United Kingdom in 2003

244,101 sq km (94,248 sq mi)
(2003 est.): 59,164,000
Queen Elizabeth II
Prime Minister Tony Blair

Domestic Affairs

British politics in 2003 was dominated by the domestic repercussions of the Iraq war. Two cabinet members resigned from the government: Robin Cook, the leader of the House of Commons (and previously foreign secretary), on March 17 in protest against “the decision to commit Britain now to military action in Iraq without international agreement or domestic support,” and Clare Short (see Biographies), the international development secretary, on May 12, saying that Prime Minister Tony Blair had reneged on a pledge to work through the United Nations to rebuild Iraq following the war.

These events took place against a backdrop of public opinion that until mid-March was hostile to military action outside the UN, then was broadly supportive of the war while it lasted and during its immediate aftermath, and after that, from June onward, was increasingly skeptical about the case that Blair and other ministers had made for regarding Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein as a dangerous threat.

These controversies were heightened by accusations by British Broadcasting Corporation reporter Andrew Gilligan that Blair had knowingly misled the public in September 2002 when a government report stated that Saddam was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at 45 minutes’ notice. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, accused the BBC and Gilligan of having made serious allegations that were untrue and that were not checked prior to being published. (Gilligan’s reports appeared both on the BBC and in the newspaper Mail on Sunday.)

Much turned on the reliability of Gilligan’s source. On July 4 David Kelly, a WMD expert who worked for the Ministry of Defence, admitted to his line manager that he had spoken to Gilligan. Kelly’s name was confirmed to journalists on July 9. On July 15–16 Kelly gave evidence to two different committees of MPs inquiring into the buildup to war. Clearly under strain, he denied he was the source of Gilligan’s most controversial allegations. Kelly left his Oxfordshire home on July 17, telling his wife that he was going for a walk. The following morning he was found dead, with one of his wrists severely slashed.

Blair immediately announced a public inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly’s death. The immediate cause was not disputed; Kelly had committed suicide. The inquiry, however, which was conducted by Lord Hutton, a senior judge, effectively turned into an inquiry into the conduct of the government in the build-up to war. Many of the principal politicians and officials gave evidence, ranging from Blair to Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6. This was the first time a chief of MI-6 had ever been questioned in public. Like all the officials and politicians questioned, he denied that either ministers or the intelligence services had deliberately exaggerated the threat from Saddam. Nevertheless, the inquiry (whose report was expected to be published in January 2004) uncovered evidence of doubts within the middle ranks of the intelligence community about some of the statements made before the war. It also transpired that Saddam’s capacity to unleash WMD within 45 minutes of an order’s being given related solely to battlefield weapons and not—in contradiction to many reports at the time—to any capacity to attack British or other Western targets outside Iraq.

Short’s resignation led to the appointment of the first black woman member of a British cabinet. Baroness Amos succeeded Short in May as secretary of state for international development. Five months later she was promoted to become leader of the House of Lords. One of her tasks was to secure the next stage of reform of the Lords. Following the failure on February 4 of the House of Commons to construct a majority for any specific proposal for long-term reform, the government announced that as an interim measure it would prepare a bill to abolish the rights of the remaining 92 hereditary members to sit in the Lords. This would leave the Lords as a wholly appointed chamber. One additional reform was announced in June: the abolition of the post of lord chancellor, which had existed for almost 1,400 years. Lord Falconer (see Biographies) was appointed in June 2003 as its final holder, pending the post’s replacement in due course by a minister of a new Department for Constitutional Affairs.

Meanwhile, opinion polls were recording widespread disillusion with the Blair government—and not simply because of controversies concerning the Iraq war. Despite presiding over a reasonably strong economy, the government was widely perceived to be failing to improve public services such as health, education, and transport. On September 18 Labour lost one of its safest seats, the north London constituency of Brent East, in a by-election necessitated by the death of the sitting MP. This was the first seat that Labour had lost in a by-election since Blair became party leader in 1994. The seat was taken by the Liberal Democrats, the third largest party in the House of Commons.

The Brent result was bad not only for Labour but also for the Conservative Party, which came in a poor third. This added to pressure on Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. Even though the Conservatives made widespread gains in local elections held in May, he failed to establish the command over the political terrain that opposition leaders historically needed in the midterm of a Parliament in order to win the following general election. The party’s annual conference, held October 6–9, was marked by bitter factional infighting. Duncan Smith, who had been elected party leader two years earlier, pleaded for party unity; however, on October 29 Conservative MPs voted 90–75 to eject him and hold a new election for party leader. Only one person put his name forward: Michael Howard, an experienced right-wing politician who had served as home secretary in the previous Conservative government. He duly succeeded Duncan Smith on November 6.

In May the second round of elections took place for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. In Scotland the ruling Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition remained in power in the 129-seat Parliament, although Labour lost 6 seats to finish with 50, while the Liberal Democrats remained at 17. The Scottish Nationalists won 27 seats, a loss of 8, while the Conservatives held steady with 18. Two smaller parties made significant gains; the Greens won 7 seats, while the left-wing Scottish Socialist Party took 6; each party had previously held only one seat. The remaining four seats were won by three independents and one candidate standing for the Scottish Senior Citizens’ Unity Party.

In Wales Labour gained two seats, to end up with 30 out of a total of 60 seats in the Assembly. The Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru won 12 (down from 17), while the Conservatives won 11 (an increase of 2) and the Liberal Democrats were unchanged with 6. The final seat was won by a former Labour MP standing as an independent. With exactly half the seats, Labour decided to govern on its own, rather than continue the Labour–Liberal Democrat administration that had been in power before the election.

London saw a radical innovation: the introduction on February 17 of a daily £5 ($8) “congestion charge” on all cars entering the centre of the capital between 7 am and 6:30 pm, Monday to Friday. The aim of this, the first “road tax” of any large city in a major industrialized country, was both to reduce congestion and to raise money to invest in improvements in public transport. Fears that the new system would fail did not materialize. Despite some initial hiccups, the technology worked well. This involved cameras at each entry point photographing auto license plates, and penalty notices being sent to cars whose owners failed to pay the charge by 10 pm. Once the new system had settled down, traffic levels in central London were reduced 16%, and the average speed of traffic during the day was up by 37%, from 13 km/hr (8 mph) to 17 km/hr (11 mph).

Economic Affairs

Economic growth remained below trend in 2003, at about 2% a year, but this was a higher growth rate than in most major economies and was sufficient to prevent any significant rise in the U.K.’s low levels of unemployment. Against this, the slow growth meant that government borrowing rose faster than Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer, had predicted. By December, Brown had admitted that borrowing in the 2003–04 fiscal year would climb to £37 billion ($62 billion). In the short run he was under no pressure to raise taxes, but many economists predicted that within two or three years the government would have to either raise taxes further or reduce its ambitious plans to increase spending on public services. In July the Bank of England reduced its benchmark “repo” interest rate to 3.5%, the lowest level since January 1955. This lasted until November, when the Bank announced the first increase in almost four years, to 3.75%, in response to evidence that economic growth had started to recover.

On June 9 Brown announced the results of five tests he had originally said, in October 1997, had to be passed if the government was to call a referendum to recommend that the U.K. enter the European Union’s single currency. He reported that despite considerable progress, only one of the tests—that joining the euro would be good for the U.K.’s financial services industry—had been unambiguously passed. In particular, recent signs of convergence in the economic cycles of the U.K. and the euro zone were too fragile for the government to be certain that convergence would last. Although Blair wanted to keep open the option of a referendum before the next general election, which was due in 2005 or 2006, Brown’s announcement made it all but certain that any referendum would have to wait until the next Parliament at the earliest.

Foreign Affairs

In the early months of 2003, the U.K. worked with the United States to secure a UN resolution explicitly authorizing military action against Iraq. This led to tensions inside the EU, especially with France (like the U.K., a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council), which opposed any such resolution. On March 18, following the breakdown of negotiations at the UN, the House of Commons voted to commit British troops to a U.S.-led military action to remove Hussein from power. Blair told MPs: “The outcome of this issue … will determine the way in which Britain and the world confront the central security threat of the 21st century. … It will determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation.” (See United Nations: Special Report.)

Altogether, 45,000 British service personnel took part in the invasion, including 26,000 ground troops. Britain deployed 116 Challenger 2 tanks and 100 aircraft (including helicopters). The main function of the British contingent was to liberate southern Iraq, especially Basra. (Smaller numbers of British special forces were engaged in particular missions behind the lines in western and northern Iraq.) Following the war British troops continued to occupy Basra, seeking to restore civil society to the city. They adopted a “soft-hat” strategy, in which soldiers, wherever possible, patrolled the streets with only light arms and wore berets rather than hard hats. Postwar Iraqi resistance actions against the British troops in Basra were far fewer than U.S. troops faced in Baghdad, but sporadic assaults still took place.

Closer to home, on July 8 Blair welcomed the draft EU constitution, which had been drawn up by a group chaired by former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, as “a pretty good outcome for Britain.” The prime minister argued that it largely involved a tidying up of existing arrangements, in contrast to the Conservative Party and other critics, who said that the new constitution would take more powers from member states and transfer them to the EU. In negotiations over the new constitution, the U.K. had resisted attempts by some other EU members to extend majority voting to matters of foreign affairs and taxation. Nevertheless, polls showed widespread public hostility within the U.K. to the new constitution; when negotiations collapsed at the EU summit in Brussels on December 13, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw expressed only mild disappointment.

Northern Ireland

At the start of 2003, Northern Ireland was ruled directly from London, following the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive in October 2002. Negotiations aimed at easing the political tension and paving the way for new Assembly elections were slow and faltering. The elections, due to be held on May 1, were twice postponed—initially until May 29, and then until the autumn. Following the announcement on May 1 of the second suspension, the British and Irish governments issued a joint declaration about the future of the peace process. Britain promised to reduce the number of troops in the province and to give up its power to suspend the Assembly in return for a complete end to all paramilitary violence and the establishment of an independent monitoring body that would have the power to punish organizations, including political parties, associated with any outbreak of future paramilitary violence.

David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s first minister, made it clear, however, that he would resume his position and work with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, only if the IRA went farther than it had before to declare a complete end to its war against Northern Ireland’s status as part of the U.K. For some hours on October 21, following weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the deadlock appeared to have been broken as a rapid succession of carefully choreographed moves occurred. Britain announced that the Assembly elections would take place on November 26; Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, went farther than ever before to embrace purely political means for advancing the republican cause and opposing “any use or threat of force for any political purpose”; the IRA issued a statement endorsing Adams’s words; and Gen. John de Chastelain, the Canadian head of the independent body overseeing arms decommissioning, announced that the IRA had “put beyond use” a substantial quantity of arms that was “larger than the quantity put beyond use” previously.

Optimism that the peace process was back on track was punctured hours later by Trimble, who said that not enough had been done for the Ulster Unionists to reenter power sharing with the republicans. He declared that too little information had been given about the scale of the IRA’s latest act of decommissioning, and without more transparency from the IRA, he could not share power with Sinn Fein.

Nevertheless, fresh elections for the 108-seat Northern Ireland Assembly were held on November 26. The outcome was a setback for the two moderate parties that had championed the peace process—the Ulster Unionists and the mainly Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party. The Ulster Unionists lost one seat to end up with 27 and were overtaken as the largest party by the Democratic Unionists (30, up 10), which had consistently opposed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The SDLP (18 seats, down 6) was overtaken by Sinn Fein (24, up 6). Smaller parties won 9 seats in all, down 9. Following the elections, Blair decided not to revive the Northern Ireland executive for the time being, as it was clear that the two largest parties, the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein, would be unable to work together, as required by the Good Friday Agreement.

Meanwhile, additional evidence had come to light about what had happened during the conflict between 1969 and 1997 between the IRA and the British army. On April 17 Sir John Stevens, the head of London’s Metropolitan Police, published the results of an official inquiry into allegations of collusion between the British army and antirepublican “loyalist” (i.e., Protestant) terrorist groups. In his exceptionally tough report, Stevens reported that his inquiries had been obstructed by the army and local police officials. His own incident room had been destroyed by fire, which in his view was “a deliberate act of arson.” Nevertheless, he stated: “My enquiries have highlighted collusion, the willful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder. These serious acts and omissions have meant that people have been killed or seriously injured.”

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