Текст книги "Glimpses of Britain. Reader"

Queen’s speech stresses respect and reform

by Matthew Tempest

The Guardian, May 17, 2005

Respect and reform emerged as the key themes of Labour’s third term today, as the Queen unveiled the government’s programme for the next 18 months.

A total of 45 bills were set out for the coming parliamentary session, which lasts until next November. The programme shows a strong emphasis on low-level crime, on terrorism and on continuing health and education reform and expansion.

The speech, written by Downing Street but delivered by the Queen in the House of Lords after a highly elaborate ceremony, said the government was committed to “fostering a culture of respect”.

The most controversial measures are likely to be the reintroduced bills for identity cards and for an offence of inciting religious hatred, although a draft counter-terrorism bill could prove provocative too.

With Labour’s majority reduced to 67 at the election, much will depend on the positions the Conservatives adopt under Michael Howard and their next leader. Only 19 Labour MPs voted against ID cards in the previous parliament.

Mr Blair declared the agenda was “quintessentially new Labour” in the short debate that followed the Queen’s Speech.

The Conservative leader Michael Howard, who will leave his post before all of the bills pass through parliament, pledged to support the government on changes to incapacity benefit and immigration measures, but stopped short of setting out the Tory position on ID cards.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, told MPs his party would “certainly maintain our opposition to ID cards”, saying the Lib Dems alone had been “consistent in our arguments” on the issue.

Combined Tory and Lib Dem opposition to any bill would mean only 34 Labour MPs would need to rebel to block the government.

Although the Queen’s brief speech lists the bills only in cursory detail – and is supposed to be strictly embargoed – much of it had been heavily trailed in advance, in particular the emphasis on crime.

A violent crime bill will include tougher laws on the sale of replica firearms, raising the minimum age on knife purchases from 16 to 18, and powers for headteachers to search pupils for knives.

There will also be a new offence of using children or innocent parties to hide or carry knives or guns. The speech confirmed plans for police to impose “alcohol disorder zones” to combat local binge-drinking problems.

The identity card bill allows for the gradual introduction of ID cards designed to combat benefit fraud. It will also include a new offence of having false identity documents.

There will also be a draft counter-terrorism bill, one of five draft measures announced alongside the 45 bills. The draft bill is thought to include the creation of offences of “acts preparatory to terrorism” and of “glorifying or condoning” acts of terrorism – terms vague enough to worry Labour’s backbench civil rights lobby.

On immigration and asylum, the speech confirms plans for a new bill including provisions to fingerprint visa applicants and introduce hi-tech travel documents.

Much of the legislation was promised in Labour’s “little red book” election manifesto, but some is leftover legislation that did not get through before the dissolution of the last parliament in April. About 20 to 30 bills would usually be the norm for a 12-month session.

On education, which the monarch described as “my government’s main priority”, the speech promises further reform “to improve quality and choice”.

An education bill will enable primary schools for the first time to become “foundation schools” and give the private sector a greater role in sponsoring city academies within the state schooling system, subject to a “fair admissions” policy.

The shake-up of the NHS will continue with a health bill introducing new measures designed to combat the MRSA hospital superbug. A separate bill will reform the NHS compensation system, designed to give more power to patients when their care goes wrong.

One potential flashpoint for government rebels will come with confirmation of an incapacity benefits bill, already outlined last year, which will stop the escalation of payments for the longer-term ill, and bring in penalties for those who are seen to be reluctant to re-enter employment.

On the thorny issue of pensions reform, the government promises a draft pensions bill based on the findings of the Turner review on the subject, expected later this year.

Among other measures proposed are: a reform of legal aid; a consumer credit bill to give greater protection to the public; a road safety bill to codify offences and penalties; a bill to create an umbrella anti-discrimination body; an EU referendum bill; a bill giving greater powers to the Welsh assembly; and a bill to combat voter fraud and increase ballot security.

One measure which has cross-party support is an Olympics bill, which would legislate necessary powers to construct the east London site if the capital is picked for the 2012 games in July.

Addressing MPs crammed into the entrance lobby of the House of Lords, the Queen confirmed that “proposals” would be brought forward for reform of the upper chamber. Labour’s manifesto promised a free vote on an elected Lords, with a commitment to remove the last remaining hereditary peers.

As is traditional, the Queen ended the address by announcing future royal visits, including trips to Canada, Malta, Australia and Singapore.

The New Edwardians

By Anthony Sampson

The Observer, July14, 2002

Do you want a baroque country house in Somerset, with a ballroom, eight bedrooms and an orangery in 300 acres of parkland, to spend Ј40 million on a Renaissance palace in Sussex, or a Palladian villa in 3,000 acres of Oxfordshire? You can have what you want, brand new.

Rich owners need no longer buy and renovate existing stately homes: they can build new ones, with both classical grandeur and modern luxuries. New country houses for the mega-rich – including City financiers, pop stars and foreign tax exiles – are rising up on a scale unknown since 1914. And the boom is transforming many rural areas, with social and political implications we are only now beginning to realise.

The new stately homes not only provide extraordinary architectural spectacles: they also give clues to the political and economic conditions of our time. For the first time in 90 years, they show the rich wanting to impress the populace with their wealth and taste.

The spate of mansion-building is partly the delayed result of the ambitions of John Gummer, Environment Secretary in the last Conservative government, to re-establish the country-house tradition. In 1997 “Gummer’s Law” allowed the rich to obtain special planning permission to build in open countryside – in places where more modest houses would be forbidden – provided that they were of architectural distinction.

We are seeing Gummer’s dream come true, as bold new structures emerge from the landscape all over Britain. But Gummer was only the catalyst for a deeper social change. For the rich are now reacquiring the desire to make their mark with high-profile mansions, whether on green fields or on the sites of earlier houses, provoking angry local disputes about the environment.

In south Wiltshire, where I spend weekends, a new palace designed by Quinlan Terry for the young Lord Rothermere has arisen below the downs, with rows of leylandii trees and elaborate security to protect it from the public. It is a much showier structure than the secluded old house in the next-door valley – once inhabited by Cecil Beaton – which has been bought by Madonna, who is more neighbour-friendly and visits the local shops and pubs.

A few miles away in Somerset, another newspaper proprietor, Peter Fowler, who owns a chain of local newspapers in Scotland, is determined to build a baroque mansion for Ј7m, on the edge of Cranborne Chase. Fowler’s agents, Savills, say it is of “outstanding beauty” and the local council claims it qualifies as an exceptional plan under Gummer’s Law. But conservationists, including representatives of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Council for the Protection of Rural England, insist the plan is detrimental to the landscape in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”.

The proposal will be debated by South Somerset Council on 23 July. The regional chairman of the CPRE, Roger Martin, warns that competition for personal space is acute. “The number of very rich people is rising, while open countryside is shrinking.”

The architect Robert Adam (no relation to his illustrious namesake), who is advising Fowler, is the most successful beneficiary of the new country-house boom: he is planning 30 more stately homes, and champions the assertiveness of the new rich. “If anyone complains any more about toffs doing this,” he has said, “I’ll throttle him.”

“There’s a lot of ebullient new money coming out, as well as old money,” he told me. “There’s no longer a negative attitude to new houses, or the inherent British modesty. New country houses provide one answer to the economic problems of the countryside, by helping to subsidise the land with jobs and building. It would be tragic if they were to be stopped by the politics of jealousy.”

All over Britain there are similar controversies. In Staffordshire, brewery heir John Greenall has built a mansion on the edge of the Peak District. In Hampshire, near King’s Somborne, a rich farmer, Tim Everett, is building a Palladian mansion, designed by Adam, with 11 bedrooms and a 50-acre park.

In the Chilterns, City banker Robert Gillespie is planning a Georgian pile on the site of an older house, designed by the neo-Georgian architect Giles Quarme. In Essex, businessman Peter Seers was given permission to build a nine-bedroom mansion at Great Canfield.

In Sussex, property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten, now on trial at the Old Bailey accused of murdering a business associate, has built the most preposterous of the new piles, Hamilton Palace, costing Ј30m, as a mausoleum to commemorate his fame.

In Oxfordshire, Arab arms dealer Wafic Said, who endowed the new business college at Oxford, is building a replica of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda in 3,000 acres of parkland for about Ј30m. In Scotland, Swedish heiress Lisbet Koerner is building a colossal hunting lodge designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, with granite imported from Portugal.

This spate of building conspicuous private mansions suggests a new confidence and ostentation among the mega-rich, having significance in Blair’s Britain. And it corresponds with nostalgia for the Edwardian Age, of carefree luxury, peace and conspicuous wealth, broken by the catastrophe of 1914.

Television programmes evoke the extravagance of the Edwardian country house and the materialism of the Forsytes. Architects look back longingly to the elegance of Lutyens and the Ritz. The blockbuster film about the Titanic relished the sumptuous lifestyle of first-class passengers. And the fantasy world of PG Wodehouse, of Lord Emsworth and Blanding’s Castle, is more popular than ever.

New Edwardians are emerging all around us, as Britain in the twenty-first century bears more resemblance to the conditions of a century ago. The decades between 1914 and 1990 begin to look like a long aberration of wars, socialism and austerity, which interrupted the progress of global capitalism and wealth creation.

When world trade closed down in 1914, it did not fully recover for 70 years; but since the end of the Cold War the global marketplace has been expanded and speeded up, to allow Western investors to exploit the world’s resources, on a scale the Edwardians could only dream of.

The new rich are looking more like the Edwardian plutocracy, with their confidence and ostentation, merging with the old aristocracy to acquire status, honours and respectability. In some ways they can feel more secure than the Edwardians: the threats to wealth and power were already looming before the First World War, whether from trade unions, socialists or foreign powers; but today they seem to have virtually disappeared.

The Labour Party, which seemed a potential menace when it was established in 1900, now appears as the ally of the rich, and Tony Blair is more sympathetic to big business than any Labour Prime Minister in history.

Taxes, which so alarmed the Edwardians, have become much less menacing, and for many foreign exiles non-existent. Death duties, first imposed by Sir William Harcourt in 1894 and augmented by Lloyd George in 1909, have become so easy to avoid that accountants tell their clients they are a voluntary tax. Big landowners are specially favoured: many people have been surprised to find they need pay no death duties on agricultural land, under legislation made in 1995, and kept intact by Gordon Brown.

The discrimination against “unearned income” has been turned upside down: Gordon Brown in his last Budget decreed that the extra costs of the health service would be financed by taxing employees through national insurance, while unearned income would bear no more taxes than before.

The full social implications of the decline of death duties are still to show themselves in the next decades, as hundreds of large fortunes made in the Eighties and Nineties pass to the next generations. Thousands of young people will be able to live comfortably without the need to work, as the rentiers and men of leisure of Edwardian times, as Bertie Wooster did a bit later at the Drones’ Club.

The desirability of tax-free inheritance has been much discussed, in both Britain and America; and the last Conservative Cabinet had lively debates about it. Chris Patten argued for abolishing death duties, while the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, opposed it. But the many loopholes for avoiding death duties are ensuring new heirs will be much more financially secure than their predecessors. Of course, the new rich have very different lifestyles to the Edwardians a century ago. They no longer employ armies of indoor servants and gardeners, like Lord Emsworth, to allow them to cultivate the art of leisure, or spend months on luxury yachts cruising between Mediterranean resorts. Many prefer to be mobile and busy-busy, flying between houses and hotels across the world, without too much responsibility for servants or estates.

Robert Adam is naturally interested in the changing requirements of the rich. “They want three things – space, mobility and privacy.” They are much keener on family privacy than the Edwardians, he says: many of them prefer not to see their servants, while others treat them as friends. They see less need for philanthropy in an age of the cult of the individual, where there is much less hardship.

But the new rich, it seems to me, still have an important resemblance to their Edwardian predecessors: they can separate themselves from the lives of ordinary people, whether in leisure or work, when the gap between the rich and poor is widening.

Today’s corporate bosses, like plutocrats a century ago, can lead their daily lives without meeting junior employees or encountering the lives of ordinary people or their problems: they can be driven from their protected homes in company carsto the company plane to meet colleagues who are equally protected.

Many of the new country mansions seem to be making statements about this need for segregation. They are as elaborately protected from neighbours and local influences as their forebears.

The most spectacular monuments to Britain in the twenty-first century will not be striking housing estates, great public buildings or model villages, but neo-Palladian piles in the middle of open countryside, built by the rich to protect themselves from the populace.

The Edwardian parallel is not in the end a reassuring one. For, with all their apparent confidence and ostentation, the Edwardians lived in an age of dangerous insecurity, of which they were only dimly aware, before their world was turned upside down in 1914.

A century later, with a new global economic and political turbulence, the grand new palaces and parks may soon look less like a revival of architectural patronage and taste, than like monuments to the complacency and the ostentation of people who wanted only to turn their backs on the rest of the country’s problems.

Why stately homes need support

by Catherine Bennett

The Guardian, November 21, 2002

For baroness enthusiasts, such as myself, Tessa “call me Baroness” Blackstone has always seemed, though full of comic potential, disappointing when it comes to delivery. Plainly she does not share that ready gift for inadvertent idiocy that once made my favourite baroness, Baroness Jay, such an asset – but then again, who does? Unlike Jay, Blackstone seems to retain a grip on reality that makes her mouth clamp shut the instant before treacherous lines like “pretty standard grammar”, or “little cottage”, can sneak out and undermine every arduous attempt to sound normal.

So it was all the more rewarding this week, when, in an interview with the Times, Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington became relaxed enough, while outlining her planned lifeline for financially distressed stately home-owners, to confirm that she possesses all the talent we had suspected, and more. Her new wheeze, which she intends to put before Gordon Brown, is for owners of Grade I, II, and II listed properties to be able to offset maintenance bills of up to Ј40,000 a year. In exchange for this indulgence – something for which, in Thatcher’s time, the grandees had lobbied in vain – the relevant householders would have to open their properties to the public for a minimum of 28 days a year. Or just over two days a month.

It was not constructive, the baroness warned, to “see this as the toffs and us”. Absolutely not: it is the toffs and her. Possibly recalling, from those distant, pre-baroness days, that stately home owners may not everywhere be considered the most deserving candidates for state assistance, the baroness was quick to explain that the scheme represents “part of our socialist agenda which is making it possible that these places are open and that the public can visit and enjoy their heritage”.

Thus, in one sentence, the baroness simultaneously claimed support from old Labour types, who had never again thought to hear the words “socialist agenda” spoken outside a costume drama, and from everyone, from the owners of their ancestral homes to their paying visitors, who acknowledges the sacred importance of “heritage”. As David Lowenthal indicates in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, it is a word the ingratiating politician can hardly repeat too often: “To neglect heritage is a cardinal sin, to invoke it a national duty.”

Arguably, if they can’t afford to maintain their portion of heritage then the baroness’s stately home-owners should simply sell it to someone who can, as the late Nicholas Ridley suggested in 1988: “There have to be the same opportunities for today’s nouveaux riches, so that I am not impressed by the case of the ancien pauvre.” He was challenged by Lord Saye and Sele: “Do you think that by removing us and installing a nouveau riche family, the heritage would be maintained in the way we maintain it? Would they want to open their Peter Jones furnished rooms to the public?” Happily this ghastly fate is unlikely to overtake Lord Saye and Sele’s ancestral home, Broughton Hall, where a recent 10-year programme of renovations was generously subsidised by English Heritage. Which is to say, by noovs.

Leaving aside the fact that the relics of mid-80s Peter Jones will, at some point, have just as much right to call themselves heritage as Lord Saye and Sele’s late-18th century Hepplewhite-style, mahogany four-poster, it is true that most people would not build a tea shop and toilet block in their garden unless they absolutely had to. They would rather move house. But as anguished Anthony Jarvis, the owner of Doddington Hall, near Lincoln, told the Times, our heritage custodians do not have this freedom: “The difference is they will return to private households… they will be lost to public view.”

This is why the protection of heritage from counter-jumpers with no sense of stewardship has become, for Blackstone, a pressing part of the left-wing agenda. Obviously she will be aware that continued occupation of their enormous houses by straitened Tory grandees is not a right that was ever sought by the proponents of socialism, who were apt to be more concerned with shared ownership. On the other hand, there is nothing to say that, in due course, having collectivised the means of production, distribution and exchange, they might not have got round to seeing the merits of the landed gentry and laying down recommendations for gift shop access and winter opening times. And this, really, is where one has to take issue with the baroness’s scheme. Is 28 days a year – which in stately home language usually translates into some inscrutable challenge – “alternate Wednesday afternoons June to Sept; every day July 20–21, 2–5, Friday mornings by appointment” – really adequate if the masses are, as the baroness wishes, to get the benefit? Do 28 days out of 365 even amount to “open”?

If Gordon Brown agrees to the “Blackstone reliefs”, as the Times already calls them, then so many scores more country houses are likely to open up in order to qualify that there will soon not be enough days in the year, in this heritage-laden land, for, as David Lowenthal puts it, “the descendants of former serfs… [to] wander in wonder around one-time masters’ mansions”. How, unless recipients of the Blackstone relief open for at least five days a week, weekends included, are visitors to claim their full socialist share of country house heritage?

Indeed, if the scheme is as popular as the baroness anticipates – “People are not coming here to burn their buns on beaches but they are coming here for the culture, the country houses and the countryside” – it may be necessary to extend viewing hours into the evening, possibly through the night. Naturally, the kind of people who furnish their house from Peter Jones would not be interested in this sort of sacrifice, but for men such as the 21st Baron Saye and Sele, one senses that duty comes first. Or maybe second. After socialism.

Fergie in chop horror

The rehabilitation of the Duchess of York, a task which only weeks ago seemed to stand about as much chance of success as the Integrated Transport System, is now hurtling towards completion faster than her in-laws can say “Sir Michael Peat”. Compared with the suppression of unwelcome court cases, flogging off unwanted gifts and choosing an in-house investigator to investigate charges of in-house malfeasance, the duchess’s previously heinous-seeming crimes of advertising cranberry juice, sitting under a plastic pyramid and exposing her daughters to a virtually naked, bald financial adviser, look more trivial by the day.

Even her exertions as the face of Weightwatchers, once considered so tawdry for a woman who might have spent her life as Prince Andrew’s helpmeet, can now be recognised as the good, honest toil they are. Certainly no one at Weightwatchers could complain she has not given value for money. Interviewed last week by the Cincinnati Post, the duchess was asked whether – if invited – she would care to go on a date with George Clooney. “Are pork chops greasy?” the duchess replied.

It is hard to believe that this unusual, probably unique spin on the rather tired “Is the pope a Catholic?”/“Do bears shit in the woods?” formulation for confirming the utterly obvious could have come about had the duchess not committed, in speech as well as in thought and diet, to live out the Weightwatching mission. And with dedication like that, it is unlikely she will leave it there. Not when there are so many other healthy variations on the theme. Stand by for Q: “Do you regret that holiday in Phuket?” A: “Do doughnuts clog up your arteries?” Q: “Have you regained your self-esteem?” A: “Are there 100 calories in a low-fat yogurt?” Q: “Do you feel you have been unfairly accused of exploiting your royal connections?” A: “Is a Weightwatchers pasta salad a scrumptious lunch or snack option, complete with handy fork?”