The Nostalgia Trap

Like Hollywood, British politics is pumping out sequels and losing its audience

The rubbish piles up during the “winter of discontent” - February 1979

A few months ago I found myself at the cinema watching trailers, one after the other, for Jurassic World; Top Gun; Avatar and Toy Story. I started to wonder what decade I was in. And this summer’s selection is not unusual. Adam Mastroianni found that before 2000 fewer than 25% of top 20 movies each year were sequels, remakes or franchises. It passed 50% in 2010 and is now close to 100%. Of course popular culture has always been dependent on influence and homage. There would be no Beatles without Chuck Berry; no Tarantino without New Wave; no Stephen King without H. P. Lovecraft. But repetition is not the same as influence. It doesn’t add anything or create meaning for a new generation.

For my age group this isn’t so bad. I’m happy to wallow in nostalgia as Tom Cruise flies some ridiculous mission (why didn’t they just use drones?) But for my kids and their friends it’s entirely alienating, they all seem largely uninterested in films. Which is unsurprising as it’s not nostalgic for them. The cinema audience is aging. Between 2011-2017 the overall audience size in the UK stayed the same but attendance by 15-24 year olds dropped by 20.6%. Ultimately Hollywood’s desire to cash in on sure things and refusal to take risks on new ideas is killing their long-term future.

The Politics of Nostalgia

This trend is evident across popular culture and is increasingly evident in politics too. As with film, the past has always influenced the contemporary political narrative. In Margaret Thatcher’s first conference speech as Prime Minister she talked about rediscovering Britain’s former glories:

“We have always had to go out and earn our living—the hard way. In the past we did not hesitate. We had great technical skill, quality, reliability. We built well, sold well. We delivered on time. The world bought British and British was best. Not German. Not Japanese. British. It was more than that. We knew that to keep ahead we had to change. People looked to us as the front runner for the future.”

Even Tony Blair, the most insistently forward-looking Prime Minister we’ve had threw in a not dissimilar appeal to the past in his first conference speech in the job:

“The British don’t fear change. We are one of the great innovative peoples. From the Magna Carta to the first Parliament to the industrial revolution to an empire that covered the world; most of the great inventions of modern times with Britain stamped on them: the telephone; the television; the computer; penicillin; the hovercraft; radar. Change is in the blood and bones of the British we are by our nature and tradition innovators, adventurers, pioneers.”

But note that in both cases this was rhetoric designed to justify a comprehensive policy agenda with the aim of genuinely changing the country. It was future oriented.

For our current Prime Minister, who is far happier campaigning than governing, nostalgia is not a tool of persuasion to help win support for an agenda, it’s the whole package. Over the past few weeks we have had an announcement on the “right to buy” social housing, which was designed as a call-back to Thatcher’s totemic council house policy. We’ve had an unsubtle attempt to turn rail strikes into a replay of Thatcher’s victory over the miners. And we’ve had proposals to open new selective grammar schools reappear again for the fifth time in the last six years.

In practice the Government have done nothing to make any of these things happen. There’s no new money attached to the social housing policy, nor detail of how it will work. The legislation that was promised years ago to allow agency workers to replace strikers wasn’t introduced (and won’t make any difference if it is now). Even if a clause was added to the Schools Bill to allow more grammar schools, which is unlikely, there would, in practice, be little money available to build any. The purpose of it all is simply to elicit positive memories of perceived policy successes from the past.

But who – apart from political history nerds – remembers these things? To be an adult voter before most grammar schools closed you’d need to be in your sixties. For the miners’ strike and right to buy you’d need to be in your mid-50s. For younger voters this stuff has no resonance at all. Like my twins watching the Top Gun trailer they are nonplussed. This is reflected in the polling. 46% of over 65s want more grammar schools but only 24% of 25-49 year olds. Older people are also more likely to respond to the strike-bashing rhetoric. 66% of over 65s opposed this week’s rail strikes compared to 34% of 25-49 year olds and just 18% of 18-24 year olds.

The older generation have become increasingly powerful in elections. As I discussed in my piece on “why British politics is broken” they are more numerous than ever before and they turnout at elections. The fear of upsetting this group is a wider problem and makes appeals to nostalgia attractive. But it’s still an extremely limited political tactic. For a start the older generation aren’t stupid. They may reminisce about grammar schools, or Thatcher taking on Scargill, but that doesn’t mean they believe this Government is capable of similar action. 65% of over 65s say they don’t trust Boris Johnson, with just 22% saying they do. Only slightly more positive than the rest of the population. According to James Forsyth in the Spectator even Tory MPs don’t believe the Government will follow up these pledges.

Moreover, for everyone under 50 it’s not just meaningless but actively alienating. The Daily Mail last week ran, as a headline on the strikes, “Labour isn’t working”, a reference to an election poster that is three years older than me. To most people it’s just baffling. There is a widespread belief that people get more conservative as they get older but it’s not clear how true that is. Political attitudes stay fairly stable across people’s lives and millennials in particular seem not to be moving right at all. The Conservatives are doing historically badly amongst younger voters (Thatcher won 18-24 year olds in 1979 and 1983 – they’re now barely polling in double digits). If the Conservatives simply ignore these generations – not just in policy terms but rhetorically by focusing purely on nostalgia appeals – they will find, like the Hollywood studios, they are permanently lost.

Labour’s Trap

The Tory failure to offer anything to voters under 50 means Labour are comfortably leading the polls with this group. But it’s fair to say there’s little excitement about the possibility of a Keir Starmer’s premiership. Over and over again in surveys and focus groups you hear that he is boring but more importantly that no one knows what he stands for. This is partly because of Starmer’s character, and because Labour are still struggling to recover from the damage of the Corbyn era. They’re also broke which really doesn’t help – they don’t have enough staff to work on policy.

But they are also caught in a nostalgia trap of their own. The late 90s are for Labour what the early 80s are to Tories – or at least the bit of Labour that currently holds the leadership. Blair’s landslide victory was formative for nearly all of the shadow cabinet and Starmer’s political team. They are clearly trying to recreate the experience. At the moment, though, is feels like a cargo cult trying to copy the actions without really understanding why they worked. New Labour wasn’t successful just because they were good at triangulation and blocking off Tory lines of attack; but because they used the space to present their own programme for change. At the moment there’s a lot of defensive manoeuvres to step round Tory traps, but little positive to go alongside it.

Nor can they just take Blair’s pledge card and announce the same set of policies. 1997 may not be quite as far back as the 70s but it’s still quarter of a century ago. The political landscape has changed dramatically. Blair and Brown inherited a growing economy which allowed them to invest in public services (after 1999) while holding down personal taxation and managing the debt. They didn’t have to make a choice. But we’ve now had fourteen years of a stagnant economy and flat wages, with no indication of that changing any time soon. Labour can’t just accept Tory plans, they have to present an alternative. Likewise there are whole chunks of the public sector – particularly health and social care – under far more pressure than in 1997 because of an aging population. More investment and more accountable management won’t be enough this time, a new approach to delivery is needed.

Most of all the generational wealth gap has grown massively since 1997. In May of that year the average property price was £58,500. It’s now £281,000 – a 380% increase. Inflation in that time is up just 93%. There is little sense in Labour’s current policy narrative that they are adapting to this shift. Apparently they are soon going to bin the Corbyn policy of scrapping tuition fees to show they are embracing economic prudence; but if that announcement isn’t accompanied by something else that helps under 40s it will remove the only substantive thing Labour had to offer to respond to this ongoing transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

There is still plenty of time to offer up something different, with an election two years away. There’s always a temptation for opposition parties to hold back on big pledges for fear they will just be stolen or nullified by the Government. It’s also tempting to leave all the difficult calls for after the election and hope to win by default, due to the extent of Government failure. But they are going to have to decide if they go to go into that campaign promising managerial competence and hope that’s enough; or whether they are going to offer a serious alternative with gives them a mandate if they win

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Embracing the future

The more stuck British politics gets the more both the Tories and Labour seem to reach back into the past for inspiration, even as it becomes less and less relevant to the problems we face today. This is partly because the electoral power of the elderly acts as a barrier against change, but it also feels like our politicians are daunted by the sheer scale of the challenges. The Government have chosen to take refuge in bombastic nostalgia to no clear end beyond staying in power. Labour spend their time triangulating but, as yet, to no obvious purpose.

In a new book, the Death of Consensus, the journalist Phil Tinline argues that there have been two moments in British politics over the past 100 years – 1945 and 1979 – when the previous consensus has come under so much pressure that a party has been able to win offering solutions that were previously considered politically unpalatable. He sees our current era as setting up a potential third break with the past. As he says:

“Ever since [the 2008 crash] we have been living through shocks and crises. From the 2011 riots, to the Brexit wars, to the grind of the pandemic, Britain has seemed trapped between watching the old order collapse, and waiting for another to be born.”

There is a huge prize waiting for the next Attlee or Thatcher, who is able to define this new era and accept the need for new solutions. But no sign of who that will be as yet.