Although no formal challenge to his leadership had yet materialized, John Major knew that his authority was being undermined by the Eurosceptic right. ‘Put up or shut up’ was his message to his critics. Beneath the fighting words, however, lay the old conciliatory impulse. The Right had to be appeased. In an interview he attacked the practice of begging and encouraged the public to report it to the police. A furore ensued. The shadow housing minister, John Battle, claimed that by cutting benefits for sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, the government was responsible for the increase in young people living on the streets. Other social problems arose in Major’s ‘classless society’. Nicholas Scott, minister of state for social security and disabled people, admitted to having authorized civil servants to assist in the drafting of a large number of amendments to the Civil Rights Bill. In addition, Scott had talked the bill out, speaking for over an hour. Several people were arrested on 29 May as disabled people protested outside Westminster. Although called upon to resign, Scott remained in office.
In Europe, the oft-repeated refrain that Britain would be ‘at the heart’ was proving difficult to sustain. In June, at a European Council meeting in Corfu, John Major vetoed the candidacy of Jean-Luc Dehaene as president of the European Commission, declaring that he objected to Dehaene’s ‘interventionist’ tendencies, and to what he had described as French and German attempts to impose their candidate on others. As the other candidates had withdrawn, this gesture was widely interpreted as sabre-rattling. Mitterrand declared that ‘Great Britain has a concept of Europe completely at odds with that held by the original six member states.’ It was an observation with which few could honestly disagree. In the UK, the use of the veto was seen as yet another genuflection before the party’s Eurosceptics. The government’s obsession with all matters European was revealed to be one that the electorate did not share. Elections to the European Parliament turned out to be spectacularly anticlimactic, with turnout a modest 36.4 per cent. In July, Major decided upon a cabinet reshuffle. Amidst other changes, he appointed a Europhile, Jeremy Hanley, to the party chairmanship and a Eurosceptic, Michael Portillo, to the post of secretary of state for employment.
The party’s various ‘sexual shenanigans’ were damaging insofar as they came in the wake of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign; the ‘cash for questions’ scandal was another matter. This corruption was a reproach to everything upon which the British prided themselves. Two MPs were suspended for accepting money from a Sunday Times journalist posing as a businessman. Later in the year, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton found themselves having to answer similar charges. For Hamilton in particular, the struggle to clear his name would prove protracted, bruising and finally disastrous.
Other problems remained. Northern Ireland dogged Major’s tenure, but now at last there seemed the possibility of a solution. John Major welcomed a statement by the IRA leadership that ‘there will be a complete cessation of military operations’ at midnight on 31 August 1994, but sought an assurance ‘that this is indeed intended to be a permanent renunciation of violence, that is to say, for good’. The UK government had repeatedly declared that three months free from violence was necessary to confirm any IRA commitment. This the IRA proved incapable of delivering. Indeed, the surreal alternation between the IRA’s earnest public pronouncements and its continuing campaign of violence led many to wonder whether the government’s approach held much promise of success. On 19 September, Major said that the IRA was ‘very close’ to providing assurances that its currently open-ended ceasefire would be permanent. On a visit to the United States, however, Gerry Adams appeared to undercut such optimism by saying that ‘none of us can say two or three years up the road that if the causes of conflict aren’t resolved, that another IRA leadership won’t come along’. That the two sides differed materially on the question of ‘causes’ was for the time being an insoluble conundrum.
In September, the prime minister gave a speech calling for a ‘real national effort to build an “anti-yob” culture’. This was criticized in the press as an attempt to counter Tony Blair’s declaration that he would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, but such criticisms missed the mark. The ‘anti-yob’ culture was entirely of a piece with Major’s world view. He understood the temptations that poverty presents, but refused to accept that they could not be resisted.
Protests grew over the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. It was a fitting response to a bill which restricted the right of public protest, but it had no effect. Tony Blair was a notable signatory to the bill. The Big Issue, a magazine set up by homeless people to address homelessness, asked Blair to explain his decision. In a smog of recrimination and impasse, one small symbolic gesture shone out. The queen visited Russia, the first of her family to do so since 1917, but the Duke of Edinburgh, in a rare denial of duty, refused. As far as he was concerned, the heirs of the Bolsheviks were the heirs of those who had ‘murdered my family’.
Concerns about what had become known as ‘the environment’ came to a head in this decade. The ‘greenhouse effect’ and anthropogenic global warming had both been identified in the late Eighties, but only in the Nineties did they begin to affect policy. A Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was established, with the aim of reducing pollution caused by motor vehicles.
In November, John Major announced that ‘preliminary talks’ with Loyalists and Sinn Féin could begin, in the light of the former’s ceasefire. But the discussions continued in tandem with further incidents. Feilim O’Hadhmaill, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, was sentenced to twentyfive years’ imprisonment for having plotted an IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland. It was a winter of problems. In December, the government was forced to back down on a proposed VAT rise after losing a parliamentary vote; the chancellor proposed increased duty on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and diesel instead.
In the meantime, the Conservatives lost the Dudley West constituency – the haemorrhage of by-elections had begun. The Common Fisheries Policy had long been one of the more contentious terms of British membership of the EU, and in January 1995, it sparked a debate in the House of Commons. Why, it was asked, did countries with no historical claim on the North Sea have rights in it? It was a running sore, but the vote was carried. The prison population had risen from 40,000 to 50,000 under the tenure of Michael Howard. A breakout was attempted at Whitemoor Prison, with five IRA members involved. Into this and related matters, the European Commission of Human Rights issued a ruling that, if upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, would remove from the home secretary the power to determine the length of time that juveniles convicted of murder should remain in prison.