‘I’ve become so cynical these days’
You do get this feeling that the socialist/anti-socialist divide is partly the old versus the young.
Tony Benn (1992)
‘We’re the lost generation!’ Martin Finkelstein, the clever boy from South Wimbledon, used to say. ‘We’re the children of the eighties! We have no hope!’
Nigel Williams, East of Wimbledon (1993)
Politics isn’t showbiz, okay? What counts is what you say.
Steve Hilton (1994)
In February 1993 the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband dropped in for tea at the Westminster office of the former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn. The two men were senior figures on the left – Miliband was then sixty-nine years old, Benn a year his junior – but they had not always seen eye to eye politically. Back in the early 1960s, as Benn was fighting his long campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage so that he might remain an MP in the House of Commons, Miliband had published his best-known book, Parliamentary Socialism, attacking the Labour Party’s reformist allegiance to Parliament. Benn’s continuing membership of Harold Wilson’s government in the 1970s had also met with Miliband’s criticism: ‘With such rebels,’ he wrote scathingly, ‘Mr Wilson has no great need of allies.’ Even so, they had much in common, sharing an optimistic and longstanding commitment to the building of the socialist future, and a passionate pride in their respective families. Now, in their mature years, they found that it was the latter that brought them together.
Miliband was worried that his two sons, David and Edward, had little commitment to the revolutionary socialism that he had made his life’s work. Indeed both were now active members of the very Labour Party that he had abandoned nearly three decades earlier. Why, he wondered aloud to Benn, did his boys seem to have so little faith in socialism, constantly challenging his pronouncements. ‘Oh, Dad, how would you do that? Would it work?’ they would demand of him. ‘Well,’ replied Benn, on hearing this sad tale of youthful conformity, ‘it’s the same with my sons.’ His second child, Hilary, had by then already failed twice to be elected as an MP, but would in due course find his way into the House of Commons and end up sitting around the same New Labour cabinet table as David and Ed Miliband.
It sounded a somewhat melancholy meeting, but Ralph was, concluded Tony, comforted by the knowledge that he was not the only ageing socialist to find that the younger generation were going off the rails: ‘I think he thought that he was very out of date.’
Perhaps he was right in so thinking. When Miliband died the following year, the former Trotskyist Tariq Ali mourned his passing: ‘His death has now left a gaping void in times which are bad for socialists everywhere.’ Britain was not exempt from those bad times, and even the mainstream, parliamentary left was looking in danger of extinction. The withering away of the tradition had already been manifest in Ken Livingstone’s failure to collect enough nominations to stand for the Labour leadership against John Smith, and in the 1991 closure of Marxism Today, a journal with influence far beyond its small circulation. Above all it was evident in the fact that the recession of the early 1990s had passed by with virtually no organised resistance by the working class; the unions had lost their strength in terms of numbers, legal rights and solidarity, while many of those most affected had still not recovered from a decade of decline, and were looking cowed. As a police officer commented in an episode of Between the Lines, looking at an anti-cuts demonstration outside a town hall: ‘It’s hardly ’84, is it?’
A number of factors contributed to this decline, most spectacularly the unqualified victory of the West in the Cold War, and the subsequent collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc. In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was still standing, the American commentator Francis Fukuyama had published his essay ‘The End of History’, arguing that the world’s ideological conflicts had been resolved in favour of capitalist democracy. Whether or not this were true, the proposition found a receptive audience and confirmed what had become unavoidably apparent over the last decade: that the intellectual tide had turned in favour of free-market economics. Ideas about state ownership of manufacturing and services, or about how to plan and regulate the economy, were unlikely to get much of a hearing in the foreseeable future. As Tony Blair explained in opposition: ‘People will look back on the present century and say that, in a curious way, it was an aberration – that you had this war to the death about ideology.’
In Britain the reinvigoration of the right had taken a very specific turn, under the influence of that doughtiest of cold warriors, Margaret Thatcher. The European Community had once been embraced by Conservatives as a bulwark against both international communism and domestic socialism, but now that the external threat was imploding and the power of the trade unions had been curbed at home, there seemed little further need of anything save the free market, operating on as wide a basis as possible. Everything else about the EU – its aspirations to exert influence in social matters and foreign affairs, for example – was inherently suspect.
The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed an instinctive patriotism to reassert itself, while the Manichean rhetoric of the Cold War era survived, to be directed now at the EU; any hint that it might seek to impede the free workings of capitalism was portrayed as socialism in disguise, a return to the bureaucratic statism of Eastern Europe. ‘Maastricht, and most of the Euro-legislation which had gone before it,’ insisted Teresa Gorman, ‘is essentially socialist in nature, designed to create a centralised structure for Europe.’ The Eurosceptic press barons tended towards the same view; Conrad Black was happy to explain that he was ‘against the EU because it is a “socialist organisation”’. The more philosophically minded argued further that the collapse of the Soviet bloc signalled the end of the era of the superstate, thereby necessitating a rethink of the European drive towards ever closer union.
Such claims helped bolster the new-found enthusiasm for Europe evident in the Labour Party, where Euroscepticism was a fading memory, associated with old folk like Tony Benn, Bryan Gould and Peter Shore, and where debate on the issue had virtually ceased. In his 1989 book Livingstone’s Labour: A Programme for the Nineties, Ken Livingstone argued for a wider internationalism, suggesting that a future Labour government should work with ‘progressive forces in both Eastern and Western Europe as well as in the USSR’, but he actually had far less to say on the subject of the European Community than on the Soviet Union. And what he really wanted to talk about was the neocolonialism and economic imperialism of the USA.
Hatred of America had long been a defining characteristic of the British left, and had led to a slightly ambivalent attitude towards the Eastern bloc. On the one hand, very few – even within the Communist Party of Great Britain – wished to adopt that system, after the crushing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia; but on the other, the existence of the Soviet Union and China was seen as a counterbalance to America. In some quarters, open criticism was considered inappropriate, so that when Benn spoke at a rally in support of the demonstrators killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he could observe, slightly surprised at himself: ‘It was the first time I had ever spoken in public against a communist government.’
It was a bit late by then, of course, and the established sections of the British left made little contribution to the hurried recalculations that followed the dismantling of communism in Eastern Europe. Outside the Labour Party, a group like the Socialist Workers Party could claim that events had proved their theory that the Soviet Union had long since descended into state capitalism, but no one much was listening. The whole political spectrum in Britain shifted as a result of the fallout blowing from the East, the right attracted again to nationalism, the left abandoning its attempt to accommodate both capitalist and socialist impulses. In the words of Jack Straw: ‘the Labour movement would no longer uneasily have to straddle the theoretical divide which had so hobbled it since its foundation.’
Blair was to confirm this shift, but it was evident within Labour long before his Clause IV adventures. ‘By driving out communism from their own countries, the peoples of central and eastern Europe have driven the threat of socialism from ours,’ wrote Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute in August 1992, a couple of weeks into John Smith’s leadership. ‘The reformed Labour Party in Britain no longer threatens to undo what privatization has achieved.’ As a consequence the Tories were deprived of one of their defining characteristics in recent years, now that the Labour Party shared their faith in markets as the only economic model in town. The need to find a new dividing line between the parties was instrumental in the elevation of Europe to the top of the political agenda.
Amongst a younger generation, however, those who might have been expected to carry the socialist banner forwards, the appeal of the Soviet Union had never been particularly marked. For someone inclined to the left and born between, say, the Suez Crisis and Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the campaigns against the hydrogen bomb and the Vietnam War, let alone the memory of the Soviet part in the crushing of Nazism, played no formative role. Nor did Europe rank very high among this generation’s concerns.
Instead the focus, despite the campaigns against apartheid and nuclear weapons, was much more domestic. The greatest galvanising event was the advent of Thatcherism, and the moment of crisis came in 1992 when Labour failed to remove the Tories from office. If, after all those years, the best that could be hoped for was a tame accommodation with Majorism, then it was hard to escape the conclusion that political parties in general – and the Labour Party in particular – were no longer suitable vehicles for social or political change. The death of the left was due as much to this generation’s rejection of politics as it was to the fall of the Soviet Union.
It was a development articulated most clearly in a series of roles played by the actor Robert Carlyle, born in 1961 and described in the press as ‘a Labour voter who never quite recovered from the party’s election defeat in 1992’. ‘People need to believe. People need to congregate. But there’s nothing left to believe in, nothing left to congregate for,’ explains his character, Albie, in ‘To Be a Somebody’ (1994), the best-known story from Cracker. Albie is a Guardian-reading manual worker who didn’t go to university but is sufficiently self-educated that he can identify a Mozart piano concerto or a Rossini opera from a few bars, and is sharp enough to trade verbal blows with Robbie Coltrane’s Fitz. He’s also feeling lost and unwanted in society. ‘We get treated like scum,’ he complains. ‘We’re socialists, we’re trade unionists, so we look to the Labour Party for help. But we’re not queers, we’re not black, we’re not Paki. There’s no brownie points in speaking up for us, so the Labour Party turns its back. We’re not getting treated like scum any more, we’re getting treated like wild animals.’
In a desperate search for meaning in his life, he shaves his hair to a skinhead cut and kills a ‘robbing Paki bastard’ of a shopkeeper, revelling in the sense of power that using a forbidden racist epithet gives him. He goes on to commit a number of other murders, including those of a criminology lecturer and a senior police detective, though he fails in his attempt to kill a freelance journalist who works for the Sun.
Carlyle returned to the theme of the dispossessed white working class as Gaz in The Full Monty, struggling to find a role as a father now that he’s unemployed. With no money in his pocket, he doesn’t know what to do with his son, Nathan, when he spends time with the boy. ‘You’re always making me do stupid stuff like last night,’ says Nathan, referring to a failed attempt to steal a girder from a disused steel mill. ‘Other dads don’t do that.’ Gaz is inspired to try his hand at stripping in an attempt to get enough money to pay maintenance, so that he doesn’t lose access to Nathan, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem of what a man is supposed to do in a rapidly changing world: ‘A few years and men won’t exist. Except in a zoo or summat. I mean, we’re not needed no more, are we? Obsolete. Dinosaurs. Yesterday’s news.’
Less celebrated was Carlyle’s depiction of Ray in Antonia Bird’s Face (1997). Like Quentin Tarantino’s influential Reservoir Dogs, the film was the tale of a heist that goes wrong in a sea of blood and broken friendships, here given a Britpop makeover with a soundtrack that included music by the Longpigs, Gene and Paul Weller, and with a debut acting role for Blur’s Damon Albarn. Ray used to be a communist – nicknamed Red Ray – who was active on the picket line at Wapping during the News International dispute in 1986, but he has abandoned political struggle for a life of crime because he feels that the radicalism of the 1980s has been so comprehensively defeated: ‘I thought: fuck it, that’s it, it’s war, them against us.’
Even in his criminal life, though, he’s still being beaten by the system. Without knowing it, he’s working for a bent copper, who explains why Ray and his kind will never win: ‘You really don’t get it, do you? You and your sort are always on your own, which is why the odds are always against you. I, on the other hand, belong to an institution.’ The one sign of hope comes from Ray’s mother Alice (Sue Johnston), who’s still campaigning, albeit on a smaller, less dramatic scale. ‘It’s over,’ despairs Ray. ‘Didn’t you read the news? They won.’ And Alice replies: ‘They haven’t won, Ray. We’re still here and we’re still fighting. Now, you may have given up, but that doesn’t mean everybody else has.’
There were common threads between those three characters. Albie, Gaz and Ray were quick-witted, articulate men, with enough intelligence to resist the role of victim, but frustrated by their failure to find a place in society and driven to an amoral nihilism. It was a type that occurred repeatedly in the culture of the era. In Mike Leigh’s film Naked (1993), David Thewlis played Johnny, another man for whom society has no discernible use. ‘Why do you feel the need to take the piss?’ he’s asked, and the unspoken answer is that there’s no other way for him to express the futility of his life. He’s cobbled together some kind of philosophy from scraps of Nostradamus, the Book of Revelation and chaos theory, but it’s hardly enough to sustain any sense of hope. ‘I don’t have a future,’ he rages. ‘Nobody has a future, the party’s over. Take a look around you, man, it’s all breaking up.’
The voice of a generation that spent its teenage years in the punk era, with the Sex Pistols’ sneer that ‘We’re the future, your future’, it was echoed again in the words of Albie: ‘You’re looking at the future. This country’s going to blow. And people like me are going to light the fuse. The despised, the betrayed, we’re going to light the fuse, and this country’s going to blow.’
The implausibility of that apocalyptic threat was yet another cause for despair. The truth was that those exiled to the fringes of society might be growing in number but they possessed no power to bring the nation to its knees, however alluring the fantasy might appear. But nor were they likely to form part of the new Britain that John Patten (in another Tory precursor of Tony Blair’s Third Way) had called for in 1993, a country in which people were ‘concerned as much about their responsibilities as their rights, opportunities as much as entitlements’.
Some of Albie and Johnny’s real-life counterparts found their way into what survived of the New Age travelling communities. Battered by years of struggle with police and local authorities, the travellers had sustained a near-fatal blow with the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, and by the second half of the decade their numbers were thinning considerably. ‘Ten years ago, we felt like an army, but how many’s still left today? Five thousand?’ a convoy member despaired to the journalist Nik Cohn. ‘And what’s our crime, once you get past the scapegoating? We don’t know our place, that’s all.’ The battles had taken their toll on the broad coalition seen at Castlemorton earlier in the decade, and now only the desperate were left: ‘Some people may show up with a lot of fancy ideas, full of utopian dreams, but they never last long. Hardcore travellers, the ones who endure, have no choice.’ As he put it: ‘The nine-to-five world has no further use for them; they’re seen as garbage.’
That opposition between travellers’ values and those of the ‘nine-to-five world’ was explored, in the mid-1990s, by several novelists for whom the image of the convoy offered an escape from modernity. In 1960 E.M. Forster had reflected that his then-unpublished Edwardian novel Maurice was set in ‘an England where it was still possible to get lost’. Things had changed: ‘There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, no deserted valley for those who wish neither to reform nor corrupt society but to be left alone.’ The New Age travellers appeared to suggest that some of this heritage might yet be reclaimed, both in a negative and a positive way: a convoy is seen as a potential refuge for a criminal in Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height (1993) and for Francis Kreer experiencing his spiritual crisis in A.N. Wilson’s The Vicar of Sorrows.
The theme was developed most fully in The Anarchist (1996), the brilliant second novel by Tristan Hawkins, who died shortly after its publication, aged just thirty-three. The Anarchist tells the stories of Sheridan Entwhistle, a magazine publisher in his forties, and Yantra, a traveller who, like Johnny in Naked, has pieced together for himself a patchwork of philosophies and religions, ranging from Greek mythology to a belief – vouchsafed to him in an acid dream by Jimi Hendrix – that ‘Stonehenge was an alien chess set’. Tempted by the image of freedom, wisdom and honesty that he perceives in Yantra, Sheridan abandons his life of suburban comfort, only to discover the shocking truth that humanity is much the same wherever it finds itself: ‘Suburbia celebrates its newborn, mourns its dead and worships its gods with no less intensity than anyone else on this cruel, chaotic planet – the only difference being that it wears a tie to do it.’ The encounter also provides the opportunity for Yantra’s travelling companion, Jayne, to return to her own middle-class family in Hemel Hempstead, another of those who came to travelling ‘full of utopian dreams’ but didn’t last the course.
During their time together, Yantra, Sheridan and Jayne also find themselves participating in an anti-roads protest, although there is some confusion about quite what the issue involves. ‘The justification, the logic behind it, doesn’t matter,’ explains Jayne. ‘If it helps undermine the bloody establishment then it’s always right. You don’t have to know what a demo’s about to join in. It’s a demo. And yeah, I s’pose it is a bit of a grin.’ Much of that motivation could indeed be discerned in the anti-roads movement that flourished briefly, and vividly, in the mid-1990s, though there was too a genuine concern for the environment, an expression of the new creed that had supplanted socialism amongst idealist youth.
The campaign to stop ancient woodlands and natural habitats being bulldozed so new roads could be built first became a major news story in July 1995, when work began on the Newbury bypass. Over the next eighteen months, thousands of protestors occupied the land in an ultimately doomed attempt to halt construction work, using tactics – including the building of tree-houses and tunnels – that ensured maximum disruption and intense media attention. They were emulated in subsequent protests, including the demonstration against the A30 extension in Fairmile, Devon, which made a star of a 23-year-old Newbury-born activist named Daniel Hooper, better known under his nom de paix Swampy.
By the time he was pulled out of a tunnel in February 1997, having spent nine days underground, Swampy had become ‘the nation’s favourite activist’, famous enough to appear on Have I Got News for You. A quiet, well-spoken young man, his commitment couldn’t be faulted. ‘We are living in a car culture,’ he explained. ‘Without this protest, I don’t think people would be aware that they are building a super-highway all the way through the country.’ None of the individual battles were won, but the raising of environmental concerns – as well as the enormous cost of dealing with such protestors – did have an impact on future planning procedures.
The numbers involved in such campaigns were relatively small, and the participants’ activism marked them out as unusual at a time when political commitment was in retreat. Much more common was the atmosphere of sullen defeat found in those parts of the country devastated by the decline of heavy industry. Such places had been hit hard by the recession of the early 1980s, had remained untouched by the later boom years of Thatcherism, had barely noticed the second great Tory recession, since there was no further to fall, and had again been forgotten in the recovery of the mid-1990s.
In the North-East, in the 1970s, the shipyards had employed 30,000 and the coalfields 65,000; these figures were now down to 2,000 and 200 respectively. The flight of employment had left behind little evidence of the property-owning democracy that had been promised. A man in Newcastle explained that he had bought his house in 1960 for £2,000 and seen its value rise and fall: ‘In 1980 it was worth around £25,000, now it’s worth around £2,000.’ Others reported trying to give their houses to the council and being refused, since the cost of maintenance was greater than the value of the property.
The same stories could be heard in Liverpool, one of the few major cities in the western world that ended the century with a smaller population than it had started, where police officers were routinely issued with bulletproof vests and school vandalism was said to cost millions of pounds every year. A clergyman returning to Liverpool after ten years’ absence was shocked at what he found: ‘The great quality of Liverpudlians was that we had hope, however bad things got. But the hope has gone now and everyone seems dragged down by a general depression.’ Edwina Currie, born and educated in the city, was also unimpressed on her trips back. ‘Liverpool is still awful,’ she wrote in 1995: ‘greedy envious eyes on the car, so you’re scared to leave it out of your sight.’
Private enterprise, for all of Michael Heseltine’s activity in the 1980s, was still conspicuous by its absence. ‘We’re living in a grantocracy here. That means we spend half our lives sitting on our arses and waiting,’ commented an unemployed community activist in Toxteth. Despite all the money spent in the attempt to regenerate the area, decline had continued: ‘There’s been about six billion so far, spread over the last four decades, and here we are today, still living in shit.’
Large parts of the country were similarly lost to any sense of national prosperity, and concern was expressed particularly for the young. In the weeks before the 1997 election, Tony Parsons toured some of the more deprived parts of the country, reporting, for example, the perspective of a woman in Bristol: ‘I work with children and teenagers. After eighteen years of Tory rule, many of them are apathetic. They have low self-esteem, low expectations.’ The celebrated photo-journalist Nick Danziger, who specialised in covering the darkest and most dangerous places on the planet, undertook a similar journey around Britain, finding a primary-school head teacher who had little time for formal education: ‘her primary objective was not to teach reading and writing, but to provide the children with a safe environment.’ The desperation of the early 1980s was being replicated, fifteen years on, and there seemed little likelihood of arresting the descent into hopelessness. Another lost generation was in the making.
Danziger’s perception was that ‘as the British government rolls back the safety nets for the poor, the excluded and marginalised people of British cities are in many ways less able to deal with relationships and circumstances than the shanty town dwellers in Third World countries’. The pseudonymous doctor, Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote a column in The Spectator reporting from the front line of general practice in an inner-city area, came to much the same conclusion: ‘having worked in several countries of the so-called Third World, and having travelled extensively through all the continents, I am convinced that the poverty of spirit to be found in an English slum is the worst to be found anywhere.’
In a previous era this was the natural constituency of the Labour movement, with the workers’ education programmes and self-help groups that formed the backdrop to Frank Field’s vision of society. In 1996 the Manic Street Preachers scored their biggest hit thus far with ‘A Design for Life’, its opening line – ‘Libraries gave us power’ – sounding epically nostalgic for a vanished world. Both Labour and the Tories had once been a part of the warp and weft of everyday society, but no longer. John Prescott talked wistfully about ‘my old days when being a member of your local Labour Party meant sports days, parties, tons of amusements and games. Much of that sort of fun went out of politics when the flowcharts flooded in.’
Instead New Labour was, as Tony Blair repeatedly pointed out, concerned first and foremost with success in general elections; there was no acknowledgement of the idea that the movement had a role to play in improving lives even when in opposition. As a consequence the pursuit of the suburban vote left many believing themselves to be unrepresented, and the courting of ‘middle England’ made those in the North, let alone those in Scotland and Wales, feel marginalised. A man living on a South Wales estate where unemployment stood at over 90 per cent, told Danziger of the loss of identity: ‘We no longer work, so I suppose I’m no longer a member of the working class.’
Instead he categorised himself as belonging to the underclass. A term that had travelled from America in the 1980s, this was now widely used to describe a sector of society occupied by, in the words of academic Mary Kaldor, ‘the unskilled, unpowerful and often unwaged or low-waged’ – the ‘socially excluded’, as New Labour preferred to express it – amongst whom material and spiritual poverty was said to be passed down from generation to generation. Gordon Brown pointed out in 1996 that ‘20 per cent of all households have no employed person in them, even though unemployment is running at about 7 per cent’.
The concept of an underclass was hardly new – it had precedents in nineteenth-century concepts of the ‘undeserving poor’ and the lumpenproletariat – but its supposed growth in recent years was a matter of political dispute. From a Conservative perspective, it was a left-wing problem. ‘The cause is twofold,’ argued John Major. ‘It’s a combination of poor schools, run on fashionable 1960s theories, which have let pupils down, and misguided council policies in the inner cities, which have driven out the sort of employers who would have given school-leavers work.’ From the left, there was no hesitation in ascribing it to the effects of Conservative policy in the 1980s, the ‘ugly face of Thatcherism’, as Michael Meacher wrote in 1984, claiming that thirteen million people in Britain were ‘living in chronic insecurity’. But few doubted any more the problem’s existence.
Mostly the underclass was depicted in terms of youth, employing the twin stereotypes of the drunken lout and the teenage single mother; the former inspired fear of anti-social, violent behaviour, the latter attracted moral indignation and mockery. As with so many cultural trends, it was captured in the pages of Viz comic, which had pre-empted the ladette phenomenon with its creation of the Fat Slags, a pair of sexually promiscuous, drunken women who shared the favours of a married and unemployed petty criminal. Now it produced Kappa Slappa (soon renamed Tasha Slappa after complaints from the sportswear manufacturer), a teenage version of the same type, seen with a succession of unwanted and abandoned children, dreaming of spending her entire life on benefits. She was to be followed on television early in the next century by Matt Lucas’s character Vicky Pollard in Little Britain and Catherine Tate’s Lauren Cooper, by which time the term ‘chav’ had made its way into the nation’s vocabulary.
Such figures were not always presented in a particularly harsh light. Steve Coogan first made his name playing both the mullet-haired, student-hating Mancunian slob Paul Calf and his tarty, promiscuous sister Pauline, and both were treated with some tolerance, at least when compared to others in Coogan’s stable. So too was ‘teenage temptress’ Bianca Jackson, played by Patsy Palmer, who made her debut in EastEnders in 1993; her appalling dress sense, her sulky demeanour, punctuated by temper tantrums, and her colourful private life weren’t allowed to conceal a warm heart of pure soap. There were also Hyacinth Bucket’s working-class sisters Rose and Daisy, together with Rose’s layabout husband Onslow, in Keeping Up Appearances. Warmer still were the portrayals in The Royle Family, a sitcom created by and starring Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, which recreated the claustrophobic working-class family-home environment of Till Death Us Do Part, but without the political shouting matches in which Alf Garnett and his son-in-law engaged. And perhaps this was the most marked difference between the working-class comedies of the 1990s and those of a generation earlier. In the 1970s, series like Love Thy Neighbour, Rising Damp and George and Mildred had featured political – and often explicitly party political – arguments as an integral part of the comedy; that element had now disappeared.
The warmth of those depictions of socially excluded families was countered in the bleakest British film of the decade, Nil by Mouth, written and directed by Gary Oldman. A tale of drink, drugs and random violence set amongst the desperate, lawless white underclass on a high-rise council estate in south-east London, Nil by Mouth had none of the gloss of Trainspotting, none of the human spirit of Brassed Off, none of the occasional flashes of wit seen in Naked. There was, however, a level of impotent, profanity-laden fury that few others had ever matched. ‘Get that cunt out of my fucking house,’ rages Ray (Ray Winstone) at his wife Valerie (Kathy Burke). ‘Get him out or I’ll kill him. Then I’ll fucking kill you and I’ll kill your fucking slag shit cunt family.’ She subsequently has a miscarriage after he gives her a severe kicking in a misguided fit of jealousy. As her mother (Laila Morse) says: ‘We’re unlucky, ain’t we?’
This did not, of course, reflect the totality of life in Britain, even as experienced by youth. ‘There are more adolescents in the Girl Guides and the Sea Scouts than there are teenage junkies, but nobody ever makes a film about them,’ observes a character in Ben Elton’s novel Inconceivable, and he had a point. The established organisations for children had become deeply unfashionable, as Chris Mullin discovered when a group of Girl Guides refused to have their photograph taken with him for the local paper in Sunderland: ‘The other kids at school would make fun of us,’ they explained. ‘It’s not cool.’ (Meanwhile Viz brought us Boy Scouse, a strip in which teenage boys win badges for such good deeds as Multiple Identity Signin’ On and Gerrin’ a 14-Year-Old Baird Preggas.) But the underclass and its association with criminality became a favourite theme of film-makers in the 1990s, in what looked at times like slum tourism of the kind targeted in one of Britpop’s finest moments, Pulp’s hit single ‘Common People’:
The political dimension to ‘Common People’ marked it out, alongside the work of the Manic Street Preachers, as an anomaly in the Britpop canon. More generally, there was little reflection of working-class life – let alone of rebellion – in the lyrics to the songs of, say, Oasis. Instead that band’s success made fashionable a proletarian style and presentation that fed into the mockney tendency of the new lads; from Blur to Jamie Oliver there was displayed an attitude of chirpy matiness that owed more to the music hall than it did to Marxism. And behind that apolitical image was hopelessness, a lack of faith in future progress. After a decade and a half of defeat for the working class in much of the country, few were left with any commitment to the idea of fighting back, and New Labour was unlikely to fill the void where once there had been a sense of social optimism.
Similarly, much of television and cinema also displayed a decreasing interest in politics. Channel 4’s soap Brookside faced criticism for abandoning the agenda that had portrayed Bobby Grant (Ricky Tomlinson) as a trade union activist in the mid-1980s. Now it became ever more sensationalist, so that even when addressing the issue of domestic violence, it resorted to the melodrama of murder and the burial of a body under a patio, a plotline that achieved high audience figures and a two-year cliffhanging story at the expense of realism. The programme’s creator, Phil Redmond, was unrepentant. ‘With a lack of any great vision from the Conservative government and the arrival of the cult of the individual, our stories became more introspective,’ he shrugged. His new series, Hollyoaks, was – like Eldorado, but more sustainably – a response to the shiny vacuity of the Australian youth-soaps.
Meanwhile the elder statesman of social drama, Ken Loach, was entering a purple patch in his career, films like Riff-Raff (1991), Raining Stones (1993) and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) making him the most acclaimed British director of the era, at least on the Continent where he was more venerated than he was at home. Here too, however, there was a turn towards the introspective. Loach’s best film of the decade, My Name Is Joe (1998), was the story of a recovering alcoholic in Glasgow (played by Peter Mullan), who’s been dry for nearly a year and is building a new life, largely centred on the amateur football team that he runs. He’s optimistic, funny and charming, and he falls for Sarah (Louise Goodall), a health visitor who’s in a different league: ‘She’s got a wee car, a job, a cheque at the end of every month, a pension, her own house,’ whereas he’s thirty-seven years old ‘and I’ve got fuck all’.
Much of the film is close to romantic comedy, though the class conflict is more prominent than it would be in, say, a Richard Curtis script. With the best of motives, Joe helps out a young ex-junkie who’s in trouble with gangsters, but in the process he finds himself sucked back into a shady world he’s left behind, much to Sarah’s horror. He tries to explain his reality to her: ‘I’m really sorry but we all don’t live in this nice, tidy world of yours. Some of us can’t go to the police. Some of us can’t go to the bank for a loan. Some of us can’t just move house and fuck off out of here. Some of us don’t have a choice.’
The misery of neglected parts of working-class Britain was also a reliable standby for newspapers wanting to make their readers’ flesh creep. In 1993 there was tremendous excitement over a thirteen-year-old from the Byker Wall estate in Newcastle, who was too young to be named but was given the moniker Rat Boy by a local journalist. The nickname (shared by Tasha Slappa’s half-brother in Viz) referred to the boy’s supposed practice of living in ventilation shafts on the estate, though he vehemently denied any such suggestion and insisted that he was merely hiding there from the police when he was caught.
The story that emerged was uninspiring. Coming from ‘a respectable working-class family’, the child had first been cautioned for burglary at the age of ten and had gone on to commit a string of such crimes, typically picking on the homes of pensioners, though it appeared that, for all his instant notoriety, he wasn’t exactly a master criminal; he stole very little, was easily scared off and was regularly arrested. He would then be put in council care and would promptly abscond. By the time he was fourteen, he had escaped from care more than thirty times, had admitted over a hundred crimes, and was still going strong when he reached seventeen and was sentenced to four years in jail, at which stage his identity could be revealed in the papers.
In his wake came other examples of what were becoming known as ‘feral children’, including Spider Boy and Blip Boy (‘because he single-handedly alters crime figures’), though none made quite the same impression. The media handwringing was mocked by Ron Manager in The Fast Show: ‘Small boys. On remand. Car stereos for goalposts? That’s the way it is these days, isn’t it?’ Caroline Aherne played a schoolgirl in the same series: ‘He’s great, my dad, but he’s so old-fashioned, you know? He still thinks that you shouldn’t have a baby till you’ve left school.’
The wider context of the Rat Boy story was the lack of appropriate accommodation in which such youngsters could be held, and Kenneth Clarke, as home secretary, responded by launching a policy of building Secure Training Centres. At the time, Tony Blair was in his ‘tough on crime’ phase, but even he sided with penal reform groups, seeing the centres – effectively prisons for children from the age of twelve upwards – as a step too far, saying that they risked creating ‘colleges of crime’. Nonetheless Clarke’s successor, Michael Howard, pressed on with the plans. After the 1997 election, Labour’s Jack Straw intimated that the programme was to be scrapped, to the relief of many, including the National Association of Probation Officers, whose spokesperson explained: ‘We would welcome the abandonment of Secure Training Centres. They went ahead against all professional opinion. They will be extremely expensive to run and will do nothing to reduce crime.’
Then Straw announced that he’d changed his mind, and was implementing the policy after all. When the first such unit, the Medway Secure Training Centre, opened in Kent in 1998, the cost of keeping an offender imprisoned there was said to be £5,000 a week, six times as much as an adult in maximum security and eighteen times as much as sending a child to Eton. (This was later claimed to be an exaggeration, the actual cost being just half that figure, no more than a decent room at the Ritz.) Within the first seven months, there had been nearly a hundred assaults on staff, with twenty-six adults hospitalised, and morale was so low that thirty-five employees had resigned, including two senior managers. Since the centre held a maximum of forty children, overseen by a hundred staff, this appeared to represent fairly serious disruption. Meanwhile, the company running the institution, Rebound, had been fined by the government for breaches of its contract. Rebound was a part of Group 4, a private security firm that, five years earlier, had won the contract to escort prisoners between jails and courts in Humberside and the East Midlands, as part of a privatisation initiative. The company’s involvement received a fanfare of early publicity, for reasons made clear in a Daily Mirror editorial: ‘To lose one prisoner may be bad luck. To lose four in as many days reeks of incompetence.’
The reversal of policies espoused in opposition was not untypical, for the Labour government proved adept at picking up Conservative ideas on crime. It was equally fond of media-friendly initiatives that never fully, or even partially, materialised, ideas such as mandatory three-year sentences for those convicted of a third burglary charge and courts sitting at night. Most famously, Tony Blair suggested on-the-spot fines for yobbish behaviour: ‘A thug might think twice about kicking in your gate, throwing traffic cones around your street or hurling abuse into the night sky if he thought he might get picked up by the police, taken to a cash-point and asked to pay an on-the-spot fine of, for example, £100.’ The proposal was roundly ridiculed and denounced by pretty much everyone, from chief constables to the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes: ‘Punishing people who are not charged and not found guilty is fundamentally against civil liberties.’ Even Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative home affairs spokesperson, dismissed it as ‘just another headline-grabbing gimmick’ (though that didn’t stop her a couple of months later proposing £100 on-the-spot fines for drug takers). Again the proposal came to nothing, and Blair was to dismiss it in his memoirs as being all Alastair Campbell’s fault: ‘It was a great piece of Alastair tabloidery.’
The one initiative that did survive to become part of the social landscape was the anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO, introduced as a way of dealing with disruptive individuals by allowing a local authority or a police force to apply to a magistrates’ court for a banning order, circumscribing that individual’s permitted behaviour. As they evolved, it turned out that these could be applied to anyone over the age of ten and required a lower burden of proof than that demanded in criminal cases, even though the breaching of an ASBO was itself a criminal offence. At times, they were far-reaching in their imposition of curfews and restrictions on movements; in 2001 a fifteen-year-old was banned from entering the Fallowfield district of Manchester, and part of Rusholme, for the next ten years.
There were soon reports, however, that having an ASBO was regarded as a matter of pride in certain quarters, evidence of a rebellious individualism. ‘People knock ASBOs,’ joked Linda Smith, ‘but you have to bear in mind, they are the only qualifications some of these kids are going to get.’ How effective the policy was remained the subject of debate. Fewer than five hundred such orders were issued in the first three years, and by 2002 the new home secretary, David Blunkett, was promising to reform the system.
Undeniably, however, the talk of feral children and teenage thugs reinforced an impression that society was slipping out of control and needed the firm hand of authoritarian government to restore order. But such an image was far from new; it had been a commonplace for centuries, from the gin-sodden 1740s, ‘when multitudes of men and women were rolling about the streets drunk’, to the 1820s, when Surrey magistrates expressed concerns about ‘the almost unchecked parading of the streets by the notoriously dissolute and abandoned of both sexes’. One could even go back to the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury, writing about the people encountered by the Norman invaders in 1066: ‘They were accustomed to eat until they became surfeited and drink till they were sick.’ As Harry Pearson noted, when considering the pitch invasions and hooliganism that marred professional football in the late Victorian era, it was only the alleged causes that changed, not the behaviour: ‘In the days before violent videos and the abolition of corporal punishment in schools you just had to face up to the sad truth: some people like fighting.’
In recent years the cause of social disorder was said, by those on the right of politics, to be the breakdown of discipline that resulted from the liberalisation of the 1960s. New Labour’s rhetoric suggested that it shared that perspective, implying a moral failure on the part of working-class youth and their families.
Its response was an endless introduction of new initiatives. In its first term, the government brought forward thirty-one Bills on law and order and introduced new criminal offences at a rate of around two per week. Yet still the stories of badly behaved youth continued to make headlines, embarrassingly so when they came close to home. Jack Straw’s own seventeen-year-old son was arrested in 1998 for alleged drug dealing, and Tony Blair’s son, Euan, two years later when he was found drunk in Leicester Square, lying on the pavement vomiting, after celebrating his GCSE results (‘they weren’t a huge cause for celebration,’ remarked Blair in his memoirs). More significantly, the prison population continued to rise, far beyond the levels inherited from Michael Howard.
Beyond the issues of anti-social behaviour and ‘neighbours from hell’ on council estates lay another trend that caused concern to politicians, but against which it was impossible to legislate. There was, it was felt, a disconnection from society evident amongst middle-class members of the generation that reached adulthood in the Thatcher years. ‘I must say,’ points out the hero of Nigel Williams’s novel East of Wimbledon, ‘that I don’t really feel part of British society.’ He’s not motivated by politics, or by anything else much, just disillusioned by everything, denouncing Britain as ‘a squalid little place, full of people who don’t believe in anything. Am I making that clear? I don’t believe in anything. I think it’s all a load of toss really.’
That sense of a generation that didn’t quite feel as though it fitted into normal society was evident in Robert Carlyle’s most mainstream and successful role of the decade. Hamish Macbeth (1995) was a prime-time Sunday evening series on BBC One that looked at first sight as though it were a Scottish version of the popular ITV police drama Heartbeat, a piece of television nostalgia starring Nick Berry as a Yorkshire policeman and set in the early 1960s. Certainly that was Carlyle’s initial impression when offered the title role: ‘A Sunday night show about a policeman in a rural setting. It didn’t take a genius to work that out. No disrespect to that programme or Nick Berry. It’s just not the kind of thing that I’d be interested in personally.’ It turned out to be something rather different.
Macbeth is a police officer who’s escaped from the big city to take up a post in the idyllic Highland village of Lochdubh, and the series came complete with a title sequence so drenched in Scottish clichés that it could have doubled as a shortbread advert. Beyond that, however, it turned out to be akin to an Ealing comedy, depicting a community warmth and a love of eccentric normality that slyly subverted expectations. The first episode was a light-hearted tale of drug-taking, domestic abuse, filicide and cannibalism, celebrating a lax attitude to law-breaking, even on the part of the police. It rapidly evolved into one of the few shows where you might expect to see discussions of existentialism, the effects of cannabis on cows or modern-day resurrection men. And Macbeth himself, as Carlyle was quick to make clear, was a more subtle character than he might have been: ‘He’d joined the police during the Thatcher years, and to come out of that and have no ambition whatsoever seemed to be quite interesting.’
A similar lack of ambition could be seen in another of the BBC’s quirky takes on the police drama. Jonathan Creek (1997) starred the comedian Alan Davies as a long-haired, duffel-coated figure obsessed with the golden age of illusion, the days of Robert Houdin, John Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant. ‘I was born a hundred years too late, basically,’ claims Creek, and the sense of being stranded out of time is emphasised by the theme tune (Saint-Saëns’s ‘Danse Macabre’) and by the influences of G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr on writer David Renwick. But Creek is also a product of his own time, someone who’s chosen to turn his back on a conventional career path in search of freedom. ‘They can never get behind me opting out from college,’ he complains about his parents; ‘like it’s a cop-out to try and escape.’
It was a theme explored extensively in the literature of the period, in a spate of novels that effectively reworked George Orwell’s 1936 classic Keep the Aspidistra Flying for the post-punk generation. The pattern was set by Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), in which the narrator, Rob Fleming, has, like Jonathan Creek, given up on his college career and opted out of the suburban future that lay before him, seduced by a cultural rather than a political opposition to the mainstream. He’s made progress since, setting up his own record shop to cater to the needs of the more discerning rock and roll obsessive, but now, thirty-six years old and approaching middle age, he’s aware that something has gone wrong. ‘We got to adolescence and just stopped dead,’ he reflects; ‘we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.’
At the heart of this arrested adolescence is a value system that defines character by subcultural credentials, the belief that ‘what really matters is what you like, not what you are like’. Consequently Rob is baffled when one of his friends starts going out with someone who has the wrong taste in music: ‘It is as hard for me to understand how he has ended up with a Simple Minds fan as it would be to fathom how he had paired off with one of the royal family, or a member of the shadow cabinet.’
In one of the novel’s key scenes, Rob goes to a dinner party with people of his own age who have, unlike him, followed the middle-class path mapped out for them, and he feels adrift in a world where ‘they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do’. Silenced and dissatisfied, he identifies the point where it all went wrong, the year when he dropped out of college and Margaret Thatcher came to power, and concludes: ‘I want to go back to 1979 and start all over again.’ Instead, in a slightly unsatisfactory resolution, Rob achieves maturity through the redeeming power of golden oldie singles.
High Fidelity was one of the biggest-selling novels of the decade, and in its wake came a host of other accounts of men in their thirties tentatively re-engaging with society. In John O’Farrell’s first novel, The Best a Man Can Get, the narrator, Michael Adams, seems to have achieved the perfect life–play balance, living with his wife and children in North London while pursuing a secret parallel existence, sharing a flat in South London with three other men and behaving as though he were still a twenty-something bachelor. But he too feels the call of adulthood and finds a metaphor for the onset of maturity as he looks back through a twenty-year collection of the New Musical Express. ‘I flicked through a few of the interviews with my boyhood heroes – snarling punks spouting nihilistic notions of no future and anarchy, postures I’d once adopted myself,’ he records, before deciding: ‘I’d better drop all these newspapers off at the recycling depot.’ In fact, by the end of the century, the idea of arrested adolescence, which had featured so prominently in Men Behaving Badly and had been embodied in the new lads, was looking decidedly dated, so that when Linda Smith appeared on the television show Room 101 she denounced ‘this culture of middle youth, this idea that we don’t grow old’.
The publication of High Fidelity saw Hornby acclaimed in the press as the ‘chief British iconographer of the 1990s’ and, if that overstated the case a little, he did remain a significant chronicler of a key section of the Thatcher generation. His second novel, About a Boy (1998), returned to the theme with a central character, Will, who is a childish grown-up finding some meaning in his disengaged life through the medium of a grown-up child, Marcus. Through Marcus, Will meets the boy’s mother, Fiona, a vegetarian music therapist, with whom he has nothing in common save for their mutual dislike of John Major, but he goes to dinner at her house anyway, only to be horrified when she tries to entertain him by playing the piano and singing from the 1970s singer-songwriter repertoire. She’s not very good, but what really embarrasses him is that instead of the knowing irony he’s expecting, there’s a sincerity to her performance. ‘Fiona meant it. She meant “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, and then she meant “Fire and Rain”, and then she meant “Both Sides Now”. There was nothing between her and the songs, she was inside them. She even closed her eyes when she was singing.’ It’s a painfully excruciating evening for him – as it would have been for the smart young cynics in Queer as Folk – and as soon as he gets home ‘he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched Prisoner: Cell Block H with the sound down. He wanted to hear people who didn’t mean it, and he wanted to watch people he could laugh at.’
Fiona represents another side of the same generation, those still committed to the legacy of a left-wing lifestyle, but equally marginal to mainstream society. ‘A peculiarly contemporary creation with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion’, she comes from a world Will ‘knew nothing about and had no use for, like music therapists and housing officers and health-food shops with noticeboards and aromatherapy oils and brightly coloured sweaters and difficult European novels and feelings’. There is no doubt, however, where the reader’s sympathies are expected to lie; Marcus asserts his independent identity with the declaration: ‘I bloody hate Joni Mitchell.’ Even with Will’s return from the cultural fringes, the tone of cynicism remained intact here and elsewhere. Personal redemption might be found in relationships, but wider society was still the subject of mockery, ridicule and distrust. And it was that note of hostility against which politicians railed, desperate to prevent it contaminating the emerging sense of a new national identity.
Both Will and Fiona, one felt, would have voted for Tony Blair and New Labour, though she with greater expectation than he, putting her faith in Blair’s message of bright-eyed optimism. ‘We must awaken in our people the hope that change can bring,’ Blair proclaimed, in a speech used for a 1997 election broadcast. ‘Because the last weapon the Tories have is despair and cynicism.’
Yet again, the same angle had been tried out first by the Tories, and particularly in this instance by Michael Portillo, who had adopted the message as his theme tune. In a speech delivered in January 1994, he attacked ‘the self-destructive sickness of national cynicism’, claiming that ‘Too many politicians, academics, churchmen, authors, commentators and journalists exhibit the full-blown symptoms of this new British disease.’ A few months earlier, Portillo had visited the offices of the Guardian, where, noted Hugo Young, he had spoken about how ‘British self-irony had grown from minor to major in the pageant of decline.’
As so often in the 1990s, however, it was New Labour that profited from a changing mood. Whatever the merits of Portillo’s arguments, they seemed less than convincing when voiced by a leading member of a government that looked tired and jaded; the British could hardly fail to apply their longstanding traditions of scepticism and mockery to such an administration. Similarly, when Prince Charles weighed in with an attack on the ‘all-pervading cynicism’ sweeping the country, it was hard not to see special pleading on the part of the royal family, a formerly revered institution.
Blair’s enthusiasm in opposition, on the other hand, promised a new era, and temporarily he carried much of popular culture with him. ‘Bugger my career,’ said Martin Rossiter, singer with Britpop band Gene and a member of the Labour Party; ‘this is my one chance not to be cynical, and I’m grabbing it with both hands.’ Following the 1997 election, the editor of BBC Two’s Newsnight programme, Peter Horrocks, wrote a memo that announced the formal end of the age of cynicism: ‘Ennui is over – for now. Much of our tricksiness and world-weariness was an appropriate way of capturing the repetitiveness of the dying days of Conservatism.’
The death of Diana seemed to suggest that the day of the cynic had indeed passed, but old habits weren’t to be shaken off quite so easily. The alliance between New Labour and Cool Britannia scarcely lasted to the end of election year. As the government began to stumble, so its fashionable new friends made their excuses and left, returning to the time-honoured practice of sniping from the sidelines. By January 1998 Harry Enfield was already on the attack (‘They are turning out to be worse than the Tories, even more mean-spirited’), followed in short order by Red or Dead designer Wayne Hemingway (‘There is a very grave danger that by simply inviting a few, mostly naff pop stars and comedians to drinkies at No 10, the very people Blair is trying to impress will be turned off’), and by Ben Elton. ‘The most gruesome aspect of the Cool Britannia thing is the way that politicians are trying to latch on to it,’ he remarked. ‘Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators.’
Within a couple of months, the NME was publishing disparaging comments from the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Alan McGee and Damon Albarn, and putting a picture of Blair on the front cover with the single-word headline: BETRAYED. ‘I’m not ashamed to be an old rocker,’ shrugged the prime minister, responding in the Daily Mirror. ‘Pop stars are perfectly entitled to have a go at the government.’ Elsewhere, the Manic Street Preachers were making a donation to Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party.
If there was a moment that captured the disenchantment of popular culture with New Labour, a symbol of the fury that this was just another government pursuing pretty much the same set of policies, it came at the Brit Awards in February 1998. While Bill Clinton’s favourite soft-rock band, Fleetwood Mac, were on stage, running through ‘Go Your Own Way’ one more time, Danbert Nobacon of the group Chumbawamba leapt onto the table occupied by John Prescott and emptied a bucket of iced water over the deputy prime minister, while shouting in support of a group of Liverpool dockers who had been in dispute with their former employers for over two years. ‘I lashed out with my fist, into his ribs,’ remembered John Prescott. ‘I hit him so hard he fell off the table.’ Only the presence of photographers crowding round prevented him from planting his foot firmly on Nobacon’s neck.
Perhaps Julian Clary’s jokes at the expense of Norman Lamont should have warned Prescott, but for the last few years awards ceremonies had become a happy hunting ground for politicians and public figures seeking a cheap photo-opportunity. Now they suddenly seemed less hospitable places, as the Duchess of York was to find at the MTV Music Awards later in 1998. Presenting an award to Massive Attack, she was upset when the group’s singer 3D refused to shake her hand. ‘Someone’s having a fucking laugh. Fuck you very much,’ he said, in disbelief at her presence, and later explained why he was uncooperative: ‘What the fuck has she got to do with music for a start?’ (His mother was reportedly unimpressed: ‘There was no excuse for this kind of behaviour. He was very well-mannered as a child.’)
Prescott’s contretemps with Chumbawamba was a world away from the heady days of Cool Britannia, when Paul Conroy, managing director of Virgin Records, could enthuse of Blair: ‘Here is a person of our generation who understands us and the music industry. It’s like when Kennedy dawned on the politics of America.’ Even then, however, some had harboured doubts. When Blair revealed his favourite singles of 1996, there was a definite sense that – like his ‘dads and lads’ reading list – it was a selection designed by committee to catch all constituencies: Oasis, Simply Red, the Fugees, Bruce Springsteen. Even worse were the inclusions of Annie Lennox’s anaemic version of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (a hit from the previous year, as it happened) and David Bowie’s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ in its tame Pet Shop Boys remix.
‘We enjoy music not just because it’s an export,’ protested Labour’s culture secretary, Chris Smith, eager to distance himself from the Tory approach to the arts, but attempts to prove the point were often unconvincing. The comedian Bob Mills interviewed Blair in opposition for MTV and came away distinctly unimpressed: ‘I was very suspicious of him. He talks about music like he’s just read a bluffer’s guide.’ The Spice Girls too were prepared to break with consensus. ‘We met Tony Blair and he seemed nice enough,’ said Victoria Adams in 1996. ‘His hair’s all right, but we don’t agree with his tax policies.’ Geri Halliwell went further: ‘The real problem with Blair is that he’s never had a real job. In the olden days a politician could be a coalminer who came to power with ideals. Not Blair. He’s just a good marketing man.’
That marketing ability was more than evident in Blair’s identification with popular culture. In his memoirs, he recalled talking with Billy Bragg about the limitations of Red Wedge, the movement set up in the 1980s to encourage political participation by the young. ‘I felt, in art and culture, we should represent all strands, avant-garde through to basic popular art, that our voters might go to watch or listen to.’ The comment raised more questions than it answered. Why should politicians feel the need to ‘represent’ culture? Was he really concerned with the avant-garde? And why did he see popular art as ‘basic’? As so often with Blair, the words didn’t repay close examination.
When a generation had, in the wake of the 1992 election, turned away from Westminster politics and set about building the foundations of Cool Britannia and new laddism, there had remained a deep antipathy to the Conservative Party, which had passed into mainstream culture. In her second set of diaries, Bridget Jones discovers that her ideal man, Mark Darcy, is actually a Conservative, and she is deeply shocked: ‘never, ever in a million years suspected I might have been sleeping with a man who voted Tory.’
There was no corresponding love for Labour, old or new, however, simply an embrace of Blair as the man who would drive the Tories out of office. Once he was installed in Downing Street and showed no sign of making any concessions whatsoever to the left – the benefit reforms being, at the outset, the policy most often cited as evidence that the new regime was indistinguishable from the old – the tide turned rapidly. Hatred of the Tories was all too easily extended to Labour.
By this stage, the absence of that generation in active politics was already becoming apparent. Most of the key figures in New Labour – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson – had been born in the decade following the end of the Second World War. The next wave of cabinet ministers, those who made their impact early in the twenty-first century, were of the same vintage: John Reid, Alan Johnson, Charles Clarke, Hilary Benn. What was missing was any serious challenge from those ten years younger, in their mid-thirties; precious few of those knocking at the gates of the cabinet had any adult memory of a time before Margaret Thatcher. ‘Where are the people?’ demanded Blair. ‘Why don’t I have more of them? I need some better people at the top. I know it. Where are they?’ The answer was that far too many had already turned their backs on the electorate and on party politics.
Some felt, too, that the atmosphere surrounding Blair’s sofa-government was doing little to encourage participation. For all the celebration of the new wave of women MPs, many believed that little had really changed. At the end of the New Labour era, when Gordon Brown had finally become prime minister, Caroline Flint, the outgoing Europe minister, was to accuse the government of treating women in the cabinet as ‘little more than female window dressing’, but that tendency had been noted almost from the outset.
‘The men remain in charge,’ wrote Helen Wilkinson, from the think tank Demos, in 1998, ‘with old Labour’s macho labourist culture replaced by a subtler, covert and insidious laddishness – all the more alienating for being steeped in predominantly middle-class values.’ Harriet Harman, temporarily out of government, marked International Women’s Day in 1999 with a Commons speech criticising the ‘militaristic, macho, hierarchical language and behaviour’ of the Labour Party: ‘I don’t believe that women feel that this is their government as strongly as men feel that this is their government.’ And Tess Kingham, one of the newly elected MPs of whom great things were expected, instead announced in 2001 that she would be stepping down from Parliament after just four years, disillusioned with the entire process: ‘I believed I was elected to get results, not recreate a boys’ public school debating club, so I gradually withdrew from activities in the Chamber.’
In the absence of the anti-Thatcher generation, promotion came rather more rapidly than might have been expected to those born in the second half of the 1960s. Among these people could be discerned a new, much more sober and dedicated attitude. The political commentator Peter Riddell wrote in his 1993 book Honest Opportunism: The Rise of the Career Politician that politics was rapidly becoming ‘confined to those who have made a youthful commitment to seeking a parliamentary career. It is like a religious order which requires an early vocation.’
Signs of this phenomenon could be observed in Conservative Central Office during the 1992 general election campaign, when the team working with Chris Patten offered an intriguing snapshot of what was to come. It was headed by Shaun Woodward, the party’s director of communications, who failed to impress the former chairman, Kenneth Baker (‘not notable for either directing or communicating’), but went on to become a cabinet minister, albeit in a Labour government, having defected from the Tories after his election in 1997. The youthful group under Woodward included 27-year-old Tim Collins, formerly an adviser to Michael Howard, 25-year-old David Cameron, 22-year-old Steve Hilton and 27-year-old Edward Llewellyn; eighteen years on, the latter three would enter Downing Street as prime minister, director of strategy and chief of staff respectively. In 1992 they were derisively known within the party as ‘Patten’s puppies’ or the ‘brat pack’, and not unnaturally they felt vindicated by their surprise victory, provoking one of Cameron’s earliest public comments: ‘The brat pack hits back!’ he exulted. ‘Whatever people say about us, we got the campaign right.’
After the election, all made rapid progress both inside and outside the party. Hilton had worked with the Saatchi advertising agency during the campaign (he was credited with the tax bombshell poster) and now moved there full time, under the patronage of Maurice Saatchi himself. ‘No one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve,’ gushed the advertiser. Hilton remained involved in political campaigning, gaining international experience as he helped Fianna Fáil to their narrow victory in the 1992 Irish election and Boris Yeltsin to success in a 1993 referendum, securing greater constitutional power for the Russian president. The slogans he devised gave an indication of how he viewed politics – ‘Ireland needs strong government now’ and ‘A strong leader for a strong Russia’ – which perhaps explained why he was less than convinced by John Major’s premiership. ‘He is undoubtedly our weakness,’ Hilton said in 1994. ‘I expect that the Labour Party will go for Major in a big way, portraying him as a wimp.’ He also dismissed the Back to Basics campaign, saying it ‘meant nothing’, though ‘the core aspects are very popular – more people locked up, kids forced back to school. I don’t care what liberals with a small “l” think.’ Nonetheless, he returned to the fold for the 1997 general election, devising the controversial – if unsuccessful – ‘demon eyes’ poster.
Meanwhile, Cameron (‘a suave Old Etonian’ according to the Guardian, and ‘one of the brightest young men in the party’ according to The Times) went on to become adviser to Norman Lamont, for whom he was said to have coined the phrase ‘green shoots of recovery’. After Lamont’s fall, he made an easy transition to a similar position under Michael Howard. A subsequent spell of employment with Michael Green at Carlton Communications (‘the most powerful man in the ITV network’) was seen by no one as an end to his political ambitions. Having been touted as a possible candidate for the doomed Newbury by-election in 1993, he emerged in 1997 as the candidate for Bill Cash’s old seat in Stafford, after Cash had moved to safer pastures in Stone. He failed there, but he was to return.
If Cameron’s experience of standing alongside Lamont on Black Wednesday was traumatic, so too was the early career of another future star of the party. George Osborne, two years younger even than Hilton, was an adviser to Douglas Hogg at the Ministry of Agriculture during the BSE crisis. Having survived that harrowing introduction to politics, he hitched himself to William Hague’s rising star in the leadership election and went on to write many of his speeches.
Acting in a similar capacity, by the end of the decade, was Osborne’s contemporary, Daniel Hannan. He too had campaigned in the 1992 election, though he had then sided with Alan Sked, who stood for the Anti-Federalist League against Chris Patten in Bath and was later to found the UK Independence Party. Like the others, Hannan slipped comfortably into the role of political adviser as the first step to becoming an elected politician. Working for Michael Spicer, with whom he set up the European Research Group, a Eurosceptic think tank, and then for Michael Howard, he also wrote leader columns for the Daily Telegraph and was elected to the European Parliament in 1999.
There was in all this an emerging pattern, summed up by Michael White of the Guardian as ‘the all-party trend towards the professionalization of politics: school, university, party functionary, MP’. For it wasn’t only in the Conservative Party that candidates were increasingly selected from a procession of what Edwina Currie called ‘identikit young men’. The term ‘Blair’s babes’, later applied to the women MPs elected in 1997, had originally surfaced three years earlier as a Labour equivalent of ‘Patten’s puppies’, referring to the youthful advisers surrounding the key figures in New Labour. Some of them remained backstage figures, but others went on to be elected to Parliament, including James Purnell, Pat McFadden, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers, David and Ed. Then there was Yvette Cooper, who had been part of John Smith’s team even before the 1992 election, and Derek Draper, a researcher for Peter Mandelson. All were still in their twenties when Blair became leader of the party.
Also known as ‘the crèche’, this group – the youth wing of the modernisers – was not to everyone’s taste. ‘Some of us have been around this place longer than you,’ snapped Labour MP Ann Clwyd at David Miliband, while Mike Marqusee of Labour Briefing was deeply unimpressed: ‘They may be young, but they are socially conservative, they exist in a self-enclosed world and they are utterly unrepresentative of young people. What have they got to say, for example, about the huge grass-roots campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill?’ It was a purely rhetorical question. The reality was that policies, philosophies and positions were less important now than the appearance of competent management, in emulation of Brown and Blair. ‘This generation exudes an air of responsibility,’ remarked Dominic Loenhis, the 25-year-old adviser to the Conservative minister Peter Brooke, in 1993, ‘but I don’t think there is any visionary feel or coherent philosophy.’
The career path identified by Michael White was not entirely new. Jack Straw, for example, had come into politics by such a route, first through the National Union of Students and then as an adviser to Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle, whose Blackburn seat he subsequently inherited. But this had been comparatively rare in the past, a more normal background being an apprenticeship in local government: Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Frank Dobson, Alistair Darling, even Peter Mandelson, had all been elected councillors. Now the role of political adviser was starting to look like the most straightforward route to the summit, particularly since there were so many of them; the numbers of advisers in government nearly doubled in the eighteen months following the 1997 election, with Blair accounting for seventeen full-time advisers in his own right. While in office, Michael Heseltine had been asked why he didn’t have any political advisers, and he replied: ‘I do. They are called ministers.’ Those days were fast being forgotten.
Straw also prefigured another key element in the new generation, for he had spent two years working on the television series World in Action. And the media was to become an important training ground for the new breed of politician, their one chance to claim that they weren’t merely postgraduate policy wonks, that they had work experience in the outside world. David Cameron and James Purnell had stints in television, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper were journalists on the Financial Times and Independent respectively, while Boris Johnson of the Daily Telegraph and Michael Gove of The Times were biding their time, waiting for a chance to enter Parliament, and Steve Hilton had a fortnightly column in the Guardian. Tim Allan and Peter Hyman – two other twenty-somethings in Blair’s inner circle – had also come from television.
There had always been common ground between media and politics, but in a political landscape shaped by the likes of Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown (again both had a background in television), the two classes were rapidly converging. The new world was encapsulated in the figure of Alastair Campbell who, as a writer for the Daily Mirror and Today, had always seen political journalism as a partisan commitment, and had been rewarded with the ear of the prime minister. It might even be identifiable in a single moment, as in 1998 when Mandelson’s protégé Derek Draper was sacked as a columnist by the Daily Express after admitting that he ran his copy past his old boss before submitting it. Or, on the other side of the political divide, in 1999 when Daniel Hannan, as a committed anti-federalist, announced that he wasn’t prepared to sit in the European Parliament as part of the European People’s Party group; it was a controversial move, but he did at least enjoy the support of the Daily Telegraph, unsurprisingly perhaps since it was he who wrote the leader column backing his own decision.
This coming together of politics and the media might have caused more concern had the majority of commentators not decided essentially to ignore its implications. New Labour’s PR machine, at least in its first decade, was so effective that it swept much of Fleet Street before it. Access to the court of Blair was strictly controlled, and restricted to those with a supportive attitude, as though the prime minister were a rock star or Hollywood actor, and most complied with the new regime, whether through conviction or – more normally – a recognition that this was the only show in town. ‘For nearly two decades,’ wrote Steve Richards, the Independent’s chief political commentator, in 2010, ‘political journalism became largely defined by whether a writer was sympathetic to Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.’
There had always been a distance between the political class on the one hand and much of the country on the other – even the sainted Clement Attlee was a public schoolboy – but the growing disparity of wealth through the Tory years and into the New Labour era, even as politics was mouthing a populist rhetoric of inclusion, made the discrepancy hard to ignore. The reduction in the variety of voices heard in the corridors of power inevitably meant that large parts of the country went unrepresented. What politicians denounced as cynicism was often nothing more than the recognition of this fact. It was difficult to believe that Rat Boy was part of the same world as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, even less plausible that he lived just a few miles from their constituencies in the North-East. The likes of Ed Miliband and George Osborne were, as Mike Marqusee implied, much the same age as, say, Swampy, though they were not easy to mistake for him. In short, the characters played by Robert Carlyle had been disenfranchised by the political rush for the centre ground of Blajorism.
This was, it was said, a new political consensus, a post-Thatcherite settlement. The difference between Butskellism and Blajorism, however, was the latter did not carry the country in the same way as had the former. In the three elections from 1951 onwards, the two main parties attracted between them the votes of three-quarters of the registered voters; in the three elections from 1992, they secured only a half. Whatever causes one wished to ascribe to this trend – the drop in turnout, the rise of the third party, the decline of ideology – it came to the same point: the only two parties capable of forming governments were fast losing the consent of the people. And as the gap between politicians and the nation widened, it was the younger generations who felt it most acutely. According to a survey published in the Demos pamphlet Britain™, 68 per cent of those aged fifty-five or over were proud of British democracy; just 7.5 per cent of those aged under fifty-five felt the same.
Nonetheless, the new establishment was proving capable of replicating itself, of finding members of the younger generation who might be trained up for future office. If, as Tony Blair claimed, ‘the only purpose of being in politics is to make things happen’, and if the power to do this was now believed to reside solely in the office of the prime minister, then there was little point wasting one’s time in local councils or the House of Commons, let alone in jobs outside politics. The special advisers, born in the second half of the 1960s, already had much greater influence over events than most MPs or even ministers. ‘Britain under Tony Blair,’ wrote Nick Cohen in 1998, ‘is a country governed by a clique of children.’
Douglas Alexander, a former researcher for Gordon Brown, was the first of this new generation to make it into Parliament, inheriting Gordon McMaster’s constituency in a 1997 by-election, and – in time for the 2001 general election – both David Miliband and Ed Balls were given safe seats, to the fury of many in the party. No one expected them to remain long on the back benches; they were, after all, the future of New Labour. It was, perhaps, little wonder that Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn shook their ageing heads as they contemplated the next generation.