Amid all the Euro 2024 fueled jubilation, I haven't had a chance to comment on last week's election in the UK (or on yesterday's election in France). But ever since the results came in, I've been thinking about the return of the Labour Party to 10 Downing Street, and the parallels with New Labour in 1997. What crystallized it for me was rewatching the Britpop documentary, Live Forever, which is overall a pretty good encapsulation of what was going on back then.
Comparing the results of 1997 with those of 2024, they look pretty similar. Labour had 418 seats then and has 411 now. In both elections the Conservatives are in second and the Liberal Democrats are third, though now the Tories have way fewer seats than in 1997 (121 vs 165) and the Lib Dems have more (72 vs 46). One of the big changes is that there are more parties represented in Westminster now, with the notable ones being Reform and the Greens, neither of which picked up seats in 1997 (Reform didn't exist, but UKIP, its predecessor, was one of a couple of Eurosceptic parties that put candidates forward). The Scottish National Party has a similar number of MPs as it did then, in part because it suffered an electoral wipeout, while Sinn Fein has grown to be the largest Northern Irish party, which would have been unheard of then.
Keir Starmer is from the same wing of Labour as Blair was, specifically the more centrist wing. Like Blair, he came in after a stinging defeat for Labour under a more leftwing leader; though apparently Jeremy Corbyn is a bit further left than Neil Kinnock was. Starmer's also relatively young, though he doesn't give off the same cool-guy vibes Blair did. Not that I've had an opportunity to see lots of Starmer interviews, but it's hard to see him noodling on a guitar or playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan. On the other hand, he did chat to Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning of the Guardian Football Weekly, so there may be a cool bone in his body somewhere.
The cultural moment is very different from 1997, though there are some interesting similarities. The big difference is the sense of exhaustion that's permeated Britain in the last couple of years. The country was hit hard by the pandemic and by Brexit, and by the mess the Tories left. Britain under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was a two-speed economy, with all the growth concentrated in the Southeast and the more industrial regions left behind. Britain under this vintage of Tories has that dynamic, though the hollowing out of anywhere outside London and the Home Counties has just accelerated in the past 30 years, plus it's suffered from austerity since 2010.
To put it another way, Britain before 1997 was just stultifying, where many young people had no option but to go on the dole. Britain up until 2024 hasn't even let them do that, because of the cuts to benefits implemented by the Tories (and to an extent by New Labour before them). Instead, young people have had to leave university in debt because of higher tuition fees, find worse and more cramped flats to live in (all in London, because that's where the jobs all seem to be), and pay for all this with increasingly precarious zero-hours contract jobs that offer no security or chance for advancement. The celebrations feel more muted now, probably because no one has any energy for a proper knees-up.
Culturally, Britain doesn't really feel like it's on the ascendant now, either. Part of that is the nature of the culture industry, and specifically the music industry - there's a reason why the Live Forever documentary is about music rather than sport or art or cinema.
One side effect of all those young people on the dole was that they had time to make music, so we saw a great flowering of unique artists like Morrissey and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the Cure, New Order and loads more. These artists, who sang in their native accents and didn't try to emulate American mannerisms like some of the more popular singers and bands, so we got the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and these gave way to Suede, the Auteurs, and eventually to Blur, Pulp and Oasis.
Now it seems a lot harder to find the new Morrissey or David Bowie or Robert Smith or Noel Gallagher. I'm sure there are great bands all over Britain, but none of them seems to have broken through to the mainstream or to the US. My suspicion is that Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in Britain right now, even though she's not British herself.
This isn't to disparage any of the great grime or UK garage bands out there, by the way - Britpop was a lot of things, but it wasn't diverse, and there were precious few non-white faces among all the bands I loved as a teenager. Whereas now you can have someone like Stormzy headlining a stage at Glastonbury. It's just a sign that the culture industry is more fragmented than it was back then.
Of course, the 90s were a strange moment for Britain overall. It wasn't just music, as Live Forever points out, and as John Harris's book The Last Party also stresses (though Harris's book is more focused on music). British cinema was getting exciting, though the only names I can really point to are Danny Boyle and Ewan MacGregor. In art, Damien Hirst was probably the most visible face of an art movement that includes Tracey Emin and was doing all sorts of innovative stuff in the 80s and 90s. Live Forever even goes beyond its musical remit to talk to designer Ozwald Boateng, who was also held to embody the virtues of the UK back then.
Just about the only thing that seems to have the same hold on the British imagination now as it did in 1997 is football. The England team of the 90s benefited from an explosion of funding following the creation of the Premier League, and from a lot of goodwill as the game cleared out the violent hooligans and became something that everyone, notionally, could enjoy. Just as importantly, black players were starting to come through and play regularly for England, better reflecting the cultural and ethnic mix of the country.
The English game of the last few years may not have suffered from violent fans or a European ban like it had in the 80s, but since Gareth Southgate was hired as head coach of the men's national team, results have been a lot better, with England reaching the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup (the first time in any tournament since 1996), then the final of Euro 2020 (the first since 1966), and after a disappointing, but actually on-par quarterfinal exit from the 2022 World Cup, England is currently one of four teams remaining in Euro 2024.
Incidentally, I'm going into this level of detail to record the ongoing savage culture war that's raging over whether Gareth Southgate is a good manager or not. I'll probably go into that in detail in another post, but here it's worth pointing out that Southgate makes for a nice callback to the 90s, because he was in that Euro 96 team that reached the semifinals before losing to Germany (indeed, it was his missed penalty that sank England). You kind of wonder how much that sense of the country being behind the team has permeated how he approaches the job now - certainly London didn't feel as bound by love for the England team during the years that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello or Roy Hodgson managed them.
I suppose, coming back to the Starmer vs Blair theme, that Starmer appealed to football via the Football Weekly podcast because that's the one thing that still ties together a majority of people in Britain, or at least England. Blair could invite Blur and Oasis to policy confabs and No 10 cocktail parties, because they were the biggest bands in Britain and most people knew about them. He could champion British filmmakers and artists because all of them were firing on all cylinders, whereas now Starmer really can only use football to connect with people.
There's also a cynical comment to be made here: with culture so fragmented along lines of ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc, football is the only thing that won't subject Starmer to accusations of favoring one group over another. It sounds a little stupid to say it, until you remember how apoplectic certain subsets of England fans got when the team would take the knee for racial justice in 2021.
In 1996, about a year before Labour won the election, Britain was enthralled by the first tournament on home soil in a generation (remember, the Scots also qualified). The song of the moment was Three Lions, by the Lightning Seeds along with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, characterized by its chant that "football's coming home". Blair used that slogan on the campaign trail, tying himself into all the cultural strands that the electorate loved.
Three Lions fell out of fashion for a while, but made its comeback in 2018, and has been trotted out at every tournament since then. Just our luck, then, that it's being sung on the terraces in Germany just as, back home in the UK, Labour's coming, at long last, home.
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