alternatehistory.com
Part 24: United Kingdom (1991-2000)
...By 1991, voters were tired of the Conservatives, with the party having been in power for 16 years. Heseltine himself faced the unenviable position of trying to maintain a functioning government with Ulster Unionist support while his leadership rivals spent more time gathering support for an inevitable leadership election once the party lost power than focusing on the next general election, as internal polls had shown the Tories behind since the end of 1989.
Kinnock's stand against the Conservative proposals for local devolution in Scotland and Wales gave the Conservatives one lifeline out of a massacre and the party took it, polling surprisingly high in both Scotland and Wales even as their numbers dipped across the entire kingdom. As such, it was no surprise that the only gains the Conservatives made during the 1991 election were in those two regions.
Labour won a majority and despite the Democrats' overall vote share decreasing slightly, the third party won seats owing to the reduced Conservative vote share. Heseltine announced his resignation as Conservative leader the following day, having (quite correctly) realized he had no support within the party left after five years at the helm and the frontbench having long since decided he would leave after the election. Kinnock took office as the second Welsh prime minister, ironically being one of the fiercest opponents of a Welsh assembly in the new cabinet.
The new Labour government set about on an ambitious program: school and criminal sentencing reforms, renewed focus on pursuing peace in Northern Ireland, jump-starting work on the British side of the Channel Tunnel project (which had barely begun by the time Heseltine left office) and House of Lords reform. With a working majority of 20, Kinnock's government went to work, bringing British criminal laws in line with European Union standards, and getting the "Chunnel" finished just in time for the 1995 elections. Even more important was, with the mediation of American Secretary of State George Mitchell, the signing of the Belfast Agreement between the UK, Republic of Ireland, and almost all major parties for the loyalist and republican camps. The Agreement set out a comprehensive peace plan for Northern Ireland and ended violence except a few attacks by dead-end holdouts, the last of which occurred in 2002. A referendum, held the same day as the 1995 election, ratified the agreement by both Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic communities and after decades of conflict, peace returned to Northern Ireland.
The 1995 election result was a rerun of the 1991 results, with Conservative leader Norman Lamont failing to make headway against the government. David Penhaligon, the man who had brought the Democratic Party to new heights, retired afterwards, handing the party over to Scottish MP Charles Kennedy. The government then moved to reform the House of Lords, with the goal of making the second chamber entirely elected. This proved to be too much and Kinnock decided instead to implement gradual reforms, first stripping the right of hereditary peers to sit in the chamber. The hereditary peers (and some of the life peers) stood almost entirely in lockstep against this proposal, threatening to derail the reform. Another compromise was worked out, removing all but 100 hereditary peers instead, alongside limiting the ability of the prime minister to "pack" the Lords by setting limits on the amount of new peerages that could be created on a yearly basis.
The end of the Warsaw Pact and Bern Accords had a great impact on Britain, just like the rest of Europe. Eastern European immigrants, especially former East Germans, moved to Britain from their homelands, which began to cause a backlash, especially among working-class Britons who were the primary competitors of the new immigrants. Kinnock dismissed many of these concerns as lingering bigotries until poll numbers showed that the Conservatives, under new leader Michael Portillo, were making serious inroads into certain Labour constituencies after putting out an anti-Europe manifesto. Attempting to head off this threat, Kinnock came out for a so-called "immigration fee" for potential immigrants from former communist regimes, citing the "fiscal burden" imposed on Britons to accommodate poorer immigrants. This was an unmitigated disaster, with the government quickly backpedaling after the fee was called racist and opponents pointing out that, even if enacted it wouldn't work: former East Germans would still legally be able to move to Britain without such a burden as they were citizens of a fellow EU nation and could not be levied such a fee.
The immigration fee debacle and refusal of Kinnock to consider devolution to Scotland or Wales catalyzed enough Labour MPs to make an aborted challenge to Kinnock's leadership in 1998. The prime minister survived easily, but was shaken in the amount of his caucus and of the party members in general who had backed Ken Livingston, the left-wing stalking horse candidate who stood against him.
With Labour's poll numbers increasingly on shaky ground and with his backbench restless, Kinnock felt he had no choice but to call an early election in 1999 to prevent falling from power. A series of blunders by Portillo and his frontbench team resulted in both Labour and the Democrats staunching their respective bleeding with Labour abandoning its attempts at appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment by portraying the Conservatives as scapegoating minorities for problems that had resulted from Conservative misrule in the 1970s and 1980s and which Labour was working to fix.
As a result, Labour fell one seat short of a formal majority and lost the popular vote. Due to the abstentionist policies of Sinn Féin, however, Labour had an informal one-seat majority and Kinnock was able to remain prime minister, however he was significantly weakened. The prime minister was able to get parliament to agree to provide troops for the MINUSTAC mission in the Congo, but even this proved to be troublesome, as several embarrassing defections among left-wing members of the party (who viewed the endeavor as being a colonialist venture to gain access to the Congo's natural resources) and other foreign policy specialists (who foresaw the difficulties that would soon plague MINUSTAC from working as intended).
Kinnock, tired and under increasing strain dealing with a knife-thin majority, announced he would step down in 2000 upon the Labour Party electing his successor, after 15 years leading the party and leading Britain for nine....
Kinnock's stand against the Conservative proposals for local devolution in Scotland and Wales gave the Conservatives one lifeline out of a massacre and the party took it, polling surprisingly high in both Scotland and Wales even as their numbers dipped across the entire kingdom. As such, it was no surprise that the only gains the Conservatives made during the 1991 election were in those two regions.
Labour won a majority and despite the Democrats' overall vote share decreasing slightly, the third party won seats owing to the reduced Conservative vote share. Heseltine announced his resignation as Conservative leader the following day, having (quite correctly) realized he had no support within the party left after five years at the helm and the frontbench having long since decided he would leave after the election. Kinnock took office as the second Welsh prime minister, ironically being one of the fiercest opponents of a Welsh assembly in the new cabinet.
The new Labour government set about on an ambitious program: school and criminal sentencing reforms, renewed focus on pursuing peace in Northern Ireland, jump-starting work on the British side of the Channel Tunnel project (which had barely begun by the time Heseltine left office) and House of Lords reform. With a working majority of 20, Kinnock's government went to work, bringing British criminal laws in line with European Union standards, and getting the "Chunnel" finished just in time for the 1995 elections. Even more important was, with the mediation of American Secretary of State George Mitchell, the signing of the Belfast Agreement between the UK, Republic of Ireland, and almost all major parties for the loyalist and republican camps. The Agreement set out a comprehensive peace plan for Northern Ireland and ended violence except a few attacks by dead-end holdouts, the last of which occurred in 2002. A referendum, held the same day as the 1995 election, ratified the agreement by both Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic communities and after decades of conflict, peace returned to Northern Ireland.
The 1995 election result was a rerun of the 1991 results, with Conservative leader Norman Lamont failing to make headway against the government. David Penhaligon, the man who had brought the Democratic Party to new heights, retired afterwards, handing the party over to Scottish MP Charles Kennedy. The government then moved to reform the House of Lords, with the goal of making the second chamber entirely elected. This proved to be too much and Kinnock decided instead to implement gradual reforms, first stripping the right of hereditary peers to sit in the chamber. The hereditary peers (and some of the life peers) stood almost entirely in lockstep against this proposal, threatening to derail the reform. Another compromise was worked out, removing all but 100 hereditary peers instead, alongside limiting the ability of the prime minister to "pack" the Lords by setting limits on the amount of new peerages that could be created on a yearly basis.
The end of the Warsaw Pact and Bern Accords had a great impact on Britain, just like the rest of Europe. Eastern European immigrants, especially former East Germans, moved to Britain from their homelands, which began to cause a backlash, especially among working-class Britons who were the primary competitors of the new immigrants. Kinnock dismissed many of these concerns as lingering bigotries until poll numbers showed that the Conservatives, under new leader Michael Portillo, were making serious inroads into certain Labour constituencies after putting out an anti-Europe manifesto. Attempting to head off this threat, Kinnock came out for a so-called "immigration fee" for potential immigrants from former communist regimes, citing the "fiscal burden" imposed on Britons to accommodate poorer immigrants. This was an unmitigated disaster, with the government quickly backpedaling after the fee was called racist and opponents pointing out that, even if enacted it wouldn't work: former East Germans would still legally be able to move to Britain without such a burden as they were citizens of a fellow EU nation and could not be levied such a fee.
The immigration fee debacle and refusal of Kinnock to consider devolution to Scotland or Wales catalyzed enough Labour MPs to make an aborted challenge to Kinnock's leadership in 1998. The prime minister survived easily, but was shaken in the amount of his caucus and of the party members in general who had backed Ken Livingston, the left-wing stalking horse candidate who stood against him.
With Labour's poll numbers increasingly on shaky ground and with his backbench restless, Kinnock felt he had no choice but to call an early election in 1999 to prevent falling from power. A series of blunders by Portillo and his frontbench team resulted in both Labour and the Democrats staunching their respective bleeding with Labour abandoning its attempts at appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment by portraying the Conservatives as scapegoating minorities for problems that had resulted from Conservative misrule in the 1970s and 1980s and which Labour was working to fix.
As a result, Labour fell one seat short of a formal majority and lost the popular vote. Due to the abstentionist policies of Sinn Féin, however, Labour had an informal one-seat majority and Kinnock was able to remain prime minister, however he was significantly weakened. The prime minister was able to get parliament to agree to provide troops for the MINUSTAC mission in the Congo, but even this proved to be troublesome, as several embarrassing defections among left-wing members of the party (who viewed the endeavor as being a colonialist venture to gain access to the Congo's natural resources) and other foreign policy specialists (who foresaw the difficulties that would soon plague MINUSTAC from working as intended).
Kinnock, tired and under increasing strain dealing with a knife-thin majority, announced he would step down in 2000 upon the Labour Party electing his successor, after 15 years leading the party and leading Britain for nine....
- lord caedus
- Word Count: 1.1k