Alex Niven is lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and editor-at-large at Repeater Books. His first book, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011.
Tony Blair’s New Labour government left the fundamental architecture of Thatcher’s economy in place — and failed to break the cycle of deepening inequality. It’s not just the criminal Iraq War, Blairism failed at every level.
Britpop is often dismissed as an embarrassing, retrograde moment in British culture. But at its best, it hinted at what might have happened if the working class had managed to regain its sense of power and pride after the defeats of the 1980s.
To win power, Corbynism must challenge a creeping conservative presence in England’s former industrial heartlands.
Mark Fisher gave a moribund left the imaginative jolt it needed to wake from the nightmare of neoliberal complacency.