Class Resilience

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.

Celebrity Culture

The nineties was a decade in thrall to the tremendous cultural and commercial attractions of celebrity. If, in hindsight, the seventies seem forever marked by memories of the Winter of Discontent, and the eighties by the dominating presence of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the signature cultural moment of the nineties was the extravagant national response to the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana embodied the glamour, beauty and charisma associated with celebrity, and enjoyed the capacity to furnish people with dreams that took them outside their workaday existence. Diana’s alluring public persona was founded on the fabricated fairy tale princess narrative constructed for her by the Royal Family, a compliant and sometimes complicit media, and by herself. The truth was murkier and far more complex.

New Ethnicities

The previous chapter suggested that the United Kingdom was less united, and perhaps less of a kingdom, in 1999 than 1990, partly the result of the redistribution of political power via the different acts of devolution that opened up new forms of self-determination to the constituent nations of Britain. That chapter also argued that these political and bureaucratic changes reflected complex and often subtle changes in the ways that Britons understood themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English. These developments were not solely the product of the decade, but were accelerated by some of the cultural energies and arguments that came to the fore in the 1990s.

Conclusion: Endings and Beginnings

Will it work? Of course. Will it be ready on time? Certainly. Probably. Maybe. The Government is prepared to throw as much money into the hole as it takes (around £758 million and rising). They can’t fail. This is their Big Idea. The vision thing made manifest. A celebration of that which is to come (with heavily edited highlights of whatever has been achieved in the last thousand years of human history that is not offensive to BT, Manpower, Marks and Spencer, Sky, Tesco, McDonald’s and anybody else prepared to chip in £12 million)....

Love in the Nineties

The lyrics from Blur’s ‘Girls and Boys’ advertise a simultaneously troubling, ambiguous and celebratory reading of love and sexuality in the nineties. The clip that accompanied the song revels in the festive and (apart from two ambiguous shaven headed figures tongue kissing) the heterosexual, mostly featuring partying British teenagers and twenty-somethings. The words that precede those quoted above – ‘Streets like a jungle / So call the police / Following the herd / Down to Greece / On holiday’ – explain the paranoia somewhat, while presenting a garish snapshot of the slightly mindless hedonism of British youth. The words immediately following those quoted above – ‘Always should be someone you really love’ – sanction sexual freedom, while requiring some level of emotional responsibility. The playful and slightly risqué ambiguity of girls who are boys who like girls to be boys also reflects the increasing acceptance of diverse sexualities.

United Kingdom?

Post-war Britain has long been seen as a nation in decline: the loss of imperial territory and international clout from 1945 onwards undeniable and inexorable facts that exposed the fantasy that Britain remained a Great Power. That fantasy was still viable during conferences at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 that set the boundaries for a new, Cold War, geography. The Suez Crisis of 1956 is an oft-recited marker of decline, exposing the myth of British imperial reach, and prompting US Secretary of State’s Dean Acheson’s crushing evaluation that Great Britain had lost an Empire but had not yet found a role. The 1980s might be read as slowing the pace of decline, the Thatcher government under its forthright, pro-American leader attempting to re-establish Britain’s credentials on the world stage.

Fantasiecle

An English computer whizz invented the twenty-first century. This, of course, is a fantastic claim, but Tim Berners-Lee rightly gets credited for inventing the World Wide Web, which became operational in the 1990s, and which quickly began to shape the way people around the globe learn, communicate, trade, debate, are manipulated, scrutinised and entertained, fall in and out of love, reinvent their identities, engage in politics, and indulge their fantasies and sexual desires. Such a state of affairs might have seemed impossible, or indeed unthinkable, for much of the twentieth century, the stuff of science fiction, although another Englishman had proposed something similar in the late 1930s.

Rewriting the Past

Historian David Cannadine claimed in 2004 that the Britain of the late 1990s and early 2000s was interested in history to an unprecedented level. Cannadine judged that this interest was widely dispersed ‘among publishers, in the newspapers, on radio and in film, and (especially) on television; and from the general public who, it seemed, could not get enough of it’. Translating this interest to ‘the market-oriented language of our day, it looked as though more history was being produced and consumed than ever before’ (quoted in Korte and Pirker 2011: 11). Yet history itself was not the only growth area, literary historian Jerome de Groot noting in 2010 that ‘at present the Historical Novel is in robust health, critically, formally and economically’.

Introduction: Beginnings and Endings

Assassination is a hyperbolic way of describing the toppling of political leaders in a parliamentary democracy. Perversely, through the 1990s, the person in Britain most vulnerable to actual assassination was a writer: Salman Rushdie. His novel The Satanic Verses had been published in 1988 to critical acclaim (winning the Whitbread Best Novel prize) and almost instant attack from sections of the Muslim community in Britain and beyond. The Satanic Verses was banned in India and South Africa, and burned publicly in Bradford in the late 1980s. Some Muslims regarded the book as a slur on Mohammed specifically and on their religion more generally. Because Islam is a global religion, the fury unleashed spread around the Muslim world, culminating in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwah, or formal opinion, in February 1989, calling on devout Muslims to kill Rushdie.