Under Prime Minister William Hague there are two Britains, two sorts of life and two sorts of people as the policies of Believing in Britain were applied upon coming into power.
Hague immediately scrapped Local Education Authorities and national planning policies. He began to implement policies copied from George W Bush; public money was given to ‘faith-based’ charities to deliver essential welfare and services.
The effects were immediate. A crazy paving of cracks appeared between rich neighbourhoods and poor ones. Schools in affluent areas favoured the children they thought would get the best exam results – almost always those with the headstart affluence gave them. Schools in poorer areas struggled alone to cover the remedial costs, the security costs, and the special needs provision and travel costs for the children who were turned away.
Richer areas made full use of Hague’s ‘commonsense’ planning policies as a ‘nimbys’ charter. They refused any new housing, except executive homes, refused any new public buildings or transport improvements. In short, wealthy areas became tranquil parks, while poorer areas were crammed with new housing and roads.
Your postcode became your passport to public services. People in Highgate laid off in corporate restructuring could expect financial, moral and practical support from their mosque, church or synagogue. Those in nearby Tottenham could expect the soup and sermon treatment reminiscent of the Great Depression.
Then, after eighteen months or so, the Hague administration was hit hard by two financial problems.
He had promised to give everyone who wished it money towards a private pension. He also promised progressively to give each university an endowment of £1bn to set it ‘free’ from government. Both of these expenses were additional to current expenses. He also promised to lower taxes. Before coming into power he had identified just two potential savings, the running costs of Whitehall and welfare fraud. His government had no more success finding real savings there than previous Tory regimes. The balance sheet did not add up.
After vacillating for a year (during which the national debt doubled) he cut spending on health and education, raised money by privatising government agencies such as the Employment Service and raised consumer taxes, including VAT on fuel, while lowering income tax by a single penny.
At the same time his ambitious programme of giving welfare money to charities ran into scandal. In many cases it was simple. No-one knew what happened to the funds once they were handed over. In other cases, projects were discovered to be using government funds for ulterior motives. In one case, preaching against birth control, in another converting people to scientology.
William Hague imported the experimental ideology of the Republican Party wholesale. He had a single ambition for his administration: to go back to a point, somewhere between Queen Victoria and the Second World War, where Britain was an ordered quilt of neat symmetrical families, where those who lost their livelihood were looked after by their local parish and where criminals were outlaws, who could expect ruthless, peremptory punishment.
Of course, this past never existed. He had forgotten, or never knew, about the workhouses, the untreated diseases, the criminal rookeries where no police dared go, the Nicholas Nickelby schools, the awful culture of deference and subservience and all the other horrors that he now found resurrected and modernised.
Lastly, but must importantly for the long term, Britain’s relations with its closest trading partners and allies in Europe went to blazes. The typical MP in Hague’s party was now a young, right-wing ideologue male who hated Europe passionately, arrogantly believing it to be a collection of socialist basket cases. This hatred was so compulsive and unreasonable that Britain could no longer play a part in Europe. After several years of grandstanding and blocking from the Tories, the other European states eventually invited Britain to leave the EU and join the European Economic Area with Norway and Iceland. Britain lost its voice in its most important markets.
The Tories turned to America to join NAFTA, but discovered America was hardly interested now we had no voice in Europe. Quietly, investment and jobs bled away. The only growth industry was now tourism, from across the world people came to see the theme park orderliness of one half of Britain while averting their eyes from the other.