How pop music built liberal Britain | John Harris | Opinion | The … – The Guardian

British Conservatism with both a big and small c is once again feeling the pangs of crisis. Tory optimists might be hanging on to the fact that their party has just scored its highest vote share since 1983; as Brexit grinds uncertainly on, Britain remains in the grip of an avowedly rightwing vision. But the last time a Tory government was elected with a convincing majority was 1987. The UKs big cities seem more impervious to Conservative politics than ever. The fact that the Tories did so badly among people under the age of 45 55% of whom backed Labour, while only 29% voted Conservative underlines the sense of slowly gathering twilight.

What has happened? Conventional political commentary quite rightly points to the aftershocks of the EU referendum, and younger remain voters being shocked into action. But beneath that immediate development are much deeper factors, bound up with 50 years of cultural change, and millions of peoples embrace of the permissive, live-and-let-live set of values highlighted by this weeks publication of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey.

Moreover, in what the survey said about peoples views of the welfare state and public spending, there was a sense of something equally important: a fuzzy collectivism that stops well short of any kind of hardened socialism, but that defines a whole swath of the country that has not soaked up Thatcherism and its legacy to anything like the extent that the Tories would have liked.

On the face of it, it should not be beyond the wit of modern Conservatives to embrace those shifts. But ingrained Tory instincts seem to always get in the way: the overriding tendency of the partys individualism to turn cruel and cold; its attachment to moralism and the manipulation of base prejudice; and, in the case of Theresa May, a fusty, back-to-the-1950s spirit that arguably sealed her electoral fate (and is now symbolised by the governments dependence on the reactionary DUP).

Meanwhile, despite the support for the Tories politics from the Mail and the Sun, something much more powerful seems to be driving Britain somewhere else: the onward march of post-Elvis pop culture, and the way it now sits at the heart of a majority of peoples lives, along with a set of values that Conservatism still seems unable to convincingly accommodate.

Clearly, the country we live in is no idyll. Inequality is rampant; racism and bigotry have hardly gone away; there is a coarseness and impatience at the heart of everyday living that was not there 30 years ago. The country that voted for Brexit is hardly at ease with itself. But at the same time, when I think back to my early upbringing in the 1970s when the second world war was still a conversational commonplace, and my grandparents hung on to an essentially Victorian view of the world and compare Britain then and now, the sense of a quiet revolution seems pretty much inarguable.

Again, this is less about politics than values. British people are more liberal on such issues as same-sex relationships and abortion than they have ever been. At the last count, one in 10 people in couples in England and Wales were in what the official statistics call an inter-ethnic relationship. Cannabis smoke regularly wafts around our town and city centres; Glastonbury is as much a part of the national calendar as Wimbledon or the Grand National. And throughout our waking hours, there is one constant above all others: what the dictionary still calls pop music, probably the most potent means of communication human beings have ever come up with, now the lingua franca of all but the oldest generations, defined by a tangle of non-conservative ideas, and right at the centre of our everyday experience.

Cynics might point to the times when pop culture has seemed anything but progressive, from the time when Britpop spawned the oafishness of lad culture, back through the flimsy materialism that ran through the 1980s (watch any Duran Duran video for the proof), to the thuggish, nasty turn quickly taken by punk rock. But by far the strongest philosophical thread in pop culture has been there for around six decades, and steadily moved from the countercultural fringe to the very heart of national life. It is internationalist, open, permissive, implicitly anti-racist and, as evidenced by the modern festival crowd, as much communal as individualist.

By way of proof of all this, after years of people proclaiming the death of ideology, pop still steers well away from the political right. Aside from Gary Barlow of Take That, I cannot think of a single high-profile modern musician who has officially endorsed the Tories, nor of any moment in the past 10 years when a Tory politician appearing at Glastonbury would have been greeted with anything other than boos.

Clearly, attitudinal shifts do not happen by accident. Our culture has long privileged musicians with a pre-eminent importance, to the point that their views still make headlines. Fifty years ago, the Beatles played a huge and leading role in pulling down the walls of class-based deference. A little later, David Bowies defiance of the conventions of gender and sexuality changed tens of thousands of lives. The arrival after punk of 2 Tone, the genre-cum-movement that made a stand against insurgent racism via the simple idea of black and white musicians updating Jamaican ska, was another huge breakthrough. And so the list goes on: the global sensibilities embodied by Live Aid; more recently, the anthems to confidence and assertiveness that have made Katy Perry the latest embodiment of pop feminism (or, as the Spice Girls used to call it, Girl Power).

Thirty years after it first stirred, we also need to talk about acid house, which began on the fringes in the late 1980s, symbolised a massed upending of that decades individualist attitudes, and then bled out into everyday life. Matthew Collins definitive book on the subject, Altered State, rightly says that acid house was the most vibrant, diverse and long-lasting youth movement that Britain had ever seen, built on deeply felt desires for communal experiences. For all that it also involved the cheap and nasty entrepreneurialism that inevitably came with illegally organised parties and drug dealing, its legacy was pretty obvious: the imperative, simply put, to be nice kind, caring, open, accepting.

Earlier this week, the Daily Telegraph published a letter from Marianna, Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley. She furiously claimed that Jeremy Corbyns appearances at Glastonbury were an utter disgrace, little realising that the festival is the perfect example of the way that ideas that are still anathema to far too many Conservatives have gone from the countercultural margins into the mainstream, and that Corbyns presence made perfect sense.

I first went 27 years ago, when the Pyramid Stage was adorned with a huge CND symbol, the organisers would not let the police in, the BBC was nowhere to be seen, and there was a clear break between the outside world and the festivals licentious wonders. These days, by contrast, one blurs into the other, which highlights the Tories big problem: the fact that even when the tents have been packed up and the comedowns have kicked in, millions of us still live in a reality in which the politics of parochialism, nostalgia and moralism make precious little sense.

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How pop music built liberal Britain | John Harris | Opinion | The ... - The Guardian