Goodness gracious me!

The twin planks of Tory ideology privatisation and low taxation had created a new wealthy class. But the aggressive me-first culture promoted by Thatcher8217;s heirs as the culture of enterprise had by the early nineties left a trail of boarded up failed businesses, deserted high streets and violent housing estates with high unemployment levels. The National Health Service became defined by waiting lists and state funded education by a rise in truancy and decline in standards.

Tory Britain was encapsulated by warm beer, spinsters cycling to church on summer afternoons, and the Windsors as Britain8217;s ideal first family. But in the real Britain chicken tikka masala was being consumed by the balti full, washed down by cold Australian larger, in crowded inner cities you could hear the muezzin8217;s call to prayer, and the Windsors had become tabloid fodder with tales of adultery and divorce. The nostalgic pre-war memory of Britain conjured up by the pints of warm dark ale and visions of Miss Marple trundling around on bicycles was translated, in the Tories8217; political rhetoric, into overtly racist sloganeering.

Britain8217;s visible Asian and black ethnic minorities were caught in the cleft between the myth and the reality. While Thatcher and her ilk commended Asian small businesses for their hard working culture, they simultaneously fuelled racism through their nostalgic myth making. In cities, where the ravages of Thatcherism produced two generations of long-term unemployed within a decade, Asian shop keepers took the brunt of the anti-foreigner feeling, running their businesses tormented by youthful vandals and unprotected by a racist police force. On the streets Paki bastards8217; and Bloody niggers8217; were sitting targets. The roll call of blacks and Asians murdered because of the colour of their skins grew each year. Their killers were rarely caught, and even more rarely convicted.

In some sense, as ideological differences on the broad parameters of the economy became fuzzy, the attitude to ethnic minorities and race became a defining difference between the Tory led Britain of the mid-nineties and New Labour run Britain of the last four years 8212; the difference between a Britain caught up in its past and a Britain that is moving forward, a Britain in which Britishness was defined as Englishness and a Britain in which cultural difference and multiple national identities are celebrated.

One of the first acts of Tony Blair8217;s government was to set up a public inquiry into the police investigation of the racist murder in 1993 of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The inquiry established that Stephen8217;s killers were not convicted because the police force was institutionally racist. The inquiry8217;s conclusions had the effect of turning a search light on the British establishment and forcing it to admit, even if reluctantly, that institutional racism was not simply confined to the police force. Accepting that institutional racism exists is only one step. But it is a step forward.

The Britain that I arrived in was full of disquiet. Helpless carping voices complained about a system they had in part sustained through successive elections. They wanted a better health service but also wanted lower taxes. They winged about the poverty trap but were suspicious of the minimum wage. They liked the fact that Mr Patel or Mr Khan8217;s store down the road was open seven days a week but seemed willing to buy the political rhetoric about foreigners drowning out their culture and taking their jobs. The Queen was in her palace and all should have been okay with the world. Except that it was not.

The Britain I left was still, nominally, bathed in the after glow of change. The New Labour revolution that was promised did not materialise, but a healthy economy albeit not guaranteed to remain so has generated an optimism that is hard to deny. Unemployment levels are at their lowest in two decades, the minimum wage has been introduced with no visible negative impact on employment or business. The Labour Party set aside the dogma of state ownership of the means of production8217; when it became New Labour8217;, but it reclaimed the idea of the welfare state from the Thatcherite exclusion zone where people on welfare were classified as lazy wastrels who sponged off the hard working tax payer. The new regime accepts the dictum that while the business of business rests with the private sector, the business of creating a fairer society rests with the state.

In the shiny New Labour world the startling anachronism of the monarchy seems more uncertain of itself. Princess Diana8217;s death, and television enhanced public show of grief, effectively announced open season on the Queen and her family. In their characteristically inept attempt to reclaim lost ground the Windsor8217;s ended up mimicking their Spitting Image caricatures from the 1980s. Sanctimonious monarchists are thinner on the ground now than they were eight years ago but there is, as yet, no majority backing for chucking out the monarchy, and young Britain is decidedly republican.

More than anything else that changed over the years that I reported from Britain was the openness to difference, which is the stamp of a society at ease with itself. The devolution of Scotland and Wales were the formal acknowledgement that Britain is a nation of nations, signifying that it is perfectly natural to first be Scottish and then British, that to identify with more than one territory or culture does not make a person less British than the Queen or Norman Tebbit. Failing the Tebbit test is, in fact, an article of faith of multiculturalism, to cheer for the Indian side at a cricket match does not make you less British, it may simply mean that you are not English.

The writer was until recently the London correspondent for this newspaper

In the real Britain chicken tikka masala is consumed by the balti full, in crowded inner cities you can hear the muezzin8217;s call and the Royals are tabloid fodder