LAST week, in a speech meant to sound the keynote for his party's campaign in the forthcoming general election, John Major warned that the Labour party was now placing "1,000 years of British history" in danger. Since Great Britain, dating as it does from the Act of Union of 1707, is in fact just 290 years old, it was not hard to hear in Mr Major's words the note of hysteria that accompanies the act of protesting too much. Why, if it is so ancient and venerable, could British tradition be shaken by a single general election? And why, if British identity is so secure, does its pedigree have to be so fantastically exaggerated?
That the prime minister should be talking at all about the grand sweep of history is itself a sign that something strange is happening to Britain. For one thing, John Major's main claim to the leadership of the Conservative party was precisely his pragmatic lack of interest in the kind of heroic, historic vision with which Margaret Thatcher had so scarified the nation. And for another, elections are supposed to be won by concentrating on "the economy, stupid". The golden rule of politics is that if people feel richer at the time of an election than they did at the time of the last one, the government will be returned to power.
By this rule, John Major ought to have no need for wild historical fantasies. Of Europe's major economies, the British is the fastest-growing. Unemployment, rising to alarming levels in Germany, is falling in Britain. Personal disposable income is rising, and consumer confidence is returning. Britain still has serious economic problems, but John Major can nevertheless claim that the long-term decline that has been its fate since the first World War is at last being reversed.
And yet, Britain these days is an object lesson in the limits of economics. The Tories have carried through their agenda for reforming the British economy with, in their own terms, remarkable success. Yet not only has the kind of society they are supposed to believe in failed to emerge, but it is very much further away now than it was in 1979.
One way to measure the gap is to remember that when John Major decided to expound his vision of Britain (or rather, of England), it did not include any of the images that might reasonably reflect the main thrust of the last 18 years: the Canary Wharf tower, brash stock market traders in red braces and red Ferraris, corporate entertainment suites in football grounds, the world summed up by the writer lain Sinclair describing the City of London in his recent book Lights Out For The Territory: "Men who would have waited years for a shared telephone effortlessly sink merchant banks. Number-crunchers treat the City like a betting-shop. The future is optional."
John Major included none of this in his vision of England. He spoke instead, borrowing his words from the unlikely source of George Orwell, of "long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist". That his image of "a nation at ease with itself" did not include any of the things his party has actually created since 1979 is a sure sign that all the achievements of the period have not, even in Conservative minds, been enough.
They have, nevertheless, been formidable. Market forces have been let loose, even into the protected domains of health and education. The power-base of the old Left has been destroyed. The terms of political debate have been altered so radically that the left-wing opposition, in the shape of Labour, would, in the pre-1979 era, have been regarded as belonging on the centre right.
The old "working class" - organised workers in heavy industries and nationalised companies - has been decimated. The power of the trade unions has been broken. In 1980, well over half of British workers were in trade unions, now less than a third are. In 1979, 29 million working days were lost through strikes. In the 1990s, the annual number has been less than half a million. The old public sector of the economy has been broken up and privatised. Cheap labour - a quarter of British employees earn less than £4 an hour - has become one of the main selling-points for British industry.
The population of the mining and industrial areas of Britain that used to be the Labour heartlands Glasgow, Dundee, the coalfields of Wales and Durham - has declined by 7 per cent in the last 20 years. A new property-owning class has been created, largely through the sale of council houses. In 1981, just over a third of semi-skilled workers, and a half of skilled workers owned their own homes. Now, the figures are 55 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. And white Britain has not become the "shareholding democracy" Margaret Thatcher dreamed of, privatisation and the floatation of building societies mean about 16 per cent of all British adults now hold some stocks and shares.
At one level, all this change has been accomplished without undermining the familiar power structures of British society. In 1981, the top 5 per cent of the population owned 45 per cent of the wealth. Now, it holds 51 per cent. And this power and wealth have become even more strongly concentrated in the south and south-east of England. In Gwent, average weekly earnings are £255 a week; in Greater London, they are more than £450 a week.
But at another level - the one at which questions are asked about British identity, about the country's place in the world and, more pointedly, in Europe the structures are crumbling.
Great Britain, neither very old nor very secure, is, as the historian Linda Colley puts it, "an invented nation, superimposed, if only for a while, on to much older alignments and loyalties". Britons as opposed to English, Scottish, Welsh or (some) Irish - defined themselves in three ways: as Protestants struggling to survive against Catholic enemies; as the free citizens of a constitutional monarchy surrounded by superstitious and slavish foreigners; and, in the era of Empire, as white people bringing civilisation and the smack of firm government to inferior and alien people.
The great paradox of the last 18 years is that after a period of almost unparalleled Tory dominance, those three pillars of the British state - Protestantism, constitutional monarchy, and Empire - have all but crumbled. And when it comes to supporting or furthering traditional Conservative values (the family, law and order, military might) the last 18 years have been an unmitigated disaster.
In the first place, Britain is no longer in any real sense a Protestant society. Since 1979, the established religion - the Church of England has lost its position as the largest church in Britain. Roman Catholicism now has two million adherents, the Anglican church, whose membership - has almost halved since 1970, has just 1.7 million. (For comparison, the Muslim, Sikh and Jewish faiths have 1.3 million members between them.) In a population of more than 58 million, just 3.5 million belong to any of the main Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist churches.
Likewise, the prestige of the monarchy has suffered a catastrophic decline. Michael Portillo, the would-be heir apparent to the Conservative leadership, defined the monarchy in 1994 as "the source of the authority and legitimacy of government ... the personification of the nation ... an institution vital to our national well-being". But if the royal family personifies the nation, Britain is not a happy person. Not only the monarchy, but the position of the hereditary peerage in the House of Lords, and even the nature of the United Kingdom itself, are now under far more stress than they were in 1979.
And as for the Empire, it will, within months, be hauled down a flagpole in Hong Kong. In spite of Mrs Thatcher's last stand on the Falklands, the long decline of empire will end only because there will be nothing left to decline from. As of July 1st, with Hong Kong's reversion to China, the British imperial possessions that contained a total population of 760 million people in 1944 will be home to just 168,075.
And more is ending than just an anachronistic image of a world painted red. The idea of Britain itself was bound up in that lost Empire. As the British political theorist David Marquand has put it: "Imperial Britain was Britain. The iconography, the myths, the rituals in which Britishness was embodied were, of necessity, imperial, oceanic, extra-European: they could not be anything else. Empire was not an optional extra for the British; it was their reason for being British, as opposed to English, or Scots, or Welsh. Deprived of Empire and plunged into Europe, `Britain' has no meaning."
Related to the decline of Empire has been the weakening of the armed forces as symbols of nationhood. The end of the Cold War has removed the excuse for massive arms spending. While the Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, has tried to wrap himself in the prestige of the SAS, the fact is that the Tories' most dramatic cutbacks in state spending have been in defence, where £12 billion has been cut from the annual budget.
IT has been the same story with many of the more intimate sources of Conservative pride. Respect for parliamentary institutions has been undermined by an endless series of scandals.
Law and order? The number of recorded offences has risen by more than 50 per cent since 1979. The prison population has risen from 42,000 to 60,000. In 1981, there were 1,300 seizures of cocaine or heroin in Britain. In 1994, there were 7,000.
The nuclear family? A quarter of British households are now headed by a single parent, twice as many as in 1979. The proportion of unmarried women aged between 18 and 50 "living in sin" has doubled. The UK has the highest divorce rate in the European Union band one of the highest in the world.
And the fractiousness evident within family life is just as obvious at the level of streets and neighbourhoods. The number of complaints to the police about noisy neighbours has increased five times over since 1981. The great ability of British society to absorb immigrants has broken down. Six out of every 10 Pakistani families in the UK live on council estates (compared to one white family in five).
None of these things happened merely because the Tories were in bower. But neither is the crisis in British identity unrelated to the Conservative agenda. The last 18 years have exposed a widening contradiction within conservatism between, on the one hand, a demand that the role of the state be reduced to the minimum and, on the other, a desire that the state should be strong and authoritative. They have shown it is not possible to encourage a laissez-faire attitude in economic behaviour and to expect order in social behaviour, to encourage wide disparities between regions and individuals in wealth and income and still expect to have a unified nation.
HE invented British nation is, in other words, in urgent need of re-invention. And this is why, for all the apparent similarity of Labour and Tory policy in so many areas, the forthcoming election will be a turning point for Britain. The economic policies of the main parties may not be substantially different, but nations do not live by economics alone, and it is John Major's misfortune that this may be one of those very rare elections that is fought not on the firm ground of finance but on the slippery and uncertain territory of how a country might go about finding its lost destiny. For whoever is in power after the general election will have to set about a task that has not been fulfilled in the last 18 years - that of finding a credible new meaning for the word "British".
