federalism. There was a real sense of optimism caused by the end of the Cold War, which had resulted in the deaths of up to 40 million people around the world, and involved no fewer than 150 smaller conflicts. At last, perhaps, the West could relax. Politicians and journalists talked excitedly of the coming ‘peace dividend’ and the end of the surveillance and espionage secret state that had been needed for so long. The only present threat to British security was the Provisional IRA, which would continue its attacks with ferocity and cunning for some years to come. They would hit Downing Street with a triple mortar attack on a snowy day in February 1991, coming close to killing the Prime Minister and the top team of ministers and officials directing the Gulf War.
Environmental worries were present too, though a bat-squeak compared to today’s panic. British scientists played a big role in alerting the world. Among the handful of Britons in the second half of the twentieth century who may be remembered centuries hence is James Lovelock. He is the scientist who in 1965 after studying the long-term chemical composition of the planet’s systems, and their interaction with living organisms, developed the ‘Gaia’ theory. The name, from a Greek goddess, came from the British Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding, a neighbour of Lovelock’s in Devon, during a country walk. ‘Gaia’ demonstrated how fragile the life-supporting atmosphere and chemistry of the planet is, an immensely complex self-regulating system keeping temperatures fit for life. Some hippies and ‘New Age’ mystics mistakenly thought Lovelock was saying the Earth was herself alive. He was using a metaphor but one with powerful implications for man-made climate change. At the same time as Lovelock was writing his most influential book, in the late seventies, far south the British Antarctic Survey was just beginning to notice a thinning of the ozone layer. It is said that when the first measurements were taken later in 1985 the readings were so low the scientists assumed their instruments were faulty and sent home for replacements. This led to an important treaty cutting ozone-depleting CFCs. British influence was important at the first world climate conference in Geneva in 1979, which had appealed to nations to do more research.
By 1990, a follow-up conference attended by 130 countries focused on the growing evidence that global warming was a real threat, but no agreement was reached about what should be done. Were any senior politicians worried? One was. Two years earlier Margaret Thatcher, science-trained, had made a speech about global warming. She had been persuaded that it was a profound issue by Britain’s outgoing ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Tickell, who had ironically enough got at her with worrying data during a long international plane flight. So in September 1988 she had told the Royal Society that she believed it possible that ‘we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the earth itself.’ Such was the interest that no television cameras were sent to record her speech and the prime minister had to read it by the light of wax candles held over her head in an ancient hall. For most people in 1990 ‘the environment’ or green issues meant containable local problems such as the use of chemical pesticides or the problems of disposing of nuclear waste. Books about the fate of the earth concerned themselves with nuclear weapons.
Culturally, the country was as fixated by imported American television as it would continue to be: Baywatch and The Simpsons were popular new imports. And the national self-mocking strand of comedy which would be such a mark of the next fifteen years was well established, with Harry Enfield’s Wayne and Waynetta Slob joining his ‘Loadsamoney’ attacks on the big-bucks Thatcher years, Spitting Image puppetry at its most gleefully venomous, and the arrival of a new quiz show, Have I Got News For You. This heralded a time when interest in ideology and serious policy issues was being replaced by politics as entertainment, a stage on which humorists and hacks could prove themselves wittier than elected parliamentarians. Unsurprisingly, this would not result in a better-run country.
After a spate of transport disasters there was a widespread feeling that large investment was needed in the country’s infrastructure. French and British engineers celebrated in 1990 when they met under the Channel. Mobile phone use was tiny by modern standards, mainly confined to commercial business travellers’ cars and a few much-mocked City slickers carrying objects the size of a brick. The computer age was further advanced. The Thatcher years had seen a glittering waterfall of new products and applications, most of them generated in California’s new ‘silicon valley’, a hotbed of computer inventiveness recognized by name as early as 1971. The revolutionary Apple II computer had been launched in 1977, followed by Tandys, Commodores and Ataris with their floppy disks and basic games. The first IBM personal computer had arrived in 1981, using the unfamiliar MS-DOS operating system by a little known company called Microsoft. The Commodore 64 of the following year would become the best-selling computer of all time, though there were British computers: here, Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum computer caught most of the headlines. Then in 1983 an IBM clone arrived, the Compaq, first of countless many, and the unveiling of Microsoft Word and Windows. A year later came the first Amstrad personal computer from the British entrepreneur Alan Sugar’s electronics company and, from the US, the Apple Macintosh. A cult novelist called William Gibson introduced a new word, cyberspace.
By the end of the eighties the hot new topics were virtual reality, computer gaming – Sim City was launched in 1989 – and the exponentially increasing power of microprocessors. Computer graphics were becoming common in films, even though they were clunky and basic by modern standards. But the biggest about-to-happen event was the internet itself. The single most significant achievement by a British person in the early nineties had nothing to do with politics. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stands alongside James Lovelock for influence above that of any politician. Today’s internet is a combination of technologies, from the satellites developing from the Soviet Sputnik success of 1957, to the US military programs to link computers, leading to the early ‘net’ systems developed by American universities, and the personal computer revolution itself. But Berners-Lee’s idea was for a worldwide hypertext – the computer-aided reading of electronic documents – to allow people to work together remotely, sharing their knowledge in a ‘web’ of documents. His creation of it would give the internet’s hardware its global voice.
Berners-Lee was an Oxford graduate who had made his first computer with a soldering iron and cut his teeth with British firms in Dorset, before moving to the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) in Switzerland in 1980. This is the world’s largest research laboratory where scientists were constantly evolving ways of communicating with one other by computer, so it is no coincidence that it was in Switzerland that Berners-Lee wrote his first program. In 1989 he proposed his hypertext revolution which arrived as ‘WorldWideWeb’ inside CERN in December 1990, and on the internet at large the following summer.
An admirably unflashy, decent man, Berners-Lee chose not to patent his creation, so that it would be free to everyone. He could have been fabulously wealthy but preferred to live the life of a moderately salaried academic, latterly in Boston, driving a second-hand car and living quietly. He was knighted in 2004 and, two years later, warned that misinformation and undemocratic forces were spreading through the web, calling for more research on its social consequences. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Margaret Thatcher, all this was still to come. There were articles proclaiming some kind of new computer world community taking shape, but they were confusing to most people. Would this internet be basically for scientists? Was it a new kind of telephone-cum-typewriter, or an automated library system? Nobody knew for sure. In 1990 there were no ‘www’ prefixes, no dotcoms.