|Area:||244,101 sq km (94,248 sq mi)|
|Population||(2002 est.): 60,178,000|
|Chief of state:||Queen Elizabeth II|
|Head of government:||Prime Minister Tony Blair|
The year 2002 was noteworthy as the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II (see Biographies), who had ascended to the throne in 1952. The two months of official celebrations, however, were preceded by the deaths of her sister, Princess Margaret, and their mother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and were followed by a controversial court case toward year’s end.
In November the queen faced criticism for having held back evidence in the trial of Paul Burrell, a former butler to Diana, princess of Wales, the queen’s former daughter-in-law who had died in 1997. Burrell had been charged with the theft of some of Diana’s possessions after her death. Shortly before he was to give evidence at his trial—evidence that was widely expected to be embarrassing to the royal family—the queen disclosed that Burrell had told her at the time that he was looking after some of Diana’s effects. Once this information had been made known to the court, the trial collapsed. Although the queen was largely absolved from personal criticism, the event triggered a national debate about whether British monarchs should continue to be beyond the reach of the courts and police inquiries. After a series of controversies in previous years, this one added pressure on the monarchy to make further accommodation to the modern age.
The year was no less turbulent for Prime Minister Tony Blair. (See Biographies.) He remained the commanding figure in British politics, but he faced economic difficulties, troubles inside his own government, tensions with the Labour Party’s traditional trade union allies, and a widespread popular perception that public services such as health, education, and transport had not improved since he took office in 1997.
Two cabinet ministers resigned following intense criticism of their performance in office. On May 28 Stephen Byers stood down as secretary of state for transport, local government, and the regions. He was blamed for continuing troubles on Britain’s railways, which most travelers regarded as having deteriorated since they were privatized in 1996. Events came to a head when Byers’s former press secretary alleged that Byers had misled the House of Commons. Although Byers refuted the allegations, he eventually resigned, admitting that he would “damage the government” if he stayed in office. In the reshuffle that followed, Blair appointed Paul Boateng as Britain’s first black cabinet minister. Boateng became chief secretary to the treasury—in effect, the deputy of Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer.
On October 23 Estelle Morris resigned as education secretary. Like Byers, she had faced weeks of pressure, in her case over a variety of specific problems ranging from errors in the marking of A-level examinations (the tests used to allocate university places) to severe delays in criminal records checks on school employees. (The checks had been ordered following the deaths of two young girls and the arrest of a part-time teacher and school janitor for their murder.) When Morris, herself a former teacher, resigned, she made the unusual admission for a front-rank politician that she was “not good at dealing with the modern media” and, more generally, “not as effective as I should be, or as effective as you [Blair] need me to be.”
Internal Labour Party matters caused Blair some concern through the year. Against a backdrop of declining membership—down by almost a third since 1997, from 405,000 to 280,000 in 2002—the party suffered severe financial problems. On January 2 the General, Municipal and Boilermakers’ Union, one of the largest trade unions (traditionally Labour’s biggest sources of income), announced that it would reduce its donations to the party by £2 million (£1 = about $1.58) over five years, in protest against the increasing use of private management in the public sector. Other large unions followed suit. Labour’s attempts to compensate by seeking money from the private sector backfired when, on May 12, it was disclosed that the party had received money from Richard Desmond, the proprietor of the Daily Express tabloid newspaper and publisher of a number of pornographic magazines.
Against this backdrop, the Conservatives might have expected strong advances as Britain’s main opposition party. In fact, the party remained well behind in the opinion polls, and its leader, Iain Duncan Smith, found it difficult to make headway. Opinion polls asking who would make the best prime minister found that he trailed far behind Blair and even behind Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. On July 23 Duncan Smith sacked David Davis as Conservative Party chairman and replaced him with Theresa May, the first woman to hold the post, in an attempt to revive the party’s fortunes.
May and Duncan Smith sought to assert their authority over a party increasingly divided between modernizers and traditionalists. The modernizers wanted an active strategy to secure more women and ethnic minority Conservative MPs and to end the party’s hostility toward unmarried and gay couples and single parents; traditionalists largely opposed these plans. The leader and the chairman appeared to side with the modernizers when, on July 29, they welcomed the acknowledgement by Alan Duncan, the deputy foreign affairs spokesman, that he was gay. He was the first Conservative MP ever to volunteer such a statement. At the party’s annual conference, May said that the Conservatives had to shed their image as the “nasty” party; Duncan Smith said the party needed to come to terms with “the way life in Britain is lived today, and not the way it was lived 20 years ago.”
Less than a month later, however, Duncan Smith upset the modernizers when he committed his party to opposing government plans to allow unmarried and gay couples to apply to adopt children. One member of Duncan Smith’s shadow cabinet resigned, and one in four Conservative MPs failed to support the party line in a vote in Parliament on November 4. The following day Duncan Smith delivered a short speech to the media in which he said, “A small group of my parliamentary colleagues have decided consciously to undermine my leadership.” He concluded, “My message is simple: unite or die.”
One major piece of social reform was unveiled on July 10 when Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that cannabis (marijuana) would be downgraded from a “class B” to a “class C” drug. Although possession of the drug would technically remain a criminal offense, in practice those in possession of small quantities would no longer be prosecuted. Blunkett announced that this change would free police forces to devote more resources to fighting drug dealers and the users of “hard” drugs such as heroin and cocaine.