James Purnell’s resignation as Work and Pensions Secretary was seen as a blow to Gordon Brown and the whole “new” Labour project. Interestingly, when the man dubbed the “baby-faced assassin” was interviewed after the dust had settled, he told The Guardian: “For me, it’s a bit like Britpop. I feel nostalgic for it, it was absolutely right for its time, but that time was 1994. We need to open up New Labour, reinvent it and eventually move beyond it.”
Soon after this, Noel Gallagher announced that he was quitting Oasis, unable to work any longer with Liam, his brother and the band’s lead singer.
Fifteen years after the date Purnell regards as the birth of “new” Labour, which was around the same time Britpop was first talked of as a musical category, the time is ripe to consider their intertwined fortunes.
In 1996, England’s anthem for that summer’s European Championship finals was “Three Lions”, recorded by Britpop act the Lightning Seeds and comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. The chorus invoked the coat of arms on the England football kit and alluded to the passage of time since the country’s one and only World Cup win in 1966. Its key section – “Three Lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming” – concluded: “Football’s coming home”. In his Labour conference speech that October, Tony Blair shamelessly plagiarised this sentiment, claiming “Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming – Labour’s coming home.” This showed him to be both a man of the moment, in touch with popular culture, and nostalgic for a fabled past of sporting triumphs and Labour governments.
After Labour won the 1997 election, Britpop and the prevailing political wind became entangled in the notion of “Cool Britannia” – the wider project undertaken by Blair and his acolytes to update perspectives of Britishness with a new and inclusive multicultural vision. The once-taboo union flag was part of the associated imagery of both Britpop and Cool Britannia, having been reclaimed from the far right.
However, Blair had done this sort of thing before – when he claimed his to be the party of law and order (traditionally Conservative territory) with his “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” soundbite.
Cool Britannia’s significance in updating stereotypes parallels “new” Labour’s fondness for modernising political institutions and beliefs, exemplified in the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales and the jettisoning of the historic commitment to the public ownership enshrined in the old Clause IV of Labour’s constitution.
Under Blair, Labour came to regard itself as a big tent – seeking to pitch a middlebrow, all-encompassing message that no one – least of all anyone in middle England – could possibly find offensive. Remember the party’s five pledges from 1997? The Boy Scout movement could almost have adopted them. Similarly, Britpop was an inoffensive collection of ditties to which parents didn’t object and with which just about anyone could sing along.
Perhaps Britpop can be characterised as a post-ideological soundtrack to post-political times. Blairism abandoned many tenets of Labour ideology and embraced the market. Arguably, its defining feature was pragmatism – “What matters is what works”.
Britpop, too, can be seen as tame and anodyne – certainly compared to punk , which claimed it wanted to shake society to its foundations (“Anarchy in the UK”, “No future”), or hippie idealism (“Be reasonable, demand the impossible”).
In the austere early 1980s, the indie soundtracks of kitchen sink social realism co-existed with mainstream pop – the likes of Culture Club, Wham and Duran Duran offering glamour and excitement by way of escapism. Arguably, political pop has been in decline since then. Red Wedge instigator Billy Bragg soldiers on, albeit shorn of much of his earlier radicalism and seeming to prefer more straightforward love songs.
The retreat from the positive glow of early “new” Labour happened incrementally. After the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the July 7 assault on London in 2005, a new realism set in. With increasing frequency, politicians stressed that “tough choices” had to be made. After 40 quarters of positive economic growth, Britain crashed into recession. Reality is now biting even harder and politicians on all sides are urging us to prepare for still harsher times to come.
Just before he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown claimed the country had fallen out of love with celebrity. But it hadn’t – and neither had he. The irresistible rise of The X Factor – essential viewing in the Brown household, apparently – has more in common with Britpop than some might think. Both are deeply derivative and showcase home-grown talent.
As for our current politics, that the main opposition leaders appear to have been moulded in Tony Blair’s image – the plastic-Blair David Cameron and plastic-Cameron Nick Clegg – suggests “new” Labour may yet have a longer lasting legacy than some commentators think.
Like James Purnell, I feel nostalgic for the mid-1990s, although not for the days of Tory government. Given the developments in music technology over the past decade and the public disenchantment with MPs after the scandal over their expenses, there’s probably no going back either to the politics or the music. Instead we need to keep on with the renewal and recasting of old principles for the modern age – both in terms of our politics and our pop.
