Brexit - The UK referendum on leaving the EU - Reneging, reshmeging!

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When Brexit started to make us poorer

By Ian Dunt Thursday, 13 April 2017 11:42 AM

A lot has been made of the so-called Project Fear campaign during the Brexit referendum. Politicians like David Cameron, George Osborne and Christine Lagarde weaponised forecasts of the economic shock which would come from a Leave vote in a way which ultimately discredited them and economists in general. The first part was fair and right, the second was not.

Consumer spending was surprisingly robust in the wake of the vote, albeit with a troubling reliance on private credit. The view set in that the Remain campaign and a shadowy cabal of economists had tried to trick the British people with apocalyptic warnings based on their political self-interest.

In reality, many of the predictions made by economists turned out to be right, even if the exaggeration applied to them by politicians did not. Take this National Institute Economic Review paper from May last year. It predicted that "heightened risk and uncertainty will cause sterling to depreciate by around 20% immediately following the referendum, which will result in an intense bout of inflationary pressure".

This is not far off what ultimately took place. The pound plummeted after the vote and then again when it transpired that the UK would seek a hard Brexit outside the single market and customs union. This means that we are paying more for imports and therefore prices are rising. Price rises are sometimes obvious - for instance when a new Apple gadget is released. And sometimes they are slipped under the radar, so they are harder for consumers to spot.

This week the Office of National Statistics labour market report found real pay growth was starting to lag behind price inflation. Average nominal total annual pay growth in the three months to February was 2.3% (it’s actually 2.2% if you exclude bonuses). Inflation in February was also 2.3%. So we’re at the exact point where the two lines on the graph collide. People are about to start getting poorer.

After years of wage stagnation following the financial crash, Britain was finally emerging from the wreckage. Lower oil prices were helping to smother inflation. People were finally starting to see their buying power increase. Then the Brexit vote happened and sterling fell. Now the process has reversed. It's back to austerity, except that this time it is self-imposed. Our pay recovery stopped just as it was getting started.


It is only going to get worse. The Bank of England expects inflation to peak at 2.75% in the first half of next year, but many economists expect it to reach three per cent. The Resolution Foundation thinks real terms pay is now falling for about 40% of the workforce. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned of well over a decade of lost wage growth, flowing smoothly from the financial crisis through to Brexit. A worker will be making no more in 2021 than they did in 2008. It is a horror story.


This was the week in which people started to get poorer because of Brexit. It will not be presented this way, because the majority of Britain's political class - in parliament and on Fleet Street - support the project. So when the public complain of a reduction in living standards they will be told to blame someone else: European leaders, immigrants, or one of the press' other scapegoats. That’s why it is crucial to note why this is happening and to pin the blame accurately.

http://politics.co.uk/blogs/2017/04/13/week-in-review-when-brexit-started-to-make-us-poorer
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U.K. Grocers Secretly Squeeze Customers as Brexit Bites

by Sam Chambers 11 April 2017, 2:00 pm AEST 11 April 2017, 7:31 pm AEST

U.K. grocers are finding creative ways of passing on Brexit-induced cost increases to consumers. If you’re shopping for candles or light bulbs, buyer beware.

Unable to raise prices of staple goods from milk to Marmite because of tough competition from discounters and watchful tabloid newspapers, supermarket operators like Tesco Plc and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Asda are ratcheting them up on less frequently purchased goods such as dental floss, whose costs might not register as readily with shoppers.

“Milk is the sort of item that shoppers use to build their price image of a retailer,” said Cheryl Sullivan, chief marketing and strategy officer at Revionics, a software provider that helps stores formulate pricing strategies. “But shoppers are only price-sensitive on a fraction of a retailer’s range.”

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The U.K. imports almost half the food it eats and despite grocers holding firm on key lines, the effects of sterling’s Brexit-driven slide are filtering through to shopping bills. Prices for food and drink rose 1.2 percent in March, the most in three years, the Office for National Statistics said Tuesday.

Targeted increases have joined “shrinkflation” -- decreasing product sizes while holding prices steady -- as a way for retailers to disguise inflation after the pound’s fall put upward pressure on costs and led to the Marmitegate row between Tesco and Unilever. Grocers like Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc have said they’re unable to pass along the full effect, but retailers are trying to protect profit margins by eking out increases where they can without sending shoppers packing.

Picking Battles

Retailers haven’t dared to tinker with the cost of milk, which costs 1 pound ($1.25) for a 2.3-liter carton at all of the U.K.’s major supermarkets. Yet the price of decorative candles rose 29 percent from October through March while light bulbs were up 19 percent and dental floss increased by 17 percent, according to independent price checker MySupermarket.com.

“If a retailer raises the price of milk, they won’t just lose that sale, they’ll lose the whole basket,” said Steve Dresser, director of consultancy Grocery Insight. “Retailers have to pick their battles on price.”

Research suggests grocers are right to be careful: 52 percent of Brits are more worried about the cost of day-to-day items than they were a year ago, according to a Barclaycard survey. Nearly three-quarters cited a more expensive weekly shop as the reason.

Grocers run sales and loyalty-card data through price-optimization software to help them figure out which prices they can increase without alienating shoppers. Revionics said it has seen an increase in demand from U.K. retailers since the vote to leave the EU.

Retailers typically order their ranges into products that drive sales and those that contribute to profitability, Sullivan said. Shoppers pay careful attention to the cost of frequent purchases, but are less vigilant about occasional splurges, making it easier to increase prices on those goods, she said.

Value Perceptions

Morrison announced temporary price cuts on staples such as potatoes and fish sticks in January. But the company recently increased the price of ground pepper by more than 10 percent, according to MySupermarket.com.

Varying prices in this way taps into consumers’ imperfect perceptions of value, said Ivo Vlaev, professor of behavioral science at Warwick University. Shoppers are concerned with the number of products on which they think they’re getting a good deal, not the total amount they spend, said Vlaev, who conducted research for Tesco.

The low prices of Aldi and Lidl, which account for about 12 percent of the U.K.’s grocery spend, exert a gravitational pull. When global food prices soared in 2010, Tesco and other supermarkets increased prices and opened the door for the discounters’ rapid expansion.

Painful memories of the retail crisis that followed are restraining grocers this time around, according to TCC Global analyst Bryan Roberts.

“The big chains are extremely mindful of not making the same mistake twice,” Roberts said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-11/eat-more-marmite-and-skip-flossing-to-beat-brexit-inflation?utm_content=brexit&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid==socialflow-facebook-brexit
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Leave means leave unless the EU want to remove two of their agencies are relocate them to countries that haven't triggered Article 50.

Then leaving is optional.
 
Bomberboyokay said:
Can count on my fingers how many times I've been to Bunnings in the last 5 years. If I ever get to a point in life where going there every weekend is the highlight of my week, please kill me.
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hahaha!! I feel exactly the same.

My missus ******* loves it...
 
Messenger said:
Leave means leave unless the EU want to remove two of their agencies are relocate them to countries that haven't triggered Article 50.
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The EU grateful and playing by the rules as always. Cant imagine why anyone wanted to leave.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/new...-half-a-trillion-pounds-to-EU-since-1973.html

Britain has contributed nearly half a trillion pounds to the European Union budget since it joined in 1973 and will have to pay a further £100 billion in the next five years.
 
EU eyes years of Brexit payments, immigration - document

By Alastair Macdonald and Jan Strupczewski | BRUSSELS

Britain will be paying off obligations to Brussels for years after Brexit, remain subject to EU courts and go on letting relatives of European immigrants settle in the UK, draft EU negotiating documents show.

The demands are contained in a paper, seen by Reuters on Thursday, that outlines "key elements" of directives for Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator, who will launch talks on a Brexit treaty after Britain holds a general election on June 8.

Prime Minister Theresa May has put ending "free movement" of workers from other EU states, budget contributions to Brussels and oversight by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) among central planks of her plans for leaving the European Union, due to happen in March 2019 after a two-year negotiating period.

But in language that echoes a tough line taken by the 27 other EU leaders who will endorse a common position at a summit on April 29, the paper spells out Brussels' aim to protect the rights of 3 million EU citizens living in Britain, extract cash from London to cover a wide range of existing commitments and ensure EU judges can hold Britain to the treaty after Brexit.

It does not put a figure on what Britain might owe -- May's ministers dismiss an estimate of 60 billion euros ($64 billion) floated by the EU -- but said the exit treaty should both set a "global amount" to honour financial obligations, subject to later adjustments. It will be fixed in euros, not pounds.

And there would also be "a schedule of annual payments".

That would reflect the fact that loans and guarantees made by the EU while Britain is a member extend well beyond 2019.

During this transition period, rules would be enforced by the ECJ, the paper states, in one of numerous references to the Luxembourg judges' continuing role in Britain. It said the EU might consider an "alternative dispute settlement" system for the treaty, but only if that was "equivalent" to the ECJ.

In a particularly pungent demand in a week where Brussels has slapped down London's claim that it might hang on to two EU agencies based in the capital, the paper says Britain should "fully cover ... costs" related to moving them and any other EU bodies to member states staying in the bloc.

IMMIGRANTS' RIGHTS

The paper, which echoes with additional detail a draft of the negotiating guidelines to be agreed by leaders next week, says the EU's first priority is to safeguard the rights forever under EU law of Europeans living in Britain on Brexit Day -- as well as pension and other rights of any who have already left.

It spells out that this includes rights, such as taking up a job or access to public housing, that those residents may choose to exercise only after Brexit, as well as the ability of family members to join them after Brexit and enjoy those same rights.

May said on Thursday she would stick to a pledge to cut net immigration by some two thirds to below 100,000 a year. The EU approach, given that some 3 million EU citizens are already in Britain, could affect her ability to meet such targets.

The EU has already voiced concern that British red tape is making it hard to claim rights to permanent residence after five years and the paper said it must have a "simple and swift" procedure in place that should be free or at worst no more expensive than Britons paid for similar public documents.

In a reflection of some of the complexities that divorce will entail, the paper said goods placed on the market on either side of the new EU-UK frontier before Brexit would continue to be covered by EU rules even if only sold afterwards -- a measure to address uncertainties about guarantees, labelling and so on.

The paper covered only negotiations on Britain's withdrawal and not plans to discuss a future free trade agreement.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-negotiations-idUKKBN17M2I6
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The EU's stance is clearly to force GB into a full on hard Brexit.

There's no way any British PM can sign a check for Euro60b before negotiations even start, especially as they mention British liabilities but no mention of British share of common assets which is probably bigger than the liabilities especially as that's a figure plucked out of thin air.

Then they want a guarantee on a soft border between Eire and NI which of course is completely impossible for all sorts of smuggling and security reasons

Then giving Spain a final veto on Gibraltar.

And also making European Court of Justice final arbiter of any agreement.

Then you have Denmark laying claim to a right to fish British waters even after they've left EU.

Also demanding Britain cover costs for moving finance and medicine bureaucratic HQs from London.

Whole point of Brexit was to regain sovereignty.

The thing that is obviously most upsetting to individual countries is the competitiveness that the low pound is giving British exports. A soft Brexit would probably see a rise in its value but the EU are always oblivious to those kind of effects and are backing GB into a corner and hard Brexit would see pound fall to 1.15 to USD at least, possibly all the way down to parity.

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The UK is doing a good job forcing itself into a hard Brexit. It's like the last 70 years didn't happen for large numbers of the May Government.

The EU, with not necessarily vindictive motivations, has every reason to offer the UK the shittest possible outcome. Idiots (and racists) stuck in the Cold War may think otherwise but the UK needs a "good" deal with the EU way, way more than the EU needs it. The EU27 know this as they aren't braindead. To paraphrase somebody else: It's not poker when all the other players know what your ******* cards are.
 
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Bomberboyokay said:
Idiots (and racists) stuck in the Cold War may think otherwise but the UK needs a "good" deal with the EU way, way more than the EU needs it.
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You really are clueless. WTO option is probably the best outcome for the UK given its service dominated sector. As for racists, yep sure, free movemement for white people and restrictions on coloured folk isnt racist is it?

It's like the last 70 years didn't happen for large numbers of the May Government.
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FFS. UK has been in the EU how long? People are well aware of the MASSIVE amount of funds that UK govts has given to the EU. And to think they want to give the UK a "bill". Yep, ok, that seems "fair".

The EU27 know this as they aren't braindead.
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Yes, because the EURO has been such a good idea! The EU is terrified that the UK will drop its corp tax to 10% and take lions share of FDI.
 
So the EU has ratified the negotiation terms for Brexit. They've had it ready for months and agreed unanimously in a matter of minutes.

Financial Times journo David Allen Green is worth following on Brexit. He's describing what is in essence "Brexit by timetable". The EU are setting the terms.


 
Juncker tells May he is '10 times more sceptical than before' on Brexit

Account of meeting between PM and EU commission head sees some close to latter put chances of talks failing at ‘over 50%’

Daniel Boffey in Brussels, Philip Oltermann in Berlin and Rajeev Syal
Monday 1 May 2017 21.26 AEST

A devastating account of a dinner in Downing Street between Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker has emerged, claiming the European commission president ended discussions about a potential Brexit deal by telling the British prime minister: “I’m leaving Downing Street 10 times more sceptical than I was before.”

Those close to Juncker are said to have subsequently concluded that the chances of Brexit talks failing were now “over 50%”. An EU spokesman declined to comment, except to point out that Juncker had told reporters at a summit on Saturday that the dinner was a “very constructive meeting, a friendly atmosphere”.

The detailed account of the meeting on Wednesday between May and Juncker, who was accompanied by the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, and key staff, suggests the two sides are dangerously divided on key issues such as Britain’s divorce bill and the future rights of EU citizens.

According to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, May is said to have told Juncker the UK did not legally owe a penny to the EU under existing treaties.

She is also said to have told him the issue of citizens’ rights could be settled in the opening few weeks of formal negotiations, which are due to start in June after the UK general election.

It was reported that May suggested EU citizens would in future receive only the same rights in relation to living and working in the UK as anyone else who was not a British citizen.

Juncker responded that such a scenario would be problematic, because EU citizens currently enjoy additional rights. “I think you are underestimating this, Theresa,” he was quoted as saying.

Juncker reportedly called the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, after the dinner, claiming May was “on a different galaxy”.

The commission has compiled a dossier on the rights it expects EU nationals living in the UK to keep and those it expects EU citizens to be able to acquire should they move to Britain.

On Saturday, at a summit where the remaining 27 EU member states adopted their negotiating guidelines, Juncker told reporters he was doubtful the UK would sign up swiftly to their dossier and suggested London had a simplistic take on the issue.

“I have the impression sometimes that our British friends, not all of them, do underestimate the technical difficulties we have to face,” he said, adding that May had told him in response to each of his questions about the future: “Be patient and ambitious.”

On Britain’s divorce bill, the EU delegation, which estimates Britain’s liabilities to be about €60bn (£51bn), are said to have told May over dinner that the UK had entered commitments with every passed budget and the bloc was not a golf club that could be easily joined or left. The EU, they said, was like a family, and Brexit should be treated as a divorce.

David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the EU, is said to have retorted that the rest of the EU could not do anything about the financial demands once the UK had left because it would no longer answer to the rulings of the European court of justice (ECJ).

Juncker pointed out that the UK wanted a trade deal, but without agreement on money there would be no desire among the 27 member states to make that happen. The whole exit process would change, the commission president is said to have responded.

“Let us make Brexit a success,” May is said to have beseeched the commission president. According to the German newspaper, Juncker said while he wanted an orderly exit, not chaos, after Britain withdraws from the EU in 2019, it would be a third country state for the EU, adding: “Brexit cannot be a success.”

It is also claimed that Juncker pulled out copies of Croatia’s accession treaty and the recently agreed Canadian free trade deal, which is more than 2,000 pages long, weighing 6kg (13lbs) in total, to point out the complexity of what is to come.

May is said to have been surprised by his response and defended her optimism with reference to her negotiations over Britain’s opt-outs from the justice and home affairs chapter in the Lisbon treaty, which was a symbolic hard break but kept all Britain’s old ties intact.

The article in the German newspaper also suggested that the EU delegation picked up on some irritation on the side of the prime minister at interventions from the Brexit secretary.

Davis is said to have made three separate references during the dinner to having successfully blocked May’s one-time plans for extra powers of surveillance for Britain’s security services via the ECJ. The newspaper claimed that May appeared unamused, leaving Juncker’s circle to discuss among themselves whether Davis would still be in charge of negotiations after the UK election.

As to the coming shape of the negotiations, May is said to have proposed that the two sides meet once a month for four days in Brussels, with positioning papers published beforehand. But she said the talks should take place in private.

“Everything should remain secret,” she is said to have demanded, to consternation from the EU side, which pointed out that the commission needed to keep the European parliament informed throughout the process.

Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said on Monday: “Theresa May talks about strengthening her hand, but in reality she has misjudged her hand at every turn, weakening Britain’s position.

“By refusing to acknowledge the complexity and magnitude of the task ahead, the prime minister increases the risk that there will be no deal, which is the worst of all possible outcomes.”

The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, said the account demonstrated the chaos at the heart of the government’s Brexit strategy.

“These reports have blown a massive hole in the Conservative party’s arguments. It’s clear this government has no clue and is taking the country towards a disastrous hard Brexit,” he said.

“Theresa May chose a divisive hard Brexit, with Labour’s help, and now has no idea what to do next. This election offers us a chance to change the direction of our country, keep Britain in the single market and give the people the final say over what happens next.”

A government spokesman said: “We do not recognise this account. As the PM and Jean-Claude Juncker made clear, this was a constructive meeting ahead of the negotiations formally getting under way.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...-im-10-times-more-sceptical-than-i-was-before
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It will be interesting to see how they deal with the rights of EU citizens in the U.K. and vice versa.
 
Messenger said:
It will be interesting to see how they deal with the rights of EU citizens in the U.K. and vice versa.
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UK offered to sort it already and Germans knocked them back. Its become very obvious that the net recipients dont want any cut in their EU payments and Germany doesnt want to pay a cent more. Hence massive so called "exit bill". Poms have huge leverage over this and know it.

Laughable that Juncker and go think May would agree to paying them huge cash with no guarantees on a trade deal.

Rubbish trade deal and pay £50bn or WTO plus Canada, Oz and US trade deals and keep cash? No brainer.

I reckon the Germans will fold on trade and free movement and the Brits will fold on cash (and a bit on free movement) despite typical French efforts at being campaingners.
 
Gough Plugger35

Cool Britannia: where did it all go wrong?

Twenty years after Labour's landslide win, did the patriotism and triumphalism of 1997 sow the seeds of Brexit?

By John Harris

“Move it along, Granddad, you’re getting in the way of The Scene! The London Scene, that is! From Soho to Notting Hill, from Camberwell to Camden Town, the capital city of Dear Old Blighty pulses anew with the good vibrations of an epic-scale youthquake!” The words come from the March 1997 issue of Vanity Fair, which was built around a 25-page account of what the magazine called Swinging London Mark II. Its cover featured Liam Gallagher and his soon-to-be wife, Patsy Kensit, reclining on a bed done out with Union Jacks; inside, there were tributes to the Conran family, Alexander McQueen, the Spice Girls, an array of restaurateurs and models, and the then leader of the opposition.

Tony Blair was pictured on page 143. His portrait had been taken using the vogueish cross-processing technique, which saturated everything in colour and made people look as if they were giving off incandescent light. Blair’s huge smile looked positively electrified, and so did the headline. Here, apparently, was “The Visionary”: a man who had led his party to the dizzying position of being 21 points ahead of the Conservatives, and who supposedly embodied a new British optimism. “Say hello to shirtsleeved, smiling Tony Blair, the leader of the ascendant Labour Party,” said the surrounding editorial. “The Right Honourable Tony is just 43 years old and has an outlook to match.”

Notwithstanding that its US edition relegated coverage of London to the inside pages and featured Julia Louis-Dreyfus from Seinfeld on the cover, what Vanity Fair was so frenziedly celebrating was much the same vision of the UK as Blair had been selling for the previous three years. Just as Bill Clinton had framed his challenge to George Bush, Sr in terms of a watershed generational shift, so Blair and his people portrayed New Labour as the epitome of everything fresh and new, fully in tune with a popular culture that was suddenly brimming with infectious confidence. Blair habitually talked about his wish to re-create Britain as “a young country”. He laid claim to being “a member of the rock’n’roll generation”. And as London swung and self-consciously British music became the “in” thing, he built himself in to the giddy cultural fantasia that became known as Cool Britannia.

The term had originated in 1967, as the title of a minute-long song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, set to the tune of “Rule Britannia”: “Cool Britannia, Britannia you are cool/Take a trip!/Britons ever, ever, ever shall be hip.” In 1995 it had been chosen as the name of an icky variety of ice cream – which mixed vanilla, strawberries and “fudge-covered shortbread” – by Ben & Jerry’s. And in November 1996, two days after the publication of a Newsweek piece by Stryker McGuire which explained “Why London rules”, the phrase was taken up by John Major’s decaying Tory government. “London is universally recognised as a centre of style and innovation,” said a press release issued by the Department of National Heritage, which was then led by Virginia Bottomley. “Our fashion, music and culture are the envy of our European neighbours. This abundance of talent, together with our rich heritage, makes ‘Cool Britannia’ an obvious choice for visitors from all over the world.”

But the Conservative Party had never been much good at allying itself with cutting-edge pop culture and the Major government was close to being a national joke – and besides, Blair had got there first. In the summer of 1995, he had sipped gin and tonic with Damon Albarn of Blur at the House of Commons, and turned up – for the second consecutive year – to the annual awards ceremony organised by Q magazine. A few months later, he made an appearance at the 1996 Brit Awards, to pay tribute to Oasis, the Stone Roses and the Clash and present a lifetime award to David Bowie.

Seven months on, his speech at the Labour party conference drew on the optimism kicked up by that year’s Euro football championships – which, with perfect synchronicity, had been staged in England – and the summer’s chart-topping anthem “Three Lions”. “Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming,” he said. “Labour’s coming home.” After the party won its landslide the following year, there was even
a brief spurt of enthusiasm for something called “The Rebranding of Britain”, which entailed the Foreign Office convening a task force chosen, according to the BBC, “to help give Britain a ‘cool’ image abroad”.

How far away it all seems from 2017. Labour now trails the Tories by close to the same margin by which Blair once led them. And if Britain ever had any hope of being recast as a “young country”, that is surely now a forlorn hope. Brexit, as the writer Anthony Barnett recently pointed out, amounts to “government of the old, by the old, for the old”. Columns in the Daily Telegraph advocate the return of imperial measures; the kind of patriotic iconography that Nineties musicians drenched in irony and playfulness now adorns the right-wing press every day, played completely straight. The kingdom itself is under threat from the exit of Scotland. Britannia does not seem cool, but rather angry, panicked – and, to cap it all, hideously square.

The Cool Britannia moment – and a moment is really all it was – was rooted in three things: rock music, an economic boom and a London that, perhaps for the last time, was both culturally thriving and a viable home to the kinds of creative people who made everything happen. Twentysomethings who worked for record companies, magazines and design houses could still live amid the action (in retrospect, I marvel that the monthly rent on my two-bed flat off Westbourne Grove gave me change out of £1,000). Better still, most of the Western world was still locked in to the decade-long spell of carefree optimism that had begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and would end with the events of 11 September 2001. A kind of giddy optimism was in the air; once the recession of 1991-92 was out of the way, London pulsed with a sense of possibility.

In the spring of 1993, as the domination of rock music by the “grunge” bands led by Nirvana reached its peak, the music press began to frame a new crop of groups in terms of a playfully patriotic British renaissance. “Yanks go home!” said the cover of the April 1993 issue of Select magazine, which superimposed Suede’s Brett Anderson on a Union Jack. His band, many of whose songs celebrated what one lyric called “the love and poison of London”, was one crucial element of the new British wave: another was Suede’s arch-rivals Blur, whose more playful but equally romantic visions of the capital defined their Modern Life Is Rubbish album, released that May. The two groups’ rivalry was given a titillating aspect by their respective lead singers having vied for the affections of Justine Frischmann, who had left Anderson for Albarn, and then formed her own group – Elastica, whose artful, extremely English music began to appear at the year’s end. The bands and their courtiers defined a social milieu centred on Camden Town, and a range of very English musical touchstones: Bowie, the Kinks and the more art-school end of 1970s punk rock.

Then, in early 1994, Oasis hit town and Blur had someone else to compete with. With horribly perfect timing, Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, killed himself on 5 April 1994. The first Oasis single was released less than a week later; Blur’s hugely successful album Parklife came out the same month. By 1995, the “in” word was “Britpop”, and a whole set of signifiers had come into play. Oasis’s Noel Gallagher took to playing an Epiphone guitar decorated with the Union Jack; twentysomething fashion mixed the dress codes of Eighties football casuals and Sixties mods. And everything was about success: huge outdoor concerts, chart-topping singles, the imperative to appeal to as many people as possible. “Who wants to be an indie noise-freak, alienating everybody?” Albarn asked. “We want to make music our grandmothers like.” Gallagher boasted of a song he had written – “All Around the World”, which was eventually released in 1997 – which he thought could win the Eurovision Song Contest.

A lot of what happened was about avenging the Eighties. Outside the south-east of England, that decade had been defined largely by rupture and division. The left was marginalised both culturally and politically: Labour had lost election after election, and for most musicians who saw themselves as part of the opposition, life revolved around the limited success afforded by the university circuit and late-night radio. Just as the political left was held back from achieving meaningful power, so a thriving musical and artistic counterculture – the shorthand term for which was “indie” – never really threatened the musical establishment against which it positioned itself. Even the Smiths, who repeatedly made it on to Top of the Pops, had only two Top Ten hits, and they never made it anywhere near the summit of the singles charts.

In any case, success was often considered suspect, if not dangerous. I began my career as a music writer towards the end of the Eighties: if I was despatched to interview a group that had signed to a major record label, my first question was always about what had happened to their all-important “indie credibility”. To be raging from the sidelines sometimes seemed to be the chosen fate of people who wanted no part of the mainstream. As the DJ and music writer Steve Lamacq later told me, “We all believed quite strongly in certain things: we all voted Labour, we were all anti-apartheid, we were pro the miners’ strike, we were anti major record labels.” And for most of the Eighties, “we” lost.

As it turned out, many musicians who cut their teeth during this period hated being so marginalised. “I resent the Eighties,” said Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. “I’d been born in the Sixties, and you’d see stuff on telly about how great it was, and by the time it comes to your formative years, where you’re thinking, ‘Come on then, let’s have a bit of that,’ it’s all going in the opposite direction. I often said I wanted a refund on my adolescence.”

The Nineties presented an opportunity to dive head first into what the Thatcher era had kept at arm’s length: acclaim, hedonism, money. Pretty quickly, Britpop’s early bohemianism was replaced by an emphasis on conspicuous consumption: high-end casual wear, Paul Smith suits, members-only clubs (the Groucho reached its peak of vogueishness circa 1994; Soho House opened the following year). At the end of 1995, Noel Gallagher’s record company presented him with a chocolate brown Rolls-Royce; in April 1997 he moved into a house in Belsize Park he named Supernova Heights. Its bespoke interiors included a 14ft fish tank, pink leather chairs originally designed for the Swedish royal family and a circular, red-white-and-blue “target bath” adorned with Venetian tiles.

This last item highlighted another big part of how the Nineties overturned much of the received wisdom of the previous decade. During the Thatcher years and beyond, Union Jacks, RAF targets and the merest whiff of patriotism were enough to prompt instant exclusion from “indie” circles. When Morrissey danced around with a Union Jack on stage in 1992, the NME’s headline was: “Flying the flag or flirting with disaster?”

A year later, Blur heralded the release of Modern Life Is Rubbish with a promotional picture titled British Image 1, featuring the group clad in skinhead-style attire and posing with a threatening-looking dog, and some writers on the same paper, where I worked before I became the editor of Select, were equally irate. But then, almost without warning, there was a sea change. By 1995 the very word “Britpop” crystallised the sense of newly acceptable – albeit camped-up – patriotism, as did Noel Gallagher’s guitar. At the 1997 Brit Awards, Geri Halliwell wore a Union Jack minidress and no one raised a murmur of complaint.

Just as old sensitivities about expressions of nationhood seemed to bite the dust, so, rather more questionably, did large elements of what was then called sexual politics. Loaded magazine – strapline: “For men who should know better” – was launched in April 1994 with a cover featuring Gary Oldman and the tag “super lads”. Its tone had a knowing sense of self-parody, but once the basic idea of “laddism” went overground, any nuances inevitably fell away. The result was a kind of unapologetic boorishness, which the post-feminist invention of the “ladette” (defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a term for “young women who behave in a boisterously assertive or crude manner and engage in heavy drinking sessions”) did little to counterbalance. And mixed up in it all was a new class tourism, all about football, greasy-spoon cafés and glottal stops. The fashionable direction of travel was nailed in one of the zeitgeisty quotes issued by Damon Albarn: “I started out reading Nabokov – and now I’m into football, dog racing, and Essex girls.” The era’s most successful sitcom, it may pain some people to recall, was the proudly moronic Men Behaving Badly.

As Britpop widened its reach and came to define no end of stuff beyond music, whole crowds of influential people were co-opted into the fun. The inclusion of fashion was a cinch, as was evident from the Union Jacks soon wrapped around Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and the tailor Ozwald Boateng. Frantic praise was heaped on the new conceptual art pioneered by the so-called Young British Artists, whose de facto leader, Damien Hirst, joined with Blur’s Alex James and the actor Keith Allen to form a notorious trio whom Vanity Fair’s coverage characterised as the “Boulevardiers” – Groucho regulars to be found “ankle-deep in cigarette butts and spilled spirits at 2.35am”. Tracey Emin was often just as soused, and equally omnipresent.

Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting – a rare Scotland-centred contribution to the fun, included partly thanks to its Britpop-heavy soundtrack – was released in early 1996. By way of an arch comment on what was afoot, the first Austin Powers picture, subtitled International Man of Mystery and co-starring Elizabeth Hurley, came out the following year, skewering Cool Britannia’s self-conscious echoes of the Sixties but instantly including itself in the same cultural moment. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) had been an early portent of the new wave of British cinema; the pretty ghastly Notting Hill, which followed in 1999, symbolised the point at which everything had long since started to smell cheap and nasty.

Until then, it was just about possible to work oneself into a slightly altered state and flit around a London that seemed to live up to the hype. Britpop stars really did compare notes in Camden pubs; actors, models and musicians could be seen doing laps of Soho – or in the East End, flitting around the newly trendy corners of Shoreditch and Hoxton. There was a general sense not just of hyperactive creativity, but extravagance: there were lots of parties, as I recall, with insanely expensive drinks, and the period’s must-have fixture – an ornate ice sculpture, which would melt away decadently as the revelry intensified. Meanwhile, for grown-ups, there were new restaurants: Oliver Peyton’s Coast in Mayfair, the River Café in Hammersmith and Terence Conran’s Mezzo restaurant on Wardour Street, which opened in 1995. Mezzo was archetypally Cool Britannia, both in its size (it seated 700 and employed 350) and its in-and-out eating experience, seemingly designed for people who could only pause for twenty minutes, in case they should miss the next party or premiere. Besides, as the phrase went, eating was cheating.

Which brings us to cocaine, which fell on London like snow. In the midst of a culture increasingly built on oafish belligerence, it was the perfect drug, whose ubiquity was captured in Blur’s “Charmless Man”, released as a single in 1996. Its lyric also sent up the kinds of posh people who now affected a faux-proletarian swagger: “Educated the expensive way/He knows his claret from his Beaujolais/I think he’d like to have been Ronnie Kray/But then nature didn’t make him that way”. But the most pointed lines came a little later on: “He talks at speed/He gets nosebleeds/He doesn’t see/His days are tumbling down upon him”.

That New Labour became the political wing of Cool Britannia was hardly surprising: Blair, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, after all, were accomplished opportunists and inveterate networkers. But there were deeper similarities between the two inventions which seemed to draw them together without anyone having to push things along. Like the new London, the political project that Blair led was outwardly open and optimistic, but up close, there was some of the same avarice, status-worship and self-regard. When Alex James was invited to the House of Commons by a young Labour Party staffer and passed around fawning MPs, he got a pretty clear sense of what was afoot. “There was a bit of a starf***er thing going, wasn’t there?” he said, five years later. “But they’re just like the rest of us. They just want to get pissed and shag famous people.”

Three months after taking power, Blair and his people hosted a Downing Street reception that would mark the most visible high point of this noble idea. The party was intended to thank celebrities who had lent their support to Labour’s 1997 election campaign, as well as serving notice of the new regime’s affinity with the so-called creative industries. There they all were: Eddie Izzard, Vivienne Westwood, Lenny Henry, Ian McKellen, the Pet Shop Boys, Angus Deayton – and Noel Gallagher, who later remembered some of his conversation with the new prime minister about the morning after the 1997 election. “We were chatting away,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘Oh, it was brilliant, man, because we stayed up till seven o’clock in the morning to watch you arrive at the headquarters. How did you manage to stay up all night?’ And this is his exact words: he leant over and said, ‘Probably not by the same means as you did.’ And at that point I knew he was a geezer.”

Twenty years on, how does all of this look? I still treasure the best Britpop records: Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife, Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, the first Suede album, the debut album by Elastica, Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. That said, I also regret paying far too much attention to a lot of anaemic, hopelessly derivative music that sounded the death knell for guitar-led rock. Among the records from that time that I now listen to most are three that were part of it only in the most general sense. Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995) and Massive Attack’s Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1998) are full of qualities rather lacking in most of that era’s music: audacity, worldliness, a keen sense of the future. They also highlight one of Cool Britannia’s most glaring features: the fact that it was so white.

Retrospection brings on other uncomfortable thoughts. If, from 1995 onwards, people were giddily messing around with flags and endlessly evoking a past Britain that probably never existed, where did that lead? A generous answer might include the 2012 London Olympics. But with the addition of the Nineties’ undertone of boorish stupidity – albeit of the “ironic” kind – you might end up somewhere a bit different.

It’s a somewhat half-formed theory, but if you tried to explain Cool Britannia to an alien and gave them the constituent parts to assemble, you might find that they presented you with something that looked a bit like Boris Johnson. Certainly, if our national conversation now seems increasingly coarse and unhinged, that might be partly down to lad culture. If the surest sign of a political opportunist is a Union Jack, some of the explanation must lie in the period when the flag was suddenly stripped of its problematic aspects, and seemingly became ubiquitous. This is not a matter of drawing lines from Cool Britannia to Brexit: apart from anything else, the voter demographics don’t fit. But often, once things are introduced to the culture, there is no telling where they will end up.

When it comes to the role of New Labour in what happened, ambivalence rules. The end of 18 years of Conservative government was a truly euphoric moment. There did seem to be a shift from fusty, greying Tories to a new breed of politicians who at least had some idea about culture and how it worked – which, in the midst of a politics built on small differences, felt significant, until the drab realities of government broke the spell. I can remember one morning at the offices of Select, not long after the Blair landslide, when the conversation turned to what an amazing thing it was that had just happened, before one of our photographers butted in. He was older than most of the other staff, and attuned to the kind of rock’n’roll attitude that insisted that all squares and straights were usually to be avoided. “It’s just another suit,” he said.

Most pop-culture waves turn out to have been the advance party for a new mutation of capitalism, and so it proved with this one. If Cool Britannia boiled down to anything, it was the birth of a London that by the early Noughties was becoming stupidly expensive and far too full of itself. Perhaps the most telling story arrived unfashionably late, in 2001, when the estate agent Foxtons introduced its capital-based fleet of Mini Coopers, which allowed its salespeople to sell overpriced flats while channelling the spirit of Austin Powers. And yet, and yet. Watching your contemporaries storm the charts was great. Flitting from party to bar to awards ceremony was nothing but a blast.

From the vantage point of 2017, we might think of Cool Britannia as the last burst of an era that lasted from about 1955 to 2000, when pop culture repeatedly seemed to give a sense of possibility and hope, and mere records could take on no end of meaning. I’m not sure it works like that any more. The most successful British music of today – witness Coldplay, or Ed Sheeran, or Adele – is omnipresent, but its vocabulary is a kind of flimsy emotional Esperanto. Conceptual art is a cultural irrelevance. Fashion chitter-chatters on, with no sense that it says anything about the wider world. And the idea that a mainstream politician might credibly claim to be a cultural player seems almost laughable.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that Cool Britannia still denotes is a brand of vaping fluid made in Manchester. The somewhat baffling online sales blurb reads thus: “Cool Britannia . . . goes for the cloud chasing enthusiasts and extreme vapers. Caramel and vanilla create the most spectacular fashion. Extraordinary combo of milk, coconuts and oats gives a tinge of nuttiness for the most fulfilling experience. Cool Britannia is all about giving you just the kind of sensation that you’re looking for.” So it proved back in 1997, before we all woke up with a slightly nasty taste in our mouths, and a sudden sense of a world that was rather more complicated than we’d thought.

John Harris is a writer for the Guardian. His book “The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock” is published by Harper Perennial

http://www.newstatesman.com/1997/2017/05/cool-britannia-where-did-it-all-go-wrong
Click to expand...
 
Where did it all wrong? People realised that Blair was just an upmarket version of Obama. Good at slogans but clueless on policy and basically just full of s**t.
 
medusala said:
Where did it all wrong? People realised that Blair was just an upmarket version of Obama. Good at slogans but clueless on policy and basically just full of s**t.
Click to expand...

Is that your way of saying a ' Liberalized, Corporatized, lick-spittle lackey'?

I'll be surprised if BREXIT ever actually goes ahead.....Since when did the people decide on a nations fate, after all.
 
Procrastinator35 said:
I'll be surprised if BREXIT ever actually goes ahead.....Since when did the people decide on a nations fate, after all.
Click to expand...

It will go ahead and May and co will blame Brussels, Berlin, Paris, anything and everything on the mainland when it inevitably is a ******* disaster.
 
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