Nice change

摘要

What did the 1990s ever do for Britain? Sandwiched between the Thatcherite battleground of the 1980s and the conflicts of the new millennium, it can be hard to recall the point of them. This was the decade dominated by Sir John Major and his Tory government's slow walk to electoral annihilation: a time of rows over Europe and over traffic cones, of a political promise to restore Victorian values and then a rash of Westminster sex scandals. It was the decade of New Labour's gilded rise: lucky to have the busted Tories for an opponent and so obsessed with getting power that they arrived with little clue how to use it. They settled on spin: the politics of the 1990s were ill-tempered and intellectually sparse. Yet these developments, Alwyn Turner argues compellingly, were not the point of Britain's fin de siecle. What mattered was happening elsewhere.