Definitely Maybe

It is, several radio programmes and broadsheet articles inform us, twenty years since the 'Summer of Britpop'. I was there, young and music-loving. Comparisons with earlier golden ages are inexact; it can't have been like the 60s, since I can remember it. It involved, as I recall, inordinate amounts of Guinness combined with indelicate swaying to the dulcit tones of What's The Story Morning Glory. We weren't aware that it was the Summer of Britpop at the time. It was just summer, the school holiday. Nor did we, by which I mean my friends and myself, think there was anything especially epoch-making about the music we were listening to, or rather the music that was played at us, in pubs and clubs and on the radio; my own tastes were slightly more eclectic. It was alright, it was just there. We hadn't known any different. Nostalgia, however can transfigure the most quotidian of times, and so here we are, two decades on, keeping the anniversary of something called the Summer of Britpop.

There is something distinctly unsettling about people feeling nostalgic for periods within one's living memory. Nostalgia is always for people older than oneself. It is more a matter of not being able to get bananas in the war, or the electric tingle as a beehived girl rubbed against your chinos than of the Verve or David Blunkett. The jarring intimation of mortality repressed beneath the surface of this discomfort might go some way towards explaining why I have greeted public celebration of Britpop's birthday with a mixture of incomprehension and blind rage. So, when 6Music announced that they had made Oasis' Knebworth performance available on Iplayer, I tweeted this:

NO I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO OASIS AT KNEBWORTH. Like New Labour it deserves to remain two decades away.

— (((Latte Labour))) (@LatteLabour) 15 August 2016

This perhaps demonstrated a temporary inability to think both sides of the question, but then age does funny things to you. A good proportion of my digital fury was entirely justified, but before we get onto the reasons for that the other side of the balance sheet needs addressing. The Britpop phenomenon, either in its musical origins or promotional narration (if it's even possible to disentangle the two), issued from a perfectly correct sense of the American dominance of rock and pop music, and a legitimate resentment of this. Even though there is a good case to be made that the Smashing Pumpkins were better than Suede, and in spite of the awkward fact that, like the mods before them, the Britpoppers could only respond to rock's wrapping itself in the stars-and-stripes by wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, there was something praiseworthy about the urge to kick back at the bigger country. There was too  a sense in which working class identity was cool within Britpop culture. This didn't necessary translate into working class people themselves being cool, nor did the working class identity that was enacted on stages and lauded in the NME commonly bear much resemblance to anything that would have been recognised by many inhabitants of that class. Still, compared to today's hipster scene, where one gets the distinct sense that working class people are regarded not as voguish aliens to be emulated nervously, but as Brexit-voting, commercial music listening, racists who wouldn't know a good craft beer if they tasted one, it wasn't so bad. These things are relative.

Britpop was also capable of voicing discontent in a more or less articulate fashion. Admittedly, it most often came down on the 'less' side, but it remains the case that the raw anger of 'Is it worth the aggravation/ to get yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?' has a lot going for it. Gallagher's devil-may-care drawl voices a nihilism more conditioned than staged. Blur were capable of framing their protest in more explicitly political terms. Mr Robinson in his quango is 'the self-professed saviour of the dim right-wing'. Ernold Same was narrated by the man described in the CD insert as 'the right-on Ken Livingstone'. It turns out that Damon Albarn was the source of the band's occasional leftism. Dave Rowntree was meanwhile an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour and ultimately a cheerleader for invading Iraq. Alex James now divides his time between making artisan cheeses and hanging out with the Chipping Norton set.

Alas, Britpop was not simply well-meaning angst and sticking two fingers up to Uncle Sam. It was in other respects, as we learned to say later, problematic in many respects.  This probably wasn't what Adorno had in mind when he said that every tale of civilisation is also a tale of barbarism, but nor is that line entirely irrelevant here (even if 'civilisation' is an optimistic description of Country House, and 'barbarism' an unkind take on Menswear). Culture is a human product, and as such is tainted from the outset with the conditions of its production, which means amongst other things with politics. This much is evident in the very word 'Britpop', a musical subgenre defined as much as anything by the state from which it issued. In this it bears some resemblance to the earlier Krautrock, although the acts generally classified as part of the latter are universally more interesting than Ocean Colour Scene. In both cases, there is a politics to the identification. Germany at the time of Krautrock was not one, but two, states. Britpop, in spite of its name, was an overwhelmingly English phenomenon. The most obvious exceptions are at best borderline cases: the Manic Street Preachers pre-date the movement slightly, and never really fitted in culturally or politically. Catatonia were of the period, but I never recall thinking of them as being 'part of the same thing' as Blur and Oasis. This was, retrospectively, a compliment. Ash were admittedly Irish, but in the face of eight centuries of national oppression the misdescription of a rock band seems a slight matter.

Claiming English idiosyncracies as uniformly British is a national pastime. A peculiarity of British rock music has been, at least until recently, its celebration of a certain kind of imagined working class identity, coupled with the occasional elevation of working class people themselves to superstar status. Britpop satisfied this fetish enthusiastically. Oasis certainly were from working class backgrounds, and spoke in interviews about being on the dole. Blur were from more monied stock in at the time ill-specified parts of East London but spoke like the love child of Dot Cotton and Dick van Dyke's chimney sweep. This was class as a marketing method; the proletariat were in this season, just as ripped jeans had been a few summers previously. The working class as presented in the posters and at the gigs was a pastiche, packaged for quick consumption. It was a matter of cheeky smiles and the hint of attitude, without taking the latter far enough to be intimidating. You expected Damon Albarn to shout 'oi, get orf me barrow' at any point. What the working class as adapted for Britpop certainly didn't lower itself to doing was work. Whilst The Who, the band Oasis wanted to be when they weren't busy trying to be the Beatles, could make a film in which a young man gets away from the drudgery of London toil, only for the hero of a mod dance floor to be revealed as a bellboy, by the 90s five days of the week were almost entirely absent from British musical output. Oasis, quite reasonably didn't want to work (Eagleton describes this as a good reason to be a socialist), but lyrically it was mostly a matter of falling in love, falling out of love, taking drugs, being a rock and roll star, and - in the case of one Blur song - listening to the shipping forecast. Put like this it sounds not unlike the life of a full time rock singer. Imagination was not a notable feature of the period.

The band often counted as part of Britpop who were better on class, in every sense in which a band could be, were of course Pulp. They are exempt from my criticism,  but were never really part of Britpop. The band predated the phenomenon by a long way, and accidentally hit the big time on the back of it. I've written about them before here. Whether or not 'nobody loves a tourist' was aimed, consciously or otherwise, at what their musical contemporaries were saying or doing, it captures some of the truth of an era. Even more dispiritingly, it speaks also to subsequent eras.

Candida Doyle's role in Pulp also distinguishes them from the run of Britpop star acts, which whiffed of Lynx and testosterone. A blokish, cliched working class masculinity suffused the genre. There were female fronted bands: none of them got the headlines and the best known, Elastica, obtained that status not least because their lead singer was sleeping with Damon Albarn, which doesn't suggest that Britpop represented a feminist high point. The best, and most under-rated, of the bands insufficiently male to be canonised were Kenickie. Notable for having singing in a regional accent that was, on the one hand, neither Cockney or Mancunian, and on the other genuine, they were musically and lyrically excpetionally. Misleadingly naive in content, their songs communicate a reality airbrushed by the comic book capers of Albarn and Gallagher they had this in common with Pulp. Lauren Laverne's wilting voice on 'People We Want' captures a darker side to the Britpop era, boredom and anxiety combine as insecure, in spite of cocaine, a young woman wades through a night out as though it were quicksand. 'This life, it's taking too long', she sings; and you know what she means.

The fear that life might not be worth living is not one that haunts the male Britpop oeuvre. It is fundamentally upbeat, macho even - although not aggressively so: with the possible exception of the Gallagher brothers, Britpop frontmen presented as new men. This did not make them averse to the odd nod and a wink. This was the era of new laddism; young men were busy learning from Loaded magazine that what, to a casual observer, might appear like sexism was in fact both ironic, and empowering for women. The apparently contradictory nature of these claims seems to have passed by for these born again feminists. The masculinity of Cool Britannia was resolutely heterosexual. In this respect it was less diverse than any other significant rock movement for a couple of decades. Brett Anderson performed an ambivalent androgyny: yet Suede were John the Baptist figures for Britpop, teetering uneasily on the brink of the New Covenant, quick to diminish so that Blur, Oasis, and countless derivative acts could take to the stage. When the messiah came, he was butch. On one occasion Alex James wore an Oasis t-shirt on Top of the Pops. He might just have well sported the slogan 'I've got a bigger dick than Noel Gallagher'. The intensity of the gender retrenchment in 90s music was in many respects laughable, even though it reflected, and fed back into  a much more dangerous backlash against feminism in society at large. It would be a cold-hearted person indeed, however, who didn't laugh - and not in the manner intended by the authors - at the ridiculous spectacle of 'Vindaloo' competing with 'Three Lions' for the number one spot, as the cultural icons of the period jockeyed to demonstrate their authentic football-supporting laddishness. It has always been unclear to me which team Alex James supports, but then I don't follow Chipping Norton Swifts closely, so I may be missing something. We should, I suppose, be grateful that Keith Allen allowed his mum and his gran to share in the bucket of vindaloo.

Singing about Goan food might have been de rigeur, but too many English people have always been more comfortable with Asian food than with Asian people. Britpop was white in its makeup and its cultural reference points. This in itself communicated something about how Britishness was understood at the time. The period coincides, for example, with Asian Dub Foundation's first releases - far more enduring and musically interesting than anything sung at Knebworth all those years ago, yet never counted as part of Britpop. This is both an injustice and a liberation.

The simplistic image of a white, male, straight, salt-of-the-earth, urban, sexual but not threatening, impish but never straightforwardly rebellious, working class was tailor made for New Labour. A wave of populism and flagwaving ushered Blair through the Downing Street gates, riding high on the legacy of forgotten protest and ageing hope. Elected, in large part by a class (contrary to much speculation, there are in fact working class people in marginal constituencies, even in the south of England), he wanted to govern a mass. A heady mix of 'progressive' nationalism and condescending ordinariness spewed forth from government onto a society already drenched with the same concoction by its rock stars. This was a Britpop government. And the Blairites imagined that the working class was as contemporary rockstars presented it: monocultural, in many ways reactionary, white, but with a sense of fair play and fun. The result was as politically ambiguous as Britpop itself was culturally: it gave us increased public spending and ASBOs, a minimum wage and asylum detention centres, the Human Rights Act and the invasion of Iraq.

There's a reluctant admission on the part of their sometime supporters that the Blair/ Brown governments did not usher in the New Jerusalem. Yet even this is narrated in terms of the working class as imagined in the Britpop era. We hear a lot about the forgotten people of the period, as indeed we should, the betrayal of core supporters by New Labour in government was real and deep. Quickly, however, this shades into talk of the white working class, the need to understand traditional values, generations of male pride lost to unemployment, concerns about immigration - in every way imaginable real and urgent social and economic crisis is renarrated in terms of a backlash against the gains of the past two decades as regards race and gender politics. In this way we end up with Blue Labour and its lingering influence. Nostalgia for Britpop fits in perfectly with this use of an ideological construction of class to defuse the politics of class. From the perspective of this project the immediate enemy is an out-of-touch metropolitan obsessed with the politically correct agenda of earlier times and unaware of the concerns of ordinary, hard-working, people. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

Twenty years have passed, then. Were it not for the remarkable elevation of a socialist to the Labour leadership, it would be tempting to say that the most notable change is that privately educated rock aficionados no longer feel the need to adopt working class accents. These are not times in which Etonians lack confidence. That, more than the whimpering of Owen Smith, ought to serve as a cautionary tale for left-wing ebulience.

The Analysis of Blairism (i) - A Class Project

Long Post warning

A couple of days ago I had things to say about the position of the Left in the Labour Party, and this got me thinking about Blairism. It seems to me that we can't understand where we're at properly unless we begin to understand what happened to Labour under the Blair leadership, and how Blair's project continues to work itself out in the present day Labour Party, especially as we approach March's special Conference and possible modification of the Party's relationship to the trade unions.

I want to understand these things better. So I'm going to think out loud, or at least begin to think out loud, in a series of three posts on Blairism, of which this is the first. I've been helped a lot by Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher's excellent little book on the history of the Labour Party, as well as by (Ralph) Miliband and Cliff/ Gluckstein (oh for the blissful days when SWPers wrote useful things).

One response, which is pretty common on the Labour Left, to the phenomenon of Blairism is to deny that there is any such thing. To be sure, the Blair (and subsequently Brown) governments betrayed the hopes invested in them by many Labour voters and did lots of bad things. But this is hardly unparallelled; to a greater or lesser extent the same can be said of every Labour government. Nor is it even clear that Blair's governments were uniquely bad: privatising air traffic control may be deplorable, but it's not obviously worse than supporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And before there was Iraq, there was Vietnam.

If Blairism is to be considered interesting, and of enduring significance for labour movement politics, there has to be more to it than a succession of right-wing policy moves, however individually distasteful. I think that there is something more; I think that Blairism can be understood as a move to decisively reorientate Labour's class representative role. In outline, I believe that Blairism ought to be regarded as an attempt (by no means exhausted) to reconstitute Labour as a party of 'progressive' European-orientated capital.

Labour and Reform

It's something of an old Trot commonplace that Labour is a 'bourgeois workers party'. Being an old Trot commonplace is not incompatible with being true, and this is a case in point. British Labourism is a curious affair. On the one hand, we have a party with a solid working class base, born (in Nye Bevan's words) "from the bowels of the TUC", and over which the trade unions can exercise a degree of influence. Yet, on the other hand, we have a party wedded to the norms of the liberal state, to a divide between the economic and the political (to such an extent that, for the greater part of the Party's history - until the Bennite reforms of the early 80s - the PLP was completely independent of the wider movement), and to the class compromise that all of this entailed. The outcome of these tensions, present from the beginning, is that Labour has functioned to represent the working class politically within capitalism. Labour's existence both encourages class politics and tends to place limits on the imagined scope of those politics. The Party has both delivered historic reforms that have transformed the lives of working class people and, in the very act of doing so, bound them more closely to a system that survives by exploiting them.

All of this is workable for as long as Labour governments can deliver reforms benefiting the working class, thereby justifying their continued existence to their core electorate and the union bureaucracies. A standard narrative, widely believed on Left and Right, holds that Labour governments can no longer do this. In Cliff and Gluckstein's neat phrase Labour now has to offer "reformism without the possibility of reforms". The point of inflexion here is usually seen as the crisis of the mid 1970s, associated with the OPEC price shocks and culminating in Britain with the IMF bail-out of the Callaghan government and the resulting implementation of austerity measures. Before things got to that point, in 1976, Callaghan himself sounded the death-knell for the 'Keynesian'* macroeconomics that had been the power-house of post-war reformsim

we used to think you could just spend your way out of recession... I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked... by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment.

Shifting Phillips curves were the order of the day in the world of economic ideas. And in the hard cold world of institutional reality, new ties appeared for the hands of reformist governments. The Bretton Woods framework, which had provided a secure international context for the British post-war settlement, ended in 1971 when the US terminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The UK's 1973 membership of the Common Market, confirmed by the 'yes' victory in the 1975 referendum, tied UK policy-makers to a "free market economics" and posed long term problems for public ownership (particularly in terms of  reversing privatisations). The growth of transnational corporations seemed to pose problems for planning - left economist Stuart Holland's 1975 The Socialist Challenge expressed well the nature of this concern in the labour movement; he spoke of a 'mesoeonomic' sector of corporations interposed between government policymaking and the desired effects in working peoples' lives.  In the next decade, the Thatcher governments' deregulation of finance and foreign exchange foreclosed further on the options for a future Labour government.

An undoubted result of all this is that Labour governments can no longer run reformism after the exact model of the post-war consensus. I am not myself convinced that reformism as such is not longer possible. The relative continued effectiveness, and undoubted effect, of macroeconomic policy, particularly evident since the 2008 crisis, surely places a question mark over some of the more extreme claims about governmental impotence. But that isn't what matters here: what matters is a widespread collapse of belief in reformism since the mid-1970s. This was summed up quite nicely by Tony Benn in his 1981  Arguments for Democracy: the post-war consensus was spent, the options facing the British electorate were "monetarism, corporatism, and democratic socialism".

Shifting the focus from the national polity to the labour movement, it looked like the reformist project's day had passed. The contradictions of Labourism needed to resolve themselves. Labour could no longer represent the working class within capitalism by offering reforms. It had to either become a socialist party, or else - in the language of two decades later - a party of business.

Resolving the Contradictions? Benn, the SDP, and Kinnock

An increasingly militant constituency Left in the early 1980s favoured the socialist route. For the Bennites this meant not only socialist policies - Labour Conferences had been voting for these for a good few years - but structural reform of the Labour Party to favour the implementation of these policies when Labour was in government. Thus democratisation of the manifesto, mandatory reselection of MPs and similar measures became priorities. Trade union influence on Labour politics increased, for example with the introduction of an electoral college for leadership elections (a measure which also sounded the death toll for a key feature of traditional Labourism, the independence of the PLP). In other ways, boundaries prescribed by Labourism were transgressed, for instance by policy proposals advocating roles for trade unions in industrial management. None the less, the 1980s Left had no intention of weakening the link between Labour and the unions; to that extent the Party's heritage as a trade union party was unthreatened.

One might have expected a threat to come from the Party's Right. If they offered no policies which union leaderships could sell their members - and recall that this was a period of intense pessimism about the possibility of reforms - wasn't there a possibility that unions could become a thorn in the Party's side? As it happened, there was no real antagonism between unions and the rightward drifting parliamentary Party during the Kinnock years. Partly this was because the most right-wing elements of Labour had exited to the SDP, partly because the overwhelming priority was the defeat of Thatcher and Labour (however bad) provided the only electoral hope here, partly because the union movement was - as unemployment increased, the sectoral balance of the UK economy shifted, and especially after the defeat of the 1984-5 miners' strike - on the back foot, and under right-wing leadership, and partly because unions were an important source of finance for the Labour Party.

Whilst the union link remained intact, the Kinnock years did witness a clearing of the ground for a later rightward shift away from traditional Labourism. Left-wing policies adopted during the 70s and 80s were quietly abandoned, and the possibility of a leftward break was weakened by the defeat of Bennism, the anti-Militant purges, and the failure of the leadership to support the GLC and other local government struggles. Of more enduring importance, as the leadership took on board fashionable sociological claims about the changing nature of its working class support, its basis for appeal to that support changed, becoming less collective, and more directed at atomised self-interest, adopting rather than challenging key ideological tropes of the Thatcher era. As Benn's diaries describe a seminar presentation as reporting a survey of Labour voters, "it's nice to have a social conscience, but your family comes first".

In all of this the Kinnock years served as a kind of John the Baptist, a forerunner for the Blairite messiah.

A saviour from on high. Blair and Blairism


The tragically cut-short leadership of John Smith provided a temporary respite for Labourism, whilst the Tories sunk under internal divisions and the ERM fiasco. Then things changed.

The fundamentals of Labourism remained unchallenged at the start of the Blair era. The union link was unbroken and, however weakened Party demoracy might have felt, the labour movement was still capable of translating demands into policy - hence genuinely welcome policies of the Blair governments, such as the minimum wage and the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ - as well as of applying brakes on excessive rightward drift. Yet there was a malaise in the air. Labour had lost four successive general elections, and for all its compromises was beginning to look like a party of perpetual opposition.

At the same time, by the early to mid 1990s, the role of the Tories as the unrivalled political representatives of British capital was looking shaky. Divided on Europe, but increasingly shifting in a Eurosceptic direction, the appeal of the Conservatives to capital focused on EU markets was limited. Moreover, a basic contradiction in the Tories' relationship to the capitalist class reared its head. Capitalism brings its wake relentless social change - "all that is solid melts into air". It has embarrassingly slight intrinsic respect for hierarchy, it cares little for morality and order beyond their capacity to secure profit. Family structures, national boundaries, ethnic identities - all are up for negotiation as eagle-eyed entrepreneurs seek out the next market. Since the 1960s, even as the industrial world had been opened up more completely to the ravages of capital, attitudes had grown more liberal on a range of issues: homosexuality, the family, race and racism, sex and sexism. And a good proportion of the bourgeoisie took this shift in attitudes on board, to a greater or lesser extent. Meanwhile they were represented politically in the UK by the historic party of order, the party of Section 28 and 'Hang Nelson Mandela' t-shirts, the Party which one of their own ministers termed 'the nasty party'.

Wasn't their room for a more modern, more progressive, more pro-European party of capital? Enter Tony Blair. Speaking to the FT in early 1997, Blair said (quoted in Bash/ Fisher),

I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour.

New Labour courted business, and its flirtations were well received, with high profile donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. The gory details of the romance are well documented in Dave Osler's book. At the time, the long-term prospect of a New Labour lacking financial dependence on the unions seemed real. New Labour's policies remained a matter of negotiation between the representation of labour and of capital, I've already mentioned a couple of significant pre-existing labour movement policies that were implemented. Yet there was a definite shift in political economy towards acceptance of neo-liberalism. The rewriting of Clause IV had a symbolic importance here. Meanwhile the relationship between the PLP and the widered movement was negotiated. Party democracy withered (in rather the same way that plants wither after being sprayed with weedkiller), National Policy Forums were introduced, Conference decisions on policy routinely ignored, and candidate selections fixed. Blairism exerted itself as a force through organisations like Progress. Meanwhile, front bench spokespeople appealed over the heads of the movement, to individual electors, understood as consumers. This was the age of political advertising and 'spin'.

In all these ways there was a shift away from Labour even attempting to represent the working class, in however a mediated fashion, and towards it being simply another party of capital, offering itself to the electorate periodically as perhaps the least-worst alternative. Voices around Progress were quite clear that they would like to make the break with Labourism permanent and institutional, eyeing up the union link. Others, prior to the May 1997 landslide which rendered the question irrelevant, mooted working with, or forming coalitions with, the Liberal Democrats, another move which would have undermined the relationship between a Labour government and the labour movement.

Neither of these attacks on Labourism came to pass, and Blair is now redirecting his messianic energies beyond the bounds of the Labour Party, setting himself the modest task of bringing peace between the worlds' religions.  Yet the Blairite assault on Labourism is still warm. Coalition with the Lib Dems remains a live possibility after the next election. And, of course, the union link is a live topic, discussion of which is due to come to a head this March.

And that will be the subject of my next post in this series.



 *It's not really fair to Keynes to attribute to him the view that you could "just spend your way out of recession" but that's another post for a special type of geek.