"All the things that you regret"
Rhian E. Jones on austerity politics and britpop
The following is from the new foreword to the Zer0 Classics reissue of Clampdown: Pop Culture Wars on Class and Gender, by Rhian E. Jones, available now from Zer0 Books
It’s been just over a decade since Clampdown appeared — the political and cultural landscape of 1990s Britain and the way it treated the idea and reality of class — is almost thirty years in the past. Reading the book in 2024, its preoccupations are a mixture of dated and vindicated. No one talks as much about retromania as they did in those days, and few people in power still talk about austerity, despite a 2019 UN report comparing the impact of ten years of its ongoing imposition on this country to the aftermath of a natural disaster. But more people are talking, far more loudly than they were in 2013, about a crisis of working-class access to both culture and politics.
At the time of writing a new foreword for the latest edition, only one in twelve people working in the UK’s film and broadcast media are from working-class backgrounds, with similar disproportionately low levels in the arts and culture industries in general.1 Meanwhile, research in 2019 found that almost 40% of those in politics, business and journalism come from a private-school background, compared to 7% in the country’s population.2 This is not — and never has been — a question of a lack of merit, talent or ambition among working-class individuals; rather it reflects the material and structural obstacles that litter working-class paths to opportunity, recognition and success.
If the issues raised in Clampdown have at last become too obvious to ignore, the book’s argument is that the ‘90s was where they took root. This decade saw the erasure of the working class from political discourse and their representation instead through a series of stereotypes, accompanied by a restriction on the ability of working-class creatives to represent themselves.
Growing up in a part of Wales entirely bypassed by the prosperity of the ‘90s boom, where the battles of the 1980s rumbled on in the form of a second round of pit closures while the Blair administration rejoiced that we were ‘all middle class now’, I’d become used to a certain oddness in how class was being thought and talked about. My part of Wales, like other post-industrial parts of Northern England and Scotland, had a particular tradition of working-class politics that was tied up with the civic and material culture of socialism: libraries and institutes collectively paid for and built by workers; bands and cultural groups based on particular workplaces; a general assumption that collective solidarity was something to strive for. This politics and culture was in a bruised and battered state in the post-Thatcher ‘90s, but it still felt meaningful to me. Reading cultural histories like Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes had given me an awareness of education — in and outside its official institutions — as cornerstones of working-class history and identity, as well as the significance of the expansion of higher education from the 1960s, and the class mobility, creativity and cultural collaboration that it enabled. And at the other end of the scale, I was conscious of the equally working-class traditions of a particular kind of glamour, escapism and devotion to the Big Night Out. In the ‘90s, the early and mid-period Manic Street Preachers were notable and almost unique exemplars of both. But not only was there no recognition in mainstream politics of the persistence of these particular identities, their loss, along with post-industrialisation, left the way open for the presentation (by those outside it) of working-class culture and identity as being devoid of intellectual ambition, skill or curiosity.
In this context, I experienced Blairism and its Britpop soundtrack from afar, and as similarly unsettling phenomena, both of which in different ways insisted that no such working-class identities existed, and that ‘working class’ itself was an identity that could only be performed, not lived. At the same time as these simplifying and often damaging depictions were being constructed from above, self-representation from below, by writers, journalists, producers or other creatives from the working class themselves, was becoming more difficult as access to mainstream arts, culture and media became restricted to those from wealthier backgrounds. Factors behind this were the incidental loss or deliberate withdrawal of the kinds of support for artists and creatives without independent wealth that had existed in the ‘60s, ‘70s and even the ‘80s, and which had in many ways enabled the growth of what became Britpop in the first place. As I wrote in 2023, for a more official Britpop retrospective:
Early Britpop is the sound of a lost world: a less overtly insane housing market allowing young creatives to rent or even squat in city centres; pre-gentrification allowing gigs and scene nights to reinvigorate disused Soho nightclubs; free education allowing the mixing of cross-class backgrounds, influences, and ideas in art-school bands.3
In tandem with New Labour’s insistence that socialist ideology was outdated and embarrassing, the idea of overtly politicised music, and music itself as part of an oppositional subculture, became dismissed in the ‘90s as similarly old-hat, unnecessary and cringeworthy — even though the political struggles of the ‘80s, their social and economic fallout, and the opportunities for pop culture to take part in these battles, were ongoing for many of us.
* * *
This is a simple enough argument, but in the conditions of 2013, it had to be made in a convoluted way. It took me years to realise that my particular issues with the ‘90s could be articulated, and that they weren’t peculiar to me. As a student in the 2000s, I followed a classic trajectory of working-class mobility from the Valleys to London, where it was obvious that the absence of class from political discourse was also the case within academia. The kind of Marxist history which had inspired me to study the same field myself was falling out of academic fashion, in favour of a turn away from class as both a subject of discussion and an aspect of identity, even where it clearly overlapped with questions of gender or race. The book I eventually produced, with its attention to class, felt therefore like a work of entryism.
In the early 2010s, after some personally listless and politically stagnant years, I had rediscovered my more reliable loves of music and writing. I was working as a shop assistant at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, where many of my colleagues were also writers, musicians, artists, actors, playwrights, poets — people who, thirty years earlier, might have been able to subsist on state benefits — including the Thatcher administration’s Enterprise Allowance — or to support themselves through cheap or squatted housing and shared production or performance space while they concentrated on creative work. But from the ‘90s onwards, welfare reform, the redevelopment of cities, rising rents and gentrification were eroding these ways of existing and working. Reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and subsequently being drawn into the dying days of the 2000s blogosphere, the naming of this particular malaise gave me an overwhelming sense of relief. I began to recover my teenage perspective on why this path now seemed impossible, and how these opportunities had been so inextricably closed off.
The publishing landscape at the time meant that Clampdown could only ever have been a zer0 book. In the ‘90s I had been an obsessive reader of the weekly music press, and zer0 seemed in many ways like the inheritor of that particular tradition of often breathlessly intense cultural analysis applied to pop culture, bringing out its political significance. As Clampdown is on one level a love-letter to ‘90s music journalism, it is also a remembrance of the one-hit wonders and obscure chancers in both pop and politics who disrupted the stagnant short-termism of the decade, and the catharsis, joy and relief they provided, from Kenickie to the Criminal Justice Bill protests. Clampdown’s argument is not that there was nothing good about the ‘90s, it’s that what was good, interesting and even radical mostly got left there and then forgotten.
All this, I realise, was difficult for some reviewers to get their heads round — indeed, I’d only just managed to do so myself. I was writing, it often seemed, into the void, and writing largely for personal catharsis and remembrance, with the knowledge that the ‘90s were such an odd decade, particularly pre-internet, that it can be hard to convey their strangeness to anyone who didn’t come of age during them. So I was relieved to find the book striking a chord with readers.
On yet another level, Clampdown is a period piece — particularly its first section on ‘the chav’, which provides a snapshot of the working class’s position in the 2010s and the political framing of it. After its denial and erasure in the ‘90s and ‘00s, in the 2010s ‘the working class’ began to make a shaky comeback as a subject of political discussion. By now, after the financial crisis of 2008, Britain had been subject to years of austerity that saw cuts to local authority budgets; the undermining of public services and infrastructure; and an explosion in the use of charity and voluntary welfare services. Discussion of ‘the working class’ in relation to poverty and inequality, however, focused on particular targets — single mothers, recipients of disability benefit — in terms of individual moral failures while entirely ignoring these structural issues.
Media and pop culture got in on this, too, producing caricatures with even less nuance than Britpop’s stereotypes, as well as the reality tv genre dubbed ‘poverty porn’. These were picked up and amplified in political rhetoric, with members of the Coalition and Cameron governments using them as reference points to justify the withdrawal of state financial support or the increased surveillance and policing of working-class communities. Clampdown is in obvious dialogue with Owen Jones’ identification of this political sleight-of-hand in Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (2011). But Clampdown’s focus is the often overlooked intersection of class contempt with sexism and misogyny, and again locates the roots of this in the ‘90s, as well as as far back as Victorian moral panics over the agency of working-class women.
The post-ideological complacency of the ‘90s had seen women’s liberation, like other aspects of the left, captured by neoliberalism and reduced to a focus on the need for more women CEOs and prime ministers rather than paying attention to structural and material disadvantage. This dovetailed with the tendency on both the right and some quarters of the left to conceptualise the working class, when they were thought about at all, as exclusively male, leaving working-class women doubly ignored. There were powerful but isolated attempts to call this out: one of the first interviews I did for Clampdown was with Pavan Amara, then a journalist with Camden New Journal, who in 2012 had written a viral article entitled ‘Feminism: Still excluding working-class women?’. I’d also written off, with some trepidation, to Emma Jackson, who was by then a sociologist but in a former life had been the bassist in Kenickie — as eulogised in the book, a hugely important band to me (and, I discovered after publication, many others). Jackson replied, linking me to an earlier piece she had written on her experiences with the ‘90s music industry and media, which confirmed many of my suspicions as a teenage observer of how certain kinds of fierce regional femininity were treated in the era of the ‘ladette’.
* * *
Clampdown was never intended to be timeless, but it has ended up being prescient. It predated the ‘90s revisionism that has attended more recent retrospectives of both Britpop and Blairism, and some of its themes of class representation have been continued in Joe Kennedy’s Authentocrats (2018) or Natalie Olah’s Steal As Much As You Can (2019). While Clampdown deals with particular lost or erased aspects of working-class identity, Dan Evans’s A Nation of Shopkeepers (2023) has analysed the evolution of more persistent and unstable aspects of working-class political identity.
In politics, the liberal triumphalism inherent in the ‘90s idea of ‘the end of history’ has been disproved with almost laughable speed, after the crash of 2008, the austerity that followed and the return to ideology on both left and right. For good or ill, the age of irony has been replaced by the age of earnestness. Against this backdrop, the idea explored in Clampdown’s first section with regard to ‘Blue Labour’ — that a narrow conception of the working class as socially, culturally and economically conservative is viewed as the only authentic one — is not only still with us but stronger than ever. But intertwined with this idea today is the focus on post-industrial and regional populations from a more sympathetic or righteously indignant angle — as the ‘left behind’, in ‘red wall’ areas in need of ‘levelling up’. When ‘the working class’ do receive political attention, it is through a condescending ventriloquism that seeks to portray them as explicitly socially conservative and implicitly white and male. Less than a decade ago, though, these same demographics were being subjected to viciously negative portrayals in both media and politics, and a decade before that, they were as invisible as if they’d vanished down a disused mineshaft.
The point at issue here, which Clampdown attempted to analyse, is narrative versus complexity. Sensationalised representations of the working class, whether as ‘scroungers’ and ‘chavs’ in the 2010s or today as ‘the left behind’, are often caricatures that erase nuance and intricacy within both class and regional identity, and which develop because they are useful politically. Culture can use its influence to play into and reinforce these caricatures, or it can challenge, complicate and subvert them. Circumstances may have altered, but the choice remains the same.
Clampdown by Rhian E. Jones is available now from Zer0 Books
See https://www.channel4.com/news/working-class-creatives-in- film-and-tv-at-lowest-level-in-decade; https://www.theguardian. com/inequality/article/2024/may/18/arts-workers-uk-working-class- roots-cultural-sector-diversity;
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/05/krautrock-eyeliner-and-feather- boas