Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

Britain 185
mid-market paper, the Daily Mail, and the more ‘respectable’ broadsheets,
the Daily Telegraph and The Times. Furthermore, the focus on sleaze and
corruption has been particularly notable throughout the press since the
early 1990s with first the Conservative governments of John Major from
1990−1997 and then the Blair administration thereafter being subject to
intense scrutiny on matters ranging from the private lives and sexual
peccadilloes of ministers to financial irregularities, improper relations with
certain controversial entrepreneurs and, in the latter throes of Blair’s tenure,
the granting of peerages to donors and lenders to party funds. Whether or
not the behaviour of these governments was significantly worse than that
of their predecessors is rather difficult to ascertain. Certainly, government
ministers were involved in all manner of dubious practices in previous
periods, but what appears to have changed is the way these are reported by
the media. In this respect, the way politics is reported on television and
radio is also highly significant. Reporting has become less deferential, and
interviewers have become more aggressive in their questioning and more
adept at exposing what they view as incompetence, hypocrisy or dishonesty
when questioning politicians.
Immigration, nationality and ethnicity
in ‘multicultural’ Britain
Although legislation by Conservative governments meant that primary
immigration from the New Commonwealth was virtually ended by the
early 1970s, the numbers entering the country have continued to increase,
mainly due to family reunion and occasional refugee influxes. Moreover, the
size of the British-born ethnic minority population (holding UK citizenship),
i.e. the descendants of the first generation of immigrants, has continued to
rise considerably. This has spawned debates about the social inclusion or
otherwise of the British-born minorities, and the development of Britain
into a multicultural society. Tensions arose in the 1970s around the emergence
of the extreme right National Front (NF). It received 3.5 per cent of
the vote in the seats it contested (in areas where there were immigrant
populations) in the 1970 election, and 3.4 per cent in October 1974. In the
late 1970s, however, the rightward shift by the Conservative party towards
a more overt nationalist agenda meant the NF had some of the ground taken
from under it. For example, in the run-up to the 1979 election, Thatcher
referred to the dangers posed to British social and cultural values and the
threat of ‘Britain being swamped by alien cultures’. In 1979, the NF vote
dropped to 1.4 per cent in the constituencies it stood in.
By the late 1990s, and the advent of Blair’s New Labour government, and
with primary immigration now severely restricted, the focus of debate and
controversy switched to the issue of asylum seekers, the numbers of whom
entering Britain had risen dramatically. In 1999 this figure had risen to