Conclusion: Endings and Beginnings

Summary

Will it work? Of course. Will it be ready on time? Certainly. Probably. Maybe. The Government is prepared to throw as much money into the hole as it takes (around £758 million and rising). They can't fail. This is their Big Idea. The vision thing made manifest. A celebration of that which is to come (with heavily edited highlights of whatever has been achieved in the last thousand years of human history that is not offensive to BT, Manpower, Marks and Spencer, Sky, Tesco, McDonald's and anybody else prepared to chip in £12 million). (Sinclair 1999: 14)

Noam Chomsky declares in Deterring Democracy that ‘History does not come neatly packaged into distinct periods, but by imposing a structure upon it, we can sometimes gain clarity without doing too much violence to the facts’ (Chomsky 1992: 1). Looking back on the 1990s, it seems clear that the Britain Margaret Thatcher led in January 1990 was strikingly different from that which, on 31 December 1999, projected forward with vitality and confidence. There were salient points of difference between Thatcher's Britain and Blair’s, in terms of stance towards the outside world, the internal configuration of the nations of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the perception that, by the end of the decade, Britain was culturally on the rise, and the possibility that chicken tikka masala might have assumed a place as the national dish. With its then still new, young leader, a reasonable simulacrum of the United States’ Bill Clinton, Britain economically and politically was a global player. The decade also was a notable period culturally, as this study has attempted to show. It was a time of literary experimentation and innovation, one that built substantially on the advances of the 1980s, so that writers who had emerged and quickly dominated that decade, such as Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Martin Amis, were part of a more diverse and broadly activated cultural scene in the 1990s. The decade had its failures and its false dawns (‘Cool Britannia’; the ‘New Generation Poets’, perhaps; and, by 1999, the project of New Labour), but it also heralded genuine new talents and perspectives in fiction, drama and poetry: Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay and Irvine Welsh, among many others.