261. Cool Britannia

The Blair government threw itself into action as soon as it was formed.

Rather confirming the existence of a deal between them, something they’ve never confirmed, Blair quickly appointed Gordon Brown Chancellor. As well as steps, such as making the Bank of England independent and introducing a minimum wage, on which they fully agreed, there’s also evidence that, as suspected, Blair had promised Brown authority of his own, unprecedented for a Chancellor, over social security.

Brown focused on families with children and on pensioners, and his reforms did bring in a significant redistribution of wealth, increasing the incomes of the poorest at the expense of the richest. Strangely, however, this led to no reduction in inequality: since the 1980s, the time of Thatcher and Reagan, the pressure towards growing inequality, whose effect we feel strongly today in the power of so-called oligarchs, had been sustained and was apparently irresistible.

The Blair government acted to improve gay rights, equalising the age of consent for straight and gay sex, abolishing the notorious Section 28 and introducing civil partnerships for gay couples.

It also worked on devolution, with parliaments set up for both Scotland and Wales, with substantial powers though nothing like independence, and a new strategic authority for London, which had been without one since Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council in 1986.

When it came to Northern Ireland, there was still a lot of work to do. Referendums in both the Republic and in the North endorsed the Good Friday Agreement, despite far lower enthusiasm among Northern Protestants than among Catholics in the province and citizens of the Republic. Now there was some hard, detailed work to do to implement the agreement. That would include a sad collateral casualty. That, though, is something which we’ll talk about next week.

Illustration: Blair and Brown, working in partnership. For now, Photo from 'The New Statesman’.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License