Andy Burnham and Britain’s Indie Establishment

Andy Burnham’s rise shows what happens when the alternative becomes the mainstream. The new prime minister flaunts the indie establishment’s music, football and fashion, while pledging the alternative and providing the mainstream.

A gold disc in Number 10 North

“Oh look at that, a gold disc of ‘The Queen is Dead’,” said Andy Burnham, offering a tour of his new Number 10 North office, pointing to a framed copy of the album by the Smiths, a Mancunian band. “I need to return that to Johnny Marr actually,” he said, namechecking the record’s guitarist.

Mr Burnham’s ascent to power has been accompanied by cheers from the music scene which the new prime minister so loves. Guy Garvey, the singer of Elbow and a dj on 6 Music, the BBC’s indie music station, welcomed Mr Burnham’s rise: “Andy isn’t an ordinary man.” The Courteeners, another Manchester band, cheered him. Oasis, Manchester’s most famous export beyond its football clubs, allowed him to play “Some Might Say” in his campaign videos.

An indie establishment from the 1980s

What feels like a shift is nothing of the sort. An indie establishment has long held sway among British politicians who came of age in the 1980s, when the Smiths and co were in their pomp. Sir Keir Starmer loved the band, along with Orange Juice, another jangly indie group.

When David Cameron appeared on “Desert Island Discs”, where the British establishment pick their favourite songs, he chose tunes by the Smiths and Radiohead. Samantha Cameron, Lord Cameron’s wife, was such a fan of 6 Music that Downing Street press officers monitored the station’s news snippets to hear what she might mention to her husband over dinner.

Centrist Dad and the 6 Music elite

Pop into a pub in north London and you might hear Centrist Dad, an indie tribute act featuring Robert Peston, a prominent television journalist, on vocals and Ed Balls, a former Labour cabinet minister, on the drums. In the audience expect to see George Osborne, a former chancellor, jumping about with Yvette Cooper, the health secretary and Mr Balls’s wife, while the face of the financial crisis wails “Mr Brightside”.

To understand power in Britain put down the Times and switch on 6 Music.

Manchester’s different way that was not different

Mr Burnham has the same tastes — whether it comes to music, football or fashion — as his predecessors. Yet he uses them to show how different he is. Pledging the alternative while actually providing the mainstream has long been Mr Burnham’s strategy.

Below the gold record from the Smiths is a leaving gift from his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, which is an armchair emblazoned “We do things differently here.” It is an apocryphal quote from Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records, which looked after bands such as New Order. Manchester’s economic outcome is different: in a country with sluggish productivity growth, the city is a rare bright spot.

Except Manchester built its renaissance on a very British model: sell services — law, media, advertising — from warehouses where they used to make things. Cottonopolis has become pdfopolis. It has the same economic strategy as every other post-industrial city. It simply succeeded. Remember another manchesterism about “Manchesterism”, wrongly attributed to Wilson: “When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend.”

Fashion and football as elite codes

So it is in music, so it is in economics, so it is in fashion. Mr Burnham’s casual fashion choices are picked over, even though carefully underdressed men have long run Britain. He prefers a £700 ($930) bomber jacket by an independent Manchester label to a suit wherever possible.

After all, suits are verboten in Britain’s most successful industries, whether AI labs or creative studios. In politics, too, they are dying out. Sir Keir wore a £500 hooded Sandro jacket, yet this choice became big news only when it emerged his wardrobe had been paid for by a Labour donor.

Liking football has long been almost mandatory within this elite. Sir Keir is a season-ticket holder for Arsenal; Lord Cameron a less-than-avid Villa fan. Yet Mr Burnham is not like the other boys. In 1997 he wrote for When Saturday Comes, a modish football magazine aimed at fans with English Literature degrees. Football endured intellectualisation in this period, with academics writing essays about the meaning of Paul Gascoigne (“Wazza mazza wiv Gazza?”), dragging the sport from low-status hobby into an elite pursuit, where it remains today.

In and against the establishment

Appearing anti-establishment while being steeped in its ways is the quickest path to power. In this way, Mr Burnham is aping a strategy used most effectively by Nigel Farage. Like most underground acts, his rebellion against Europe began by playing to tiny crowds in pub back rooms. What started as niche became mainstream, establishment opinion.

This was no trouble for Reform UK’s leader, who has always fitted into the establishment, no matter how much he protests, bouncing from a private school into the City. Mr Farage, like Mr Burnham, is both in and against the establishment, criticising it while still a creature of it.

Indie musicians once fought the establishment, steering clear of major record labels. Their popularity defeated them. When the alternative became the mainstream, small labels were bought out; indie music became little more than the soundtrack of an establishment reliving its youth. The Smiths issued a fatwa against Lord Cameron liking them. Now, in Mr Burnham’s Britain, they welcome the prime minister’s attention, their record on the wall of the country’s new centre of power.

Can frozen culture produce political change?

In power, Britain’s latest prime minister promises the biggest political shift in 40 years (or since “The Queen is Dead” came out). Being the clearest product of the culture of that era is a problem if that is the goal.

Mark Fisher, a leftie writer, long complained that culture was stuck, leaving 21st-century Britain with “20th-century culture on high-definition screens”. In Mr Burnham’s telling, politics has been stuck, too. If politics is downstream of culture then when culture freezes, politics is also frozen. But when a politician is so shaped by that same culture, what can truly change?■

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