Labouring the Point? The Politics of Britpop in ‘New Britain’

In 2009, twelve years after first winning office, the thrice-victorious electoral force that was New Labour appeared to be in trouble. The resignation of the Cabinet’s youngest minister, 39-year-old James Purnell, after the close of polls in the crucial spring local government elections was seen as a blow not just to Prime Minister Gordon Brown but to the entire New Labour project. When Purnell, dubbed the ‘baby faced assassin’,1 was interviewed after the dust had settled, he told the Guardian newspaper, ‘[f]or me, it’s a bit like Britpop – I feel nostalgic for it, it was absolutely right for its time but that time was 1994 … We need to open up New Labour, reinvent it and eventually move beyond it.’2 The same summer Noel Gallagher announced that he was quitting Oasis as he was unable to work any longer with his brother Liam, the band’s lead singer. At the time of writing we are then some fifteen years after the moment Purnell dates as the birth of New Labour. The advent of Britpop was not far behind. The time is then ripe to look at the intertwined fortunes of both.