More? No Boy Has Ever Asked For More!

Ben Wildsmith 

In my dreams, the Manics would book Cardiff Castle for the same night as the Oasis reunion in the stadium and we could have a more accurate rendering of 90s nostalgia in which style, wit, and artistry provide an alternative to coked-up, leaden conformity.

It isn’t compulsory to ‘roll with it’ however loudly you are ordered.

As the dullest segment of Gen X prepares to unleash its credit cards on £1800 hotel rooms in the hope that attendance will wash away the shame of missing out on the Stone Roses at Spike Island, we should take stock.

None of these bands would stand a chance today. The scene they came up in has been eradicated from our town centres.

A beneficent postwar culture, allowing kids a couple of years on the dole to practice instruments and dream a little has been stamped on so repeatedly that pointing out its similarity to middle-class gap years is considered immoral.

If you want to play in a band, then you should sign up for a college course, hey they have their own venue where you can showcase what you’ve learned to industry professionals at the end of term!

You’ll get a certificate to show your mum and all those transferable skills to offer the recruitment team at Lidl.

Our young people, it’s been reported are the unhappiest in Europe. Is that shameful, or what?

Natural law

We’re increasingly bombarded from the right by assertions of natural law. Gender is rigidly fixed, they tell us, as are the roles of men and women. Culture is irrevocably tied to received history and ethnic identity. Values, values, values….

It’s curious, then, that the ‘common sense’ brigade doesn’t consider the happiness of youngsters to be any of their concern.

Soaring rates of childhood mental illness are blamed on a lack of moral fibre. ‘Snowflake’ children have central heating; therefore, they have no right to be unhappy, let alone seek help if they fail to snap out of it.

You’d think concern for the happiness of our young would be fundamental to our natural state as mammals, let alone humans.

The study cited focused on 15-year-olds. How’s the last 15 years been for you?

Now imagine having known nothing but austerity, decline, and being ordered to stay indoors during what should have been your best summers – the ones when you made your memories.

Tracked, monitored, and funnelled into an economic system that uses homelessness as a deterrent to deviation, their lives are galaxies away from the haphazard bedsit world that provided a soft landing into adulthood 30 years ago.

Demoralising 

And what are we offering them now? After a lifetime of Tory chaos and cruelty, their new Labour Prime Minister devoted his first national address to telling them things will be getting worse.

Remembering that George Osborne’s austerity resulted in the UK being the slowest nation to recover from the 2008 crash, the reimposition of it now is as perverse as it is demoralising.

Before we’re assailed by the usual Starmeroid sensibilists, let’s consider how self-defeating and confused this week’s speech is.

The ‘black hole’ in the public finances was known to all before the election. Labour’s charade in pretending to have discovered it subsequently is a flat-out lie to weasel out of their election promises not to raise taxes nor cut services.

This needs repeating until everyone understands it because all subsequent policy will now be built on fundamental dishonesty.

Moving on, the stated strategy of the government is to grow the economy so that it can improve public services without recourse to borrowing or printing money.

So, if growth is the goal, why on earth would Starmer begin his term by talking down the prospects of the economy so bleakly that only a fool would invest in it?

The demoralised public is being offered no infrastructure projects, no overhaul of devolved funding, no remediation of harmful policies like the two-child cap, and no hint of what the government would like to do with the money it is about to take from us.

The only certainties on offer have been weapons for Ukraine, an end to winter fuel payments, and a rent rise for social tenants.

4D chess

For an incoming government to offer so little in terms of aspiration is remarkable. I suspect that the strategy is a continuation of the ‘4D chess’ that has seen Labour advisors lauded as electoral geniuses around the world since July.

When the budget isn’t as harsh as we all fear, Starmer and Reeves will emerge into the sunny uplands of public opinion having greased through the economic reality of a broken nation once again.

It won’t do. The UK is economically depressed, and it is washing up on the shores of our children’s wellbeing.

No amount of stern finger-wagging and sorrowfully claiming that they have no choice but to run essential services into the ground will exonerate Labour from failing to reverse policies that are driving people into despair.

We see the sums being raked in by shareholders in our utilities, we see the ongoing privatisation of the NHS, we see the dangerously overworked social workers, the clogged courts.

We don’t see a dentist.

For a Labour government to allow all that to deteriorate yet further undermines the reasons for the party’s existence.

The UK needs hope to get through the privations it is already suffering. Starmer’s move to extinguish it in the service of expectation management is a cynical manipulation of the national mood when we are collectively suffering from years of misgovernance.

Stood under a hole in the roof, the Prime Minister is claiming the sensible thing is not to fix it.

Self-imposing a failed Tory fiscal straitjacket will render the UK incapable of responding not only to the needs of its people, but opportunities in the world economy.

There’s nothing grown-up about mouldering away in poverty for decades. It is time for haircuts at the top of society, not further amputations at the bottom.

So, if you’re rooting out your Adidas Sambas in readiness for next summer’s concerts, ask yourself this.

How did we go from ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ to ‘Things Can Only Get Worse’ in the gap between Labour governments?

If your answer is ‘The Tories’ then why aren’t we trying something new?