It says something for the enduring power of the Mancunian band Oasis that it is associated with the incoming Labour government of both Tony Blair in 1997 and of Sir Kier Starmer in 2024. In the exciting dawn of New Labour's landslide victory, Gordon Brown boldly gave monetary independence to the Bank of England and Tony Blair gave a party. The financial markets unambiguously applauded the first move, while the media couldn't quite get enough of the reception in 10 Downing Street. "Cool Britannia" was born. It wasn't exactly clear who was fawning on whom, but among the "stars" Blair was seen clinking glasses and laughing with the famously surly Noel Gallagher. Together with his equally charmless brother Liam (who sadly was NFI), Gallagher fronted Oasis, then one of the most successful bands in the UK.
Scroll forward nearly three decades to another Labour landslide. This time it's secured on 33% rather than 43% of the popular vote and only a few more people vote for Starmer's "Change" as voted for John Major when the Tories were obliterated in 1997. Once again, the incoming government does something to catch the eye of the markets: it promptly axes the Winter Fuel Allowance for the elderly, preposterously justifying the move to "stave off a run on the pound" after the "discovery" of a black hole in the public accounts. Amazingly, Oasis are back on hand too. But this time there is no party in Whitehall, rather a more grubby instance of "dynamically priced" ticket sales for their re-union tour. A grave looking prime minister publicly promises to "grip" this monstrous manifestation of the workings of the market to ensure that "tickets are available at the prices people can actually afford".
The success of Oasis perhaps validates Rupert Murdoch's maxim that no-one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British public, but the band's two intersections with the workings of the British state are nonetheless telling. They perhaps define the arc of the growing government establishment in all its vacuity and bathos since the turn of the 21st century.
There have been plenty of debatable high and low points over the past thirty years: Katrina & the Waves winning Eurovision; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; the London Olympics; Jimmy Saville; Andy Murray winning Wimbledon and RuPaul's Drag Race. But the trend is clear: the UK's relative economic performance and standards of living have declined. Average wages have doubled but the price of a pint has trebled. Oil and energy is four times as expensive and the average house price now nearly five times dearer than when Blair stepped over the threshold of Number 10. Most emblematic of all is the rising cost of a ticket to Glastonbury, which has even managed to outstrip the egregiously expensive residential property market. "Stuff" has got cheaper but the price of some necessities and services has become almost unobtainable for a population which is poorer in aggregate relative to the general price level.
For those tasked with overseeing the workings of the economy, the trend of relative and absolute decline has been masked by falling borrowing costs, cheaper imports from China and high levels of immigration dominated by unskilled economic migrants. Gordon Brown banked the benefits of the economy which he inherited with a massive splurge of welfare payments; indeed, public spending and his system of tax credits saw the biggest re-distribution of income in the UK since the Second World War. Despite all the misleading talk of "austerity", the succeeding Tory administrations kept the Brownite settlement and merely slowed the accumulation of the annual deficit; the ratio of total debt to national output kept rising. Covid then turbocharged it such that it is now nearly 100% of GDP.
It is not enough to say (as the BBC recently claimed) that all the developed nations are in the same boat and face similar problems. Unfortunately, the markets are a little more discriminating than the Beeb's preposterously named "Verify" unit. Now with the highest borrowing costs in the G7, the UK is an outlier and markets have a habit of sinking their teeth into the hindmost. Again, the trend is clear.
Why have the markets gradually and unmaliciously come to a more bearish view of the UK? After the merry-go-round of the Tory years the UK now has a stable government with a stonking majority; it's a world champion in modular nuclear reactors; it has a drawerful of eco medals and leads the western world in Botox treatments, drunken stag parties, personal pronouns and bum-lifts. Unfortunately the UK also has a workforce where over a fifth are economically inactive, a situation not eased by a grossly ineffective healthcare system which still has over 7m on waiting lists three years after the Pandemic. Welfarism has also led to a dramatic increase in claimants, particularly those incapacitated by mental health issues where the criteria for a successful application are less stringent than those for unemployment benefit.
There has also been a large and wholly unproductive expansion of the state, accelerated by the Covid pandemic. For example, the NHS now has very nearly 2m on its payrolls and the civil service apparat at the MOD alone now outnumbers the Royal Navy and RAF combined. Part time work for a full time wage is the order of the day, at least in Whitehall. Government regulations intrude into every area of public and personal lives and proceed from the absurd belief that all risks, from whatever source, can eventually be eliminated. The state now accounts for very nearly half the economic activity of the UK. Meanwhile citizens and private enterprises have been burdened with the highest level of tax since 1948. In inverse proportion to the growth of the state, manufacturing (ex construction) has dwindled to a mere 4% of the economy, the financial sector has contracted and ownership of UK companies by domestic investors has collapsed.
Naturally, it would be unfair to blame Sir Keir Starmer for the accumulation of these ills and the inheritance of his government is far meaner than the one handed to Blair. Yet for all the bullish talk of "Change" and reform (especially of the NHS), the incoming Labour government has cleaved to its socialist roots; Starmer has even approvingly benchmarked himself against the regime of Harold Wilson, hardly the acme of left - of - centre administration. The public sector has been rewarded with pay settlements unlinked to productivity or even reform, paid for by further levies on the private and personal sectors. The government has even channelled its inner Tony Crosland: under the ideologue Bridget Phillipson it is set to reverse the only really positive achievement of the Conservative years, namely the improvement in the attainment levels of schools in England. The "White Heat of the Technology Revolution" has been re-ignited too by a gigantic subsidy for Ed Milliband's cockamamy pursuit of a carbon-free economy by 2030.
But by far the biggest change of the past three decades has been the steady decline in democratic participation and the fragmentation of political allegiances such as mainland Britain now more closely resembles its province of Northern Ireland. The past ten years has seen the four established parties of the UK in various stages of disarray and declining support, with the worst and likely most enduring change in the Conservative Party. Only the Reform and Green parties have increased their share of public approval. It cannot be said that any of the four main parties have used periods in either government or opposition to articulate a philosophy or even an agenda suited to the challenges facing 21st century Britain (or Scotland in the case of the SNP). Blair thought he'd found the so-called "Third Way", a nebulous and briefly fashionable concept which lay somewhere between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension but which was comprehensively stymied by his saturnine chancellor. Cameron essayed Blair-lite and in a swerve towards identity and sexual politics, thought he could modernise the Tory message by endorsing, inter alia gay marriage and the "right" of servicewomen to serve in the front line. Yet both he and his successor were unzipped by the issue of Europe, which had consumed almost the entire intellectual energy of their party to such little effect, save on their office and that of their two predecessors. The Liberal Party too tried a brief philosophical renewal with the "Orange Book" of 2004. Unfortunately its proposals looked far too much like a throw-back to the mature political style of Gladstone for the party's kindergarten to accept. It was enough to get the Liberals into the 2010 coalition, but was unable to prevent a return to the politics of the rebellious Micky Mouse thereafter. Ed Davey's bungee jump was as much a political statement as it was a stunt.
Bizarrely, the one politician most obviously unsuited to the role of PM and the hard yards of public administration was also the one who also enjoyed a level of public endorsement even greater than Blair's in his first term. Johnson, the man who wished he had never had to grow up, gave a commitment to the funding of critical government services and successfully leveraged the pitch with his unambiguous promise to leave the EU. He created a wide ranging coalition which thoroughly undermined Labour's traditional base while energising the Tory populist one. More successfully than Corbyn (who got far more votes than Starmer at both attempts), Johnson successfully identified the common ground rather than the centre ground. Alas, he was unzipped by his own inadequacy in office and the colossally damaging reaction of the apparat to Covid.
In recent times, it has been fashionable (particularly at the BBC) to denigrate the fleeting government of Ms Truss as the high point of 21st century economic irresponsibility. Alas, borrowing costs have now gone beyond the level at which she allegedly "crashed" the economy. Starmer now faces the challenge which has confronted every single Labour government except that of Blair: how to finance and run the New Jerusalem against a highly sceptical market.
At some point the apparat will be forced to understand the UK is the least well placed of the developed economies to sustain its useless and sclerotic public administration, vacuous political culture and bloated welfare state on the present trajectory. What political re-alignment will follow this reckoning is uncertain, but for everyone else the party's over.
