Millennium: Why we need to forget the 2000's

How British politics and society is obsessed with a time which cannot return.

Returns to the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s, British politics is constantly stalked by a fear of the past. Spectres of fascism, discrimination, and economic depression are all levied at those who seek to change the economic or cultural status quo. Indeed, there is probably no greater crime in today’s politics than being yesterday’s man or woman. This fixation with the past isn’t new, Marx famously said “the traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. However, in Britain today, we live in a waking nightmare: the failure of the 2000s. Almost all media and politics can be rooted in a desire to return to the land “where falls not hail, or rain or any snow” of Britain at the Millennium. The future for Britain is not post-left or post-liberal but post-utopian.

Podcasts are a modern scourge, a constant companion replacing the knowledge of a book and the thrill of enlightened discussion with worse versions of both. In Britain, by far the most popular political podcast of the 2020s is The Rest Is Politics. This is not filled with insights about the previous 15 years of political action but powered by the exhaust of each host’s apex of prestige in the 2000s. For Alastair Campbell, the 2010s were a fallow period. Brexit allowed him to launder himself into the political consciousness, but he had been an exile before, plagued by the legacy of Iraq. For Campbell’s Sancho Panza, Rory Stewart, the 2010s were a disappointment. With Stewart’s political career stalling and ultimately failing, his life as 19th-century traveller, adventurer, and servant of the Queen in the Orient seems far more alluring. Both men’s chief political message isn’t a policy program but a prayer for the return of those good times before economic crises and “populism.”

There is a control for this podcasting experiment: Political Currency, the substantially poorer relation of TRIP, has all the political experience of those who were in the room for much of the 2010s. Led by Ed Balls and George Osborne, it struggles to garner a tenth of the attention of Campbell and Stewart’s outfit. The sober realities of the OBR cannot compete with the promise that “we can still party like it's 1999.”

Across the political spectrum, from the Liberal Democrats to Reform, the animus of the 2000s reigns. The Lib Dems, like the Chouans who held out in the rural countryside of the west of France against the revolution, still live in the idylls of an Ancien Régime. The manicured countryside settings, home to the rural and retired, are holdouts where the economic, demographic, and societal shocks of the last 15 years haven’t been felt to the same degree. This is partly why their leader Ed Davey’s (no relation) platform consists of anti-politics and juvenile publicity stunts. The Lib Dems are the Lotus Eaters of our day, praying that history leave them be and the girdle around their reality is upheld.

Reform presents a different version of the 2000s. Their entire vibe is 2000’s TV, Reform is the party of the Inbetweeners, the Office, Top Gear, and even Trapped. I really don’t want to talk about race in stark terms but suffice to say the casts of all these programs look very different to those you would see if they were made in Britain now. Nevertheless this romanticism for a time past also weds Reform to the language of that time indeed, their political vocabulary is probably closest to that of an early Blair government. They call for “smart immigration” and an “immigration that is right for Britain” two phrases that would both be at home in a Tony Blair speech. Further still, Nigel Farage is careful to avoid the vocabulary of mass deportations and remigration, which are growing in currency amongst the British right, preferring the passive phrase “population explosion”, a term straight out of The Guardian in 2011. Reform have also kept the Thatcherite impulse of the benefits of a smaller state, which has stalked all British right-of-centre thought since, despite having a coalition in many ways which does not share this desire. Reform promises a return to sensible immigration, but also to a society based upon the assumptions of the millennium, not those of 2025. Reform are difficult to pin down precisely because of the romanticism for the 2000’s and the society of that time which drives their success.

A different time- sourced from the Great British Getty Images page.

Finally, the travails of the governing party, Labour, are in many ways those of a party that has realised the 2000s will not just return with “sensible” government. The adults may be back in the room, but the room has burned down. The plan was simple: stable government, experts, end Tory incompetence, a return to a growing economy and the political aesthetics of Love Actually. Tragically for Starmer and McSweeney, the only Conservative failings they are visibly solving are those on immigration which their own base hates them for ending. Much of the fanfare from the media on the new government’s arrival was predicated on it being a Blairite restoration, but much like the Bourbons, “ they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” this was not a new 1997 but a new 2005.

The millennium for many is still the end goal of all politics. A return to a time when things were better and the political bonds between everyone in society were closer. By mimicking the speeches, vibes and institutions of that time they believe we can return. But all the speeches, grownups in the room, leading the international community and delivery units cannot makeup for a world which is fundamentally different. The old United Kingdom of 1997 will not survive, only by accepting this will a new young Britain thrive.