Alex Niven's Blog

Ignore for now what they became and recall the radical vision that fuelled their rise – and made the nation embrace them

Judging by the reaction to the announcement of the Oasis reunion, it would seem that the most powerful of all 1990s drugs is nostalgia. For some hoary veterans of the Britpop era, the reunion gigs next summer will be an opportunity to dust off the old Reni hat, slip on a pair of faded Adidas Gazelles and recall an apparently simpler time. Meanwhile, for Oasis sceptics, the reunion will be nothing more than an example of what the French dramatist Émile Augier once called “nostalgie de la boue” – the desire to wallow in the mud and remember a tacky, regretful, slightly seedy experience from the collective past.

Somewhere between the sycophancy of Oasis stans and the cynicism of their detractors lies the truth about the band’s legacy. I sympathise with the view that Oasis heralded the rise of a certain strand of cultural conservatism in the mid-90s. But it’s also true that there was a good deal of radicalism – or at least radical potential – in their early output and its cultural effects. Right now, as a New Labour revival government struggles to inspire the public, and as people in Britain search for better forms of collective identity than the toxic populism of the right and far right, we could do a lot worse than remember what was so socially meaningful about the Oasis phenomenon in the first place.

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and wrote a book about Oasis’ Definitely Maybe for the 33 1/3 series

The party’s electoral strategy is based on an outdated stereotype of the northern voter – and it will come back to haunt Starmer

In the 2024 general election campaign, both major parties seem intent on being as grimly, greyly unadventurous as possible. Moments of farce aside, the dearth of talking points has at times made me feel weirdly nostalgic for the heady days of late 2019, when talk of the “collapse of the red wall” dominated a rather more dramatic contest. Nearly five years on from the upheavals of 2019, what has happened to the “red wall” which became such a defining psephological cliche of that moment?

In fact, while the “red wall” phrase has somewhat fallen out of fashion, the idea that Labour’s electoral success depends on its ability to win back imagined hordes of socially conservative voters in the distant north and Midlands remains central to the party’s self-image. While coherent Labour policy announcements have been rather thin on the ground lately, the mood music of Starmerism – if such a thing exists – is dominated by themes of security, patriotism, toughness on immigration and the fact that Keir Starmer’s father was once a blue-collar worker. All of this apparently in the hope of appealing to a “white working class” whose heartlands lie in a vague northerly terrain called something like Outside the London Bubble.

Postwar artists wouldn’t have had a chance without affordable housing or social security. When will politicians realise that?

When John Lydon sang in 1976 that anarchy was coming to the UK, he wasn’t far wrong. Genuine anarchism (a noble political tradition) certainly didn’t descend on Britain in the wake of punk rock and Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory three years later. But since 1979, the consensus that the British state should empower individuals through social security (such as the “council tenancy” Lydon sneered at in Anarchy in the UK) has been steadily unpicked by Thatcher and her successors – a triumph for laissez-faire anti-statism, if not quite anarchy itself.

The irony is that countercultural outbursts like punk were really enabled by the statist policies of postwar Britain. For all that countless artists, musicians and writers from the 50s to the 80s saw government as the enemy and thought they were mavericks railing against the system, the flourishing culture of the period was very much a product of the welfare state and its nurturing social infrastructures.

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of The North Will Rise Again

Powerhouses, levelling up, taking back control: the Labour leader says he is done with such ‘sticking plaster’ solutions

When the post-punk hero Mark E Smith intoned, more than 40 years ago, “the north will rise again”, he probably didn’t have in mind a constitutional commission chaired by Gordon Brown. But a lot has changed since 1980. Now even Britain’s political class in Westminster seems to have realised that the gaping socioeconomic divide between England’s north and south can be tackled only with root and branch reform.

Labour’s Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future is a genuinely radical set of proposals for combating regional inequality, and contrasts sharply with the Tories’ rather pitiful strategy for levelling up. Replacing the House of Lords with a democratic alternative, devolving control of transport, infrastructure and housing to local government, plans for moving large numbers of civil servants outside London – all these ideas suggest that Keir Starmer might just be serious about thoroughgoing reform of the most regionally unbalanced advanced economy in the world.

As in Devon and Cornwall, Whitby’s rise in second homes is fuelling worsening inequality and a housing crisis

If, like me, you grew up in a certain part of north-east England, the North Yorkshire coast felt like the nearest “exotic” destination for a summer holiday. The idea is not so fanciful as it sounds. In fact, in recent years comparisons between this part of the country and foreign expat hotspots like the Costa del Sol have begun to look more and more apt, not least due to the warming climate.

But all is not well in this picturesque corner of England. Last month, residents of the seaside town of Whitby – in effect the capital of the Yorkshire tourist trade – voted overwhelmingly in favour of making all new-build homes in the town full-time primary residences. The parish-level vote was, as the Scarborough borough council website drily notes, “no more and no less than an expression of the views of the electorate”. But while the result is not binding, it shows that Whitby locals are increasingly feeling the burn of the “frenzy” for second homes in British coastal areas.

There’s an astonishing lack of thinking about how to address the radical implications of Britain’s disintegration

There is a famous quote from the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

His argument could equally apply to the United Kingdom. Many think the UK in its current form is probably doomed, and that the break up of the union is inevitable. But outside the various nationalist causes, few people seem to have a clear idea about what should replace the dying dream of unionism.

Related: It’s too late to save the union, Gordon Brown | Letters

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island

The defeat in Hartlepool suggests Labour has simply revived the ‘pints and flags’ tactics that failed in the Miliband years

Labour’s drubbing in the Hartlepool byelection was the most dramatic and symbolic of all the varied results from May’s elections. Party figures have eagerly repeated a familiar metaphor since those results: that Labour has a “mountain to climb”, citing its 2019 election losses as evidence of the scale of the challenges it faces. But the collapse of Labour’s vote share in the north-east of England last week can’t be explained by long-term factors alone. This was a campaign spearheaded by the leader’s office, to which Keir Starmer devoted much time and energy. The loss of Hartlepool, a seat that has voted Labour since its creation, was his failure.

The circumstances behind this extraordinary defeat tell us much about the party under Starmer. The Labour leadership seems to imagine “red wall” seats such as Hartlepool as dim hinterlands full of patriotic, socially conservative, working-class voters – the polar opposite of a caricatured “metropolitan elite”. According to this reading, the task of rebuilding support in these areas is a simple case of airlifting Saint George flags into town during election campaigns and repeating hollow, patronising cliches about “trust” and “competence”.

Related: The Green party is showing Labour how to connect with its former heartlands | Lynsey Hanley

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island

For all its electoral shortcomings, the rise of an alternative leftwing party may signal a realignment in British politics

In recent years, the north of England has become a blank slate for whichever stereotypes the London-based media wants to foist on it. Whether the topic of debate is the “red wall” or “left behind” voters, there is usually an assumption that northerners are socially conservative (patriotic, Brexit-y, even a bit racist). “Northern safari” media features, in which journalists parachute into former mining villages to gather vox-pops from disgruntled, often elderly voters, have tended to back up the point.

Now, a new political movement, the Northern Independence party (NIP), has started to make the case that the north can and should be a place of radical potential rather than a reactionary backwater.

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island

The party needs vitality and verve to make a breakthrough – not the dated, ‘sensible Labour’ approach that Starmer favours

Before the resumption of its civil war yesterday, the Labour party, largely thanks to the heroics of Andy Burnham, was actually having a pretty good month where leadership is concerned.

The Greater Manchester mayor’s barnstorming press conferences in October were, on the surface, about opposing tier 3 restrictions for his city and securing a decent financial support package from a grudging Tory government. But the response to Burnham’s soapbox moment quickly developed into something bigger.

The prevalence of coronavirus in large urban areas plays into the hands of those prosecuting a rightwing culture war

It’s both true and a little obvious to say that coronavirus knows no borders. But it’s important to point out that neither is it much concerned with established cliches about the internal geography of the UK. There has been no clearcut “north-south divide” in the spread of the pandemic throughout England, for example. Indeed, if anything, the narrative of recent months has emphasised that traditional notions about England’s social and political makeup are becoming increasingly irrelevant and outdated.

Our cultural landscape is changing. In place of a 20th-century discourse that viewed England as a land of mega-regions – like north and south – and saw a great cultural faultline between industrial and non-industrial areas, coronavirus is combining with political developments to highlight a new and very different reality. In simple terms, the great divide in English life is now between the cities and everywhere else.

The Tories under Johnson may have hit on a magic formula with room for yet more success

Related: Can Labour rebuild its red wall without losing its cities? | Andy Beckett

Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island