Entangled Alliances

In 1996, Stryker McGuire launched the age of “Cool Britannia” with an ode to the city’s burgeoning chic in Newsweek magazine:

Right now, London is a hip compromise between the nonstop newness of Los Angeles and the aspic-pre-served beauty of Paris, sharpened to a New York edge. In short, this is the coolest city on the planet.

photo credit: *spud*

Thirteen years later, Stryker is back with an altogether more despondent vision.  Looking back over the Blair-Brown era, he casts back to the millennial optimism of the 1997 Labour victory and London’s world leadership in fashion, the arts and architecture.  The contrast, and it’s a stark one, is with a modern-day London heading into deep recession – the symbols of its former glory now insistent reminders of its current predicament:

Glitzy restaurants and cutting-edge fashion that used to be signs of welcome creativity reek of excess in a time of belt-tightening. Heavily mortgaged homes that looked like brilliant retirement nest eggs when property prices were soaring year after year now just look like basket cases. Construction sites and street works that once raised expectations of things to come now seem like major inconveniences. 

Interestingly, McGuire’s comparisons are not just historical, but allude to a Britain in decline while other countries rise from the ashes of their own recent past and, as a corollary, to a Prime Minister engaging in “Jeeves” diplomacy, evidently desperate to bask in the Obamian glow for a chance of electoral salvation.  This, we understand, in contrast to the optimistic verve of the Clinton-Blair “special relationship” (of which we are reminded by this weekend’s Progressive Governance Conference, a Clinton-Blair brainchild of 1999, and the announcement of a new Peter Morgan film).  Today, no more British bridge between the indispensable American nation and an idealistic integrationist Europe, but a country trapped in outdated alliance frameworks while Europe looks inward and America looks East (as the positioning before this week’s G20 summit has shown).

All in all, this is a fascinating article which is worth reading in full.  Its vision of British malaise is not quite as downbeat as The Economist’s notion of Reykjavik-on-Thames, but it does, I think, capture a pessimistic national spirit and the sense of drift not just of an economy, but of culture and a political system to boot.  This tone is manifested in phenomena as diverse as “Olympic regret”, the “summer of rage” and the return to headline dominance of political sleaze – always a sign of political decay.  In many ways, it is redolent of the “crisis of confidence” which Jimmy Carter identified in his ill-advised 1979 malaise speech (ill-advised, because it was a gift for Reagan to trumpet the indomitable American spirit – Britons, I suspect, are more accustomed to self-doubt).

If there’s cause for optimism, though, it can be found in McGuire’s original 1996 piece.  Marvelling at London’s reinvention and deliberately cautioning Londoners against hubris, he reminds readers of the city’s peculiar flux and of its rises and falls that, like inexorable market cycles, never cease to eschew the possibility of relaunch just around the corner:

The fun won’t last, of course. London swings violently between booms and busts. It was stuffy in the 1950s, when you couldn’t find a decent meal in the place; it was “swinging” in the 1960s, when pop music and Carnaby Street injected a dose of classless style. It was almost destroyed by grandiose redevelopment schemes in the early 1970s, then rescued again by the entrepreneurial energy of punk. In the early 1990s the city was mired in a deep recession. Now it’s back. Nobody planned this; nobody ever has.