The big idea: is nostalgia killing politics?

The pop culture of past generations weighs like a dark cloud on the youth of today. Teenagers may have their own subcultures but the mainstream is all nostalgia. The big films are sequels, remakes or long-running sagas. The most watched shows on Netflix are 90s sitcoms, or paeans to the past like Stranger Things. The main stage at Glastonbury is full of OAPs performing tribute acts to their youth. The top music story of 2024 is the return of Oasis, a band whose songwriter was born during the Wilson administration.

This is all a function of the internet, which makes the past ever-present in easily accessible form, leaving little space for the new or innovative. In a slightly more subtle way it’s doing the same thing to politics, with more severe consequences than Champagne Supernova being played incessantly on the radio.

This is most visible in the decline of the Conservatives, who have essentially become a boomer Facebook group in the guise of a political party. Their leadership contest has already seen calls for the return of grammar schools (most of which closed before anyone under the age of 60 could have attended one) as well as the standard attacks on “militant trade union barons”, as if they were still all bolshie miners rather than mostly female graduates in the public sector. At party conference, leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch suggested that statutory maternity pay (introduced in 1987) and the minimum wage (1999) were among the innovations putting an undue burden on businesses.

Most of all there is the worship of St Margaret, with the leadership candidates falling over each other in their haste to condemn Keir Starmer for moving her portrait from one room in Downing Street to another, and Robert Jenrick revealing his daughter’s middle name is Thatcher. It’s not quite as bad as the 2022 contest, when Liz Truss literally dressed up as the former prime minister while recreating her most famous photoshoots, but it’s not far off.

This doesn’t just matter because of the fusty vibes it gives the party but because they’re tied to supporting a rhetorical agenda that no longer makes sense. The political challenges of the future lie around climate change, AI and the rising cost of public services. The Conservatives are talking about grammar schools, right to buy, and bringing back national service. It feels like we’re only a speech or two away from calling for the return of “proper binmen”, as per the nostalgia-drenched Facebook meme.

It’s hardly surprising, given all this, that, according to the pollster YouGov, just 13% of people under the age of 50 voted Tory at the election, compared with 42% of pensioners. This age split is not typical: as recently as 2015 the party got 34% among under-50s. It’s hard to see how they can recover without breaking free from this backwards-looking politics, but they daren’t risk alienating their remaining base, who are still voting for them because they remember the winter of discontent.

Labour aren’t, yet, as badly trapped by the past, and did much better with younger voters (though they didn’t win a majority of votes in any age group). But they are at risk of turning Tony Blair into their own Thatcher-like totem.

Starmer’s policy agenda has important differences from Blair’s. For a start it’s more statist, as we can see with the renationalisation of the railway lines that aren’t already back in public ownership, and Ed Miliband’s creation of the state-owned GB Energy. The prime minister’s personal politics are to the left of his predecessor’s.

But Starmer made sure to get Blair’s personal blessing at a conference held by the latter’s thinktank before the election, and has subsequently hired a load of Blair-era advisers. His effective number two in Downing Street is Pat McFadden, who was Blair’s political secretary. His director of communications, Matthew Doyle, was the deputy director under Blair. His new “adviser on effective delivery”, Michael Barber, made his name running Blair’s delivery unit. A whole swathe of New Labour ministers from Alan Milburn to Jacqui Smith have been brought back as advisers or Lords ministers.

There is a logic to staffing up an inexperienced team with those who served Labour’s most electorally successful leader. Yet, as with the Tories, the challenges of today are not the same as 1997.

Perhaps the most telling example, so far, of the dangers of using an old playbook, was the decision to rule out raising any of the main taxes during the election. This is seen as a critical moment in Blair’s success. But in 1997 there was strong growth that allowed money to be put into public services without tax rises. That isn’t true now, and so the government have found themselves in a trap that is at least partly of their own making. It isn’t possible to avoid tax increases, maintain rules around borrowing, and avoid a further wave of austerity. Something has to give.

Likewise, when it comes to the NHS, it’s all very well bringing back people like Milburn and Wes Streeting’s adviser Paul Corrigan who ran New Labour’s reform programme, but they did so under completely different circumstances, with whopping annual spending increases and more experienced staff. The approach to reform today will, by necessity, have to look very different.

The need to do things differently doesn’t just apply to policy, but to the way government communicates. Alastair Campbell revolutionised “spin” in the 1990s. His approach worked back in the pre-internet days but is far less effective now. Sticking out bad news at 7.30pm on a Friday night was a cynical but effective move when newspapers and BBC bulletins were the main ways voters got information, but today it just looks desperate, and doesn’t make much difference to how much coverage the story gets. Even the phrases that only politicians use – like “I’ll take no lectures from” or “hard-working families up and down the country” – now seem archaic.

Our most transformative prime ministers, for good or ill, are those who have departed from a stale consensus and tried a different approach. Thatcher and Blair themselves constantly demanded a break with the failures of the past, including those for which their own side were responsible.

If today’s politicians want to deal with the challenges we actually face, they need to stop anxiously conjuring the spirits of the past to their service, and learn to speak a new language.

• Sam Freedman is the author of Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It (Macmillan).

Further reading

This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain by Will Hutton (Macmillan, £10.99)

Great Britain?: How We Get Our Future Back by Torsten Bell (Bodley Head, £20)

Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party by Anushka Asthana (HarperNorth, £22)