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Tuesday 7 October 2008

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

Practitioners of ‘soft contour’ politics, the Jam Generation’s views on the environment, social breakdown and, increasingly, the public services, morph into a similar disenchantment with the state as a unique provider of solutions. They like talking to one another — Mr Cameron singles out James Purnell, Siôn Simon and former No. 10 aide Ben Wegg-Prosser as Labour people he admires. George Osborne and Ruth Kelly are longstanding friends. Tory strategists openly admire the fresh thinking of the Lib Dem education spokesman David Laws.

This ecumenical tendency is less obvious among the hardcore Brownites — Yvette Cooper reveals she once wore a badge proclaiming, ‘She cuts: we bleed. No more bleeding cuts!’ She doesn’t sound much fonder of her opponents now. The Blairite–Clegg–Cameron nexus is more porous. Clegg says he ‘recognises that the state has become either overweening or downright inefficient’. It’s a shared nostrum of the Jam Generation that the state can’t deliver all ends. The big debate is about who has the compelling answer to what that means.

The music left a trace in one way we would not have prophesied when we first heard it. Weller is exercised by lack of social mobility (not that he thinks the ‘braying sheep’ are going to do much about it) in, ‘When You’re Young’: ‘It’s got you in its grip before you’re born/ It’s done with the use of a dice and board/ They let you think you’re king but you’re really a pawn’.

Now all the parties promise to reverse social inequality, from Mr Cameron’s entanglements on the future of grammar schools, to New Labour’s faith in City Academies to narrow the divide in urban education, and Mr Clegg wants to make it his defining mission. A degree of wishful thinking that ‘everyone’ shares a generally progressive view prevails, with Mr Cameron insisting that his treatment of immigration can ‘Look at immigration in a colourblind way’. Really, Dave?

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