On Wednesday, Liz Truss arrived on stage at her party conference to M People’s Moving On Up. In some ways, it was an apt choice, its final stanza saying more or less exactly what the speech said:
Moving, moving, moving
Nothing can stop me
Moving, moving
Time to break free
Nothing can stop me.
M People, on the other hand, were not subject to the correction of the markets, and therefore nothing could stop them. They were in quite a different situation to Truss; also, they hate her, and immediately went on Twitter to say so.
Last month, at Labour’s conference, delegates were heard to chorus Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream, soundtrack to Tony Blair’s first victory, when it seemed inexorable and true. The kids are wearing chokers and miniskirts, the pound is crashing, football may or may not be coming home but people who care seem to think it is, interest rates have become a source of day-by-day terror, and Jamie Oliver is an enemy of the state, or at least CCHQ declines to deny that he is. Welcome back to the 90s, isn’t it cosy here?
This is where the young people will say: “But you loved the 90s. You’re still wearing cargo trousers and listening to Pulp. So that decade can’t have felt anything like the 20s, because this is terrible.” Well, grasshopper, it’s like this: we have taken some losses in the intervening years, besides Loaded magazine.
Although there was a biting recession back then, we were not already running on fumes when it hit. Household indebtedness was significantly lower, the debt to income ratio averaging 100%, now it’s 130%. That has mainly been driven by house prices, though student debt does not help, so the experience of being young, by which I absurdly mean under 45, lacks that sense of infinite possibility you get from not constantly worrying about your landlord. Youth being the seedbed of creative disruption and optimism, this is why we are not in Cool Britannia any more, and union flags bedeck MPs’ living rooms, not Geri Halliwell’s dress or Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher’s pillows on the cover of Vanity Fair. The problem with boomers is that however much richer they are than everyone else, it does not seem to put them in a good mood.
There was also what we could loosely term an innocence to the last century, which we lost, according to Sunday supplements, on 9/11: this was when the “end of history” theory, which we can loosely summarise as “nothing else bad can ever happen”, was debunked, and things have been getting steadily worse since. Personally, I think this is too US-centric and actually the innocence has been lost to climate anxiety, but we do not need to solve this now.
There is something, though, that powerfully recalls the end of the last century, just a small thing, really only relevant to this declining country: the Conservatives are, in the memorable words of Tony Blair in 1994, “the most feckless, irresponsible group of incompetents ever let loose in government”. Most of them know it, and more importantly, judging by Labour’s 33-point lead in the polls, most of the voters know it. The prospect of a Labour government looks more than just realistic; even the realists are readying words like “landslide”.
The most important lesson to take from the 90s, from a progressive standpoint, is not to waste that moment again; no more muddling through, no more incrementalism, no more kowtowing. This time, make it count. If we’ve learned anything from the 21st century, it is to take D:Ream with a pinch of salt – things can get better, but they can also look better while remaining the same.
