I've been doing a 1990s deep-dive for a chapter of my book recently and ended up watching the whole second series of This Life. This Life, if you don’t know, was a cult ‘90s BBC drama about a group of twenty-somethings and the various personal and professional scrapes they get themselves into in the mid to late period of the decade, and for people of a certain age it’s a cultural touchstone. Warren and his therapy. Sexy, self-confident Anna, swilling wine, chain smoking and seducing men. Handsome bisexual motorbike messenger Ferdy, his Glaswegian lover Lenny and their hot sex in the shower. Loathsome Miles swaggering round his law chambers full of posh entitlement. Lots of these things had never been portrayed quite like this before on prime time TV and it was exciting stuff. The BBC put it on iPlayer in lockdown in 2020 and I tried to rewatch it then but couldn’t face it: sitting there in my solitary, socially distanced world where I hadn’t been touched for several months all that boozing and fun and casual sex was unbearable. When it was first aired in 1997, though, that second series in particular made a deep impression on me. I was 17 and the whole thing was just so incredibly aspirational. This is what, with any luck, I had before me.
The chapter I'm working on, for my book about single women and cooking, is about coming of age as a cook in the 1990s when food culture was changing in various ways. (Great piece by Holly Pester on the class politics of 1990s snack food, in particular of dips, in Vittles today) I initially started my This Life re-watch as part of a search for cultural representations of single women in the decade. Anna is, of course, an absolutely legendary example, but there wasn’t much about her eating habits – we mainly see her smoking and drinking. Instead there’s Egg, swept up in the New Laddish idea of cooking being ‘the new rock n roll’ (this was actually pre-Jamie) and trying to turn the caff where he works into a funky modern bistro-style restaurant. There’s also a lot of going to the pub, a few communal house dinners, a lot of eating out and of workplace drama.
I talked about it with a friend the other day, who also loved it when she was younger: ‘Twenty somethings back then were so grown up!’ I said. She replied, maybe sensing me heading towards some lazy Gen Z-bashing, ‘You mean, they were allowed to be grown up.’ I've thought about that a lot since that conversation and she’s totally right. Even though I'm now fifteen or twenty years older than a lot of those characters were back then, they still seem grown up to me. This is probably partly to do with the formative time I first encountered them in but there’s also a way of life those characters had that is more grown up than a lot of what I have ever had access to. I hate ‘90s nostalgia but this was a time when some things were better: there was a bit more money around after the end of the recession, if you were a young professional in London you could live in a nice shared house in zone 1, you could afford to go for a few pints after work several times a week even on a bike messenger’s wage and at this point, university education would still have been free: Miles, Anna, Egg and Warren would not have had to pay for their law degrees.
All this intersected with a load of thoughts I've been having lately about the personal and political circumstances of my life, the lives of those around me and the state of the wider world. These are informed variously by: efforts to finally at the age of 44 somehow achieve housing security; the run-up to last week’s general election; the shitshow of Starmer’s Labour Party purge; despair and horror at the state of the wider world, including the atrocities in Gaza, the rise of far right and anti-migrant politics, the climate catastrophe and the fact that few mainstream politicians in this country seem moved to take any action about these situations and in many instances are making them worse. A few days after that conversation with my friend I read an article by William Davies in the LRB, about so-called ‘Generation Anxiety’, that is young people in their twenties who face insecure employment and housing prospects and a life of debt if they choose to go to university, who are still feeling the impact of a global pandemic, who feel terrified in the face of the environmental crisis and are increasingly being diagnosed with various forms of anxiety disorder. I thought then about that class of politicians and pundits who sneer at these young people, call them snowflakes, tell them to pull themselves together. Many of them sneered at those of us who got involved in the Corbyn project and then blamed us for the 2019 election result.
Political defeat is depressing. Anyone who is an activist knows this. A lot of those sneering politicians and pundits are the same people who’ve spent nearly 30 years lecturing those of us on the left who don’t vote Labour telling us to be sensible grown-ups, to hold our noses and vote for them (apart from in 2019 of course), no matter what right wing rhetoric and policies they hurl at us or what cynical, bullying politics they enact within their own party. These are people who can only seem to conceptualise political defeat as involving electoral politics. 2019 was a defeat for the left too but there are many, many kinds of political defeat. When I was involved in the anti-tuition fees movement in the late 1990s shortly after the Blair government introduced them, many of these same pundits, columnists, think tank leaders and politicians sneered at and undermined us: It’s only a thousand pounds! And look at all the other good stuff the Labour government is doing, get some perspective! We replied: Thin end of the wedge, you’ll be transforming the nature of Higher Education if you do this, it won’t stop here. But they didn’t listen, or care. That was the first of my significant political defeats. (Though we were obviously right)
That was my activism in the late 1990s but there was some before that, as I trailed around on the coattails of my older siblings in the final years of Major’s Tory government. Protests against the waves of road building that were taking place, involving squats and encampments and other forms of direct action. (My brother Tom was covering the protests against the M11 Link Road in Claremont Road, Leytonstone, for the local paper and he took me down there in the summer holidays in 1994.) The huge protests mobilised against the Criminal Justice Bill, which I went to with Tom and my sister Hannah. In my head all this is linked with a very particular 1990s kind of political activism - a bit autonomous/ anarchist, very anti car and anti road and it can be seen in the founding of movements like Critical Mass (which recently marked its 30th anniversary, written about by my mate Dan Hancox here)
So the 1990s is obviously a really complicated decade (truism alert) Some commentators were harking back to it last week in the days before the election. Telling us, once again, that we shouldn’t be so self-indulgent and if we wanted to recreate the glories of May 1997 we needed to just get over ourselves and vote for Starmer. Many of these people would have had free university education. After they graduated would have bought properties in inner London in the 1980s and 1990s that will now be worth millions. It is not their place to lecture us anymore (if it ever was) and I find myself wondering if they’ll ever shut up. Yes, there was a ‘landslide’ of sorts last Thursday, but the world has moved on and the turnout, vote share and newly elected Green, independent and (urgh) Reform MPs tell us this. The conditions that enabled the likes of Anna, Egg and Ferdy to swagger around town having a laugh and splashing the cash, revelling in those early, deluded days of Blair and his government, just do not exist anymore.