United Kingdom in 2000

244,101 sq km (94,248 sq mi)
(2000 est.): 59,714,000
Queen Elizabeth II
Prime Minister Tony Blair

Domestic Affairs

Public confidence in the U.K.’s Labour government, headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, was severely shaken in 2000 by a crisis that erupted suddenly in September and came close to bringing the country’s economy to a standstill. A loosely knit group of farmers and truckers set out to protest the high cost of fuel. As in other countries, fuel prices in the U.K. had risen sharply following the rise in crude oil prices on the world market. In addition, fuel taxes in the U.K. were the highest in Europe. The protesters blockaded the U.K.’s oil refineries and for three days managed to prevent most gasoline and diesel supplies from reaching gas stations, industry, or public services such as hospitals. Only when it became clear that their action was having a far more drastic impact than they expected and that the support they had enjoyed from most of the public was threatening to evaporate did they suspend their blockade. They did, however, warn that they would resume it in 60 days if the government failed to tackle the cause of their complaint. On November 8, one week before the expiry of the 60 days, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer, announced small reductions in the duty (tax) on diesel and “clean,” low-sulfur gasoline. This was enough to prevent immediate further disruptions; reductions in December in the world price of crude oil also helped to defuse the protests.

Nevertheless, in the short term, the damage to the government’s reputation was severe. Labour’s support fell by 10 points in two weeks—the sharpest fall recorded in the history of British government-approval opinion polls. Labour’s standing among its traditional working-class voters fell especially sharply. For the first time since 1992, the Conservative Party regained the lead. As life began to return to normal, however, so did political allegiances, although some damage to Labour’s standing persisted.

The fuel crisis was a symptom (and a sharp expression) of a wider malaise that afflicted Blair’s administration. During the year opinion polls found that increasing numbers of voters thought the government was losing its way, becoming arrogant, putting presentation before substance, and failing to deliver improvements to the main public services. These claims were not made only by the government’s political opponents. One of the harshest analyses was provided by Blair’s own polling adviser, Philip Gould. In a private memorandum, written in May but subsequently leaked to the media, Gould warned the prime minister of “a sense that for much of the last 18 months, the Government has been drifting, growing almost monthly weaker and more diffuse. . . . We have been assailed for spin and broken promises; we are not believed to have delivered; we are believed by a huge margin to be slowing down rather than speeding up.”

The government’s troubles were not all of its own making, and it could claim to be presiding over a successful economy, but it did seem to be paying the price for failing to think strategically. One vivid demonstration of this was provided by the House of Lords. In November 1999, as the first stage of a longer-term program to reform the Lords, most hereditary peers had been stripped of their right to attend. The government had allowed 92 to remain, most of them either Conservative or nonparty critics of the government. The effect was to ensure that Labour peers constituted only slightly over one-third of the new House of Lords. Throughout 2000 the antigovernment majority flexed its muscles more aggressively than it had ever done when the House of Lords was dominated by hereditary peers. Scarcely a week went by without the Lords’ defeating the government over some aspect of its legislation. Although the government had the power to reverse these defeats by invoking its majority in the House of Commons, the procedure for doing this was slow and cumbersome. The process significantly delayed the government’s program.

Blair faced different kinds of setbacks in other aspects of his constitutional reforms. On May 4, running as an independent, former Labour MP Ken Livingstone (see Biographies) won the election to be London’s first directly elected mayor. Labour’s candidate, Frank Dobson—a former health secretary in Blair’s cabinet—came in a poor third, winning only 13% of the vote. (In the first count, Livingstone scored 39%, with Steven Norris, the Conservative candidate, coming in second with 27%. With no candidate winning 50%, all except the top two were eliminated and the second preferences of the eliminated candidates taken into account. Livingstone defeated Norris on the second count by 58–42%.) Labour also fared badly in separate elections on the same day to the new Greater London Assembly, winning just 30% of the party vote (almost 20 points less than its share in the 1997 general election), compared with 29% for the Conservatives, 15% for the Liberal Democrats, 11% for the Greens, and 15% for other parties.

In Wales Alun Michael resigned as first secretary on February 9, forestalling a vote of no confidence that he looked certain to lose. Michael had been Blair’s favoured candidate for the post, but he had never gained the full confidence of Labour Party members in Wales, many of whom felt that he had been imposed on them in place of their preferred candidate, Rhodri Morgan. Following Michael’s resignation, Morgan was appointed unopposed. He sought to bolster Labour’s position in the Welsh Assembly (where the party had 29 out of 60 seats and, therefore, did not command a majority) by seeking cooperation with the Liberal Democrats. This led to a formal coalition between the two parties, agreed to on October 5.

In Scotland, where a Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition had been in operation since the election of the country’s first Parliament in May 1999, upheaval came out of the blue. First Minister Donald Dewar, often called “the father of the nation” as a tribute to his central role in bringing Scotland to devolution, died suddenly on October 11. (See Obituaries.) He was succeeded as Labour leader in Scotland, and as first minister, by Scotland’s enterprise minister, Henry McLeish.

Perhaps the greatest running controversy in the U.K. during 2000 concerned the Millennium Dome, a vast circular tentlike structure 320 m (1,050 ft) in diameter—the largest enclosed space in the world. Built with money from the National Lottery, it was located in Greenwich, southeast London, next to the prime meridian line. The dome’s purpose was to house a visitor attraction to celebrate different facets of British life at the start of the new millennium. It attracted only half the 12 million visitors expected, however, and needed regular injections of extra cash from the lottery to pay its bills. The decision, supported by the government, to hand over extra money diverted from other causes was widely condemned.

The National Lottery itself became a subject of controversy. It had been operated by Camelot, a company created solely for the purpose, since its birth in 1994. In August 2000 the National Lottery Commission announced that Camelot would not have its license renewed for the lottery’s second seven-year term, due to start in late 2001. Instead, negotiations would be held with The People’s Lottery (TPL), headed by flamboyant entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. Camelot went to court arguing that the commission had acted wrongly. In September the court ruled in Camelot’s favour and instructed the commission to look afresh at Camelot’s proposal’s alongside TPL’s. This provoked the resignation of the commission’s chairman. The new chairman, Lord Burns, reviewed both bids. On December 19 the commission announced that it would award the license to Camelot after all.

A fatal rail accident on October 17 had widespread repercussions. Four people were killed when an intercity express came off the rails at Hatfield, 32 km (20 mi) north of London. It quickly became clear that the track itself had been defective. Railtrack, the privately owned company that had operated the U.K.’s tracks since privatization in 1996, was criticized for putting profits before safety—a charge that the company strenuously denied. Safety checks elsewhere on the rail network uncovered other potential defects, however, and the rail system was disrupted for some weeks as low speed limits were imposed on many sections of track while the defective rails were replaced.

Some of the blame was directed at the Conservatives for the way they had privatized the rail system when they were in control of the government. A week after the Hatfield crash, the Conservatives came under fire again with the publication of the report from an official inquiry into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), widely known as “mad cow” disease. The inquiry found that some civil servants and Conservative ministers had failed to divulge the full truth in the late 1980s and early ’90s about the dangers of BSE’s crossing the species barrier and infecting humans. By the end of 2000, some 80 people in the U.K. had died of the human variant of BSE.

Economic Affairs

The U.K. enjoyed its eighth consecutive year of expansion as the economy grew by 3% and unemployment fell to 5%. Meanwhile, inflation remained subdued, with the underlying rate staying close to 2% throughout the year. The Bank of England raised its main “repo” interest rate early in the year in two stages from 5.5% to 6%, but the rate then remained unchanged for the rest of the year. The continuing strength of sterling continued to worry exporters, particularly manufacturers. The British currency was caught in the crossfire between a strong dollar and a weak euro; the pound lost around 10% of its value against the dollar during the year, but sterling gained further ground against the euro to end the year around 15% higher than when the euro was launched in January 1999.

In July Brown unveiled plans to raise public spending by 10% in real terms over the three years 2001–04, with the largest increases for public transport, education, and the National Health Service. In November he announced above-inflation increases for 2001 and 2002 in state retirement pensions as well as the cuts in diesel- and low-sulfur-gasoline taxes.

Public finances remained in surplus, which allowed the government to reduce the national debt. The prospects for continuing surpluses were aided by the auction in April of the third generation of mobile telephone licenses. Expected to raise around £3 billion (about $4.4 billion), they ended up raising £22.5 billion (about $32.6 billion). The success of this auction prompted a number of other countries, especially in Europe, to copy the U.K.’s example.

The continuing strength of sterling caused special problems for the U.K.’s motor industry. In March the German company Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) announced that it was selling its U.K. subsidiary, Rover Cars. Rover was eventually acquired by a newly formed consortium, Phoenix, headed by a former Rover executive. Phoenix immediately embarked on a program of rationalization and job reduction. In the second half of 2000, Rover was producing cars at only one-third the rate of just three years earlier. In May the Ford Motor Co. unveiled plans to end volume car production at its main U.K. factory, at Dagenham, in east London.

Some manufacturers with British subsidiaries—especially Japanese companies—warned that they would eventually scale back their investment in the U.K. if it remained outside the European single currency. The government, however, refused to shift from its policy of waiting until the right economic conditions materialized. In October Blair gave his clearest warning yet that this day was still some way off when he said that if a referendum was held then, he would vote against joining the euro.

Foreign Affairs

In October Blair set out his vision for Europe in a major speech in Warsaw. He criticized the European Union (EU) for losing touch with its people: “The citizens of Europe must feel that they own Europe, not that Europe owns them.” He called for the EU to draw up a “charter of competences” that would set out the limits to its power and so stop it from drifting toward becoming a federal state. This way, he argued, “the EU will remain a unique combination of the intergovernmental and the supranational. Such a Europe can, in its economic and political strength, be a superpower—a superpower not a superstate.”

The former dictator of Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, was finally allowed to return home on March 2. Pinochet had been arrested during a visit to the U.K. 17 months earlier after Spain requested that he be extradited on charges of having tortured Spanish citizens during his period in office. The U.K. home secretary, Jack Straw (see Biographies), decided to let him return to Chile after a team of doctors concluded that Pinochet was “at present unfit to face trial” and that “no change to that position can be expected.”

Northern Ireland






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