Britain should be thanking Thatcher for the Oasis reunion

Telegraph

6 hours ago

With the much-anticipated Live '25 reunion tour by a newly-peaceful Oasis spectacularly kicking off at Cardiff's Principality Stadium last weekend, there is an unlikely heroine linked to the Mancunians' meteoric success, the birth of Britpop and the 90s Cool Britannia movement which exploded in its wake.
Labour's Tony Blair may have basked in the morning glory of Cool Britannia, hailing its protagonists in Downing Street in 1997 and riding the wave of a creative tsunami which saw music, art, fashion, film, the media, politics and football coalesce in an unimaginable way.
Yet there is an improbable political figure who some might say deserves acclaim for the popular culture juggernaut which raced through Britain almost exactly 30 years ago. Step forward Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
Thatcher and the Gallagher brothers may seem implausible bedfellows and Lady T may have exited her stage in 2013, but without one of her government's 1980's policies in particular, Britpop – and thus this momentous Oasis Live '25 tour – may have never birthed.
The reunion is projected to gross £400m and takes Liam and Noel across Britain, to the Americas, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Working for The Sun in the 1990s and becoming editor of its show business column, Bizarre, I had a ringside seat for the group's – and the accompanying movement's – explosion onto the front pages. I witnessed the band's bombastic live shows from 1994 in London and via Tokyo, California, Oslo, Milan, Majorca and Exeter, but peaking at Manchester's Maine Road and Knebworth in 1996, around the time of The Sun's highest ever daily full-price sale of 4.78m, in March of that glorious year.
Musical, media and technological landscapes have fractured so significantly over the past decades that I cannot envisage any British group hereafter emerging with such impact and cultural significance.
But, according to leading figures from that era, the seeds for the Gallaghers' rise and resurrection may have been sown back in 1983, when Thatcher launched the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. The brainchild of her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, its aim was to stimulate entrepreneurship, with the jobless rate standing north of 11 per cent.
Recipients were provided with £40-a-week for up to a year and claimants needed to prove £1,000 in savings and to have been unemployed for at least eight weeks. The scheme supported 103,000 people annually at its peak, but received criticism from those who felt it was simply shielding true jobless figures. It is, however, credited with helping 325,000 people to become self-employed.
But an unanticipated side effect of the policy was its stimulation of the creative sector with many key Cool Britannia figures taking advantage.
One man the PM helped was somebody firmly on the other side of the political divide – Creation Records' Alan McGee, the man who discovered Oasis in 1993. He admits: 'Say what you like about Thatcher, may she rot in hell, but her enterprise allowance helped me and a lot of others who probably wouldn't want to put their hand up to it. It's what funded most people at Creation Records to begin with.'
Young British Artist Tracey Emin, synonymous with Cool Britannia, thinks Thatcher should be credited for her role in the creative industries – and the artist's own career, insisting: 'How did I get here today? The Enterprise Allowance: thank you Margaret Thatcher. It was a really difficult time, but whatever Margaret Thatcher was or wasn't, she obviously did some things right. It was f---ing brilliant. You set up your own business and got a guaranteed income for a year. Life on the enterprise allowance was so much better than life on the dole. The majority of us were really grateful for every little bit we were given from the government.'
Other Thatcher beneficiaries include Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, back at Number One in the album charts last month, Portishead, Chris Donald, the founder of Viz magazine, Julian Dunkerton of fashion label Superdry, and Turner Prize-winning artists Jeremy Deller and Rachel Whiteread, its first-ever female recipient. Another was Keith Jeffrey, who used the funds to establish Newcastle's legendary venue The Riverside where Kurt Cobain's Nirvana played their first ever non-US gig in October 1989. So, Thatcher brought grunge to Britain, too.
Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder is adamant that Britpop and his role in the Madchester scene, which predated and inspired it, would not have happened without Maggie's Magic Money Tree, admitting: 'We probably wouldn't even be in a band if it wasn't for her, she started us up with the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. So when we was on it, it was guys setting up their shoe-selling business or people going into selling flowers and we was setting up a band. Because there was no jobs around at the time, you either went into crime or into making music.' When asked whether Thatcher saved him from jail, Shaun answered: 'I guess so.'
Tory stalwart Lord David Willetts believes Thatcher would have been proud of her creative legacy: 'She liked the idea of get-up-and-go, encouraging entrepreneurialism. The benefits bill was surging so much that you could justify relatively modest schemes like this. I'm sure that's how it was sold to her. It wouldn't have been her taste in music, but she was a fan of anything that made Britain prominent. I'm sure she'd have found their politics juvenile, but as long as they didn't end up back on benefits, that was fine.'
And Thatcher's successor John Major concurred: 'Success is economically good for our country. Ian McKellen's skills as an actor or Tracey Emin's as an artist, and so on. It's not only the great captains of industry or the politicians, or the big companies that build our national success. It's also the aggregate importance of individual effort that adds to the diversity, the culture of our country, and this our national economic well-being.'
And the Oasis dates will certainly benefit a struggling UK economy with experts estimating they will generate £940 million in fan spending. According to research from Novuna Personal Finance, almost 1.4 million fans will spend an average of £682.80 per person on tickets, travel, food, drink, accommodation, and shopping. Most is expected to stay within local communities, with 57.9 per cent of the total spend – equivalent to £544.9 million – projected to flow directly into the economies of the four host cities – Cardiff, Manchester, London and Edinburgh.
Fellow Mancunian Morrissey of The Smiths, an Oasis hero and influence, once sang about his dream of seeing Thatcher on a guillotine. But, according to the cast of Cool Britannia, the controversial leader helped fashion a musical and artistic legacy which will live forever and continues to stimulate the UK economy today.