Britain just got Weller: meet the Jam Generation
Anne McElvoy talks to the politicians reared on the 1980s music of the Jam: post-Cold War, disenchanted with state monopolies, and cagey about Class A drugs
We are living through a sudden generational tilt that is leaving the Baby Boomers who have run Britain looking sorely past their vote-by date — something I’ve been exploring in a programme examining the impact of this change for Radio 4. Far from being ‘young pretenders’ or ‘young Turks’, they now dominate the elites at Westminster, pushing their older, greyer colleagues into subsidiary roles.
This still makes me pinch myself as someone whose first sight of David Cameron was at a college Valentine’s ball in 1986 with his shirt hanging out of his black tie suit. Around that time, I made Michael Gove the ‘Pushy Fresher’ of that term in the Cherwell student newspaper (prophetic, no?). I remember David Miliband as an earnest college representative at the Student Union.
The bookend events of our university lives were the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of 1991. We arrived at university at the conclusion of a long tussle with union power. Billy Bragg was still demanding ‘Which side are you on?’, but the battle was lost already. ‘The difference between my generation and the one before me,’ one senior Labour Cabinet figure confided to me, ‘is that I went on the same marches they did — but I’d stopped believing it was going to change anything.’
The ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher was complete — just at the time the dons were pettily voting against awarding her a degree. Of the cast I interviewed, the only one who still defends this protest was Yvette Cooper, who says, ‘It was completely right. You can say in retrospect it looks different. But it was right at the time.’
Conservatives grew up in a long period of Tory dominance which petered out into a landslide defeat of John Major just as they were on the brink of their careers. Their Labour peers had a mirror experience of that. ‘Until I was in my thirties, my sole experience in politics was of losing,’ says David Miliband.
It explains why the Achilles heel of the present Labour leader is the fear that whatever other virtues he may possess or battles he wins, he may just be out of time. Evidently Gordon Brown is conscious of this: hence the rapid rejuvenation of the Cabinet and Mr Miliband’s loyal insistence that the ‘age and experience’ combination is going to be the winning one for Labour — a script we will hear more of in the run-up to the next election.
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Michael Taylor
February 15th, 2008 4:26pmSorry, I don't get it. So loads of politicians are about my age (41). So what? Cameron and Osborne were on the wrong side of Eton Rifles. I clearly remember Jam gigs from 1979 to 1982 and it was like being at a football match, I just can't imagine Ruth Kelly and Yvette Cooper being part of that. It was also very working class too and very non-political. Can't see the earnest Millibands and Nick Clegg there at all. Caroline Flint maybe, she sounds a bit Wellerish and is about the right age (46), and quite an unlikely looking politician. But as the great main once said: And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names
Richard Hare
March 5th, 2008 10:28amI grew up opposing state control in the 80s but now I can see that where a state is well run for the people, by the people high tax and spend can work for society as a whole. I was misled by inefficient Labour government and badly run unions into the belief that socialist ideas were de facto doomed to failure. Why have I changed my views? Because I have been living in Scandinavia for 7 years bringing up kids and making no use of private health or education. They say you become more of a realist the older you get, but unless you experience different realities you just become a reactionary. Please visit Scandinavia, there are many problems here, but there are solutions too.