The big Britpop plot: Is the return of Oasis a government psyop?

August 27, 2024: after 15 years of calling each other cunts in public, Oasis announce that they intend to reform. 

July 4, 2025: the Britpop duo (plus co-founder Bonehead) take to the stage together for the first time since they buried the hatchet, at the Cardiff opener of their Live ‘25 Tour. 

July 5, 2025: the UK enters a new era of cultural relevancy – a half-decade that parents will reminisce about, misty-eyed, with their children for years to come. What was so good about it exactly? They can’t really remember, but there were Union Flags.

August 14, 2025: Blur reforms (again) to release a new single the same day as Oasis and ignite the Battle of Britpop Part Two, the 30th Anniversary Special. Damien Hirst throws together some novelty NFTs for the occasion. 

2030: the nation emerges from a half-decade of national mania only to realise that, while we were cheering on mediocre guitar bands and getting bad haircuts, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has outsourced the entire nation’s infrastructure to private contractors, quietly gone to war with half the world, and overseen the widespread flourishing of Victorian-era diseases like scabies and scurvy. The Gallaghers? Oh, they broke up again ages ago. Now they’re back in their mansions, bickering over the internet. Or the metaverse, or whatever.

In truth, we should have seen it coming. Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine warned us about this all the way back in 2013. “Someday it would be interesting to read all the MI5 files on Britpop,” he said at the time, denouncing Cool Britannia as a government conspiracy. “The wool was pulled right over everyone’s eyes there.” 

Conspiracy theories about the British government’s – and specifically New Labour’s – clandestine support of Britpop have, understandably, resurfaced in the wake of Oasis getting back together. Is it really just a coincidence that the Gallagher brothers enjoyed musical supremacy under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then the band all but disappeared for 14 years of Tory rule, only to reappear once Keir Starmer secured office? Can a direct line be drawn between right-leaning Labour leaders and the 90s-lads-turned-middle-aged-dads who will pay a small fortune to relive the “good old days” at a sold-out stadium next year?

Britpop stars’ love for Tony Blair was no secret in the 90s and early 2000s. Members of both Oasis and Blur were invited to 10 Downing Street to shake hands with the man who sent British troops into Iraq, continued the social erosion of the Thatcherite years, and damaged an entire generation’s faith in politics and protest. And that’s not to mention what was going on behind the scenes. Damon Albarn has recalled a “strategic meeting” with Blair and Alastair Campbell before the former won the general election in 1997, saying he was given a “premature insight into the dark mechanics of politics” (he would later disown New Labour altogether, but he’d already invited Blair to “give up politics and join Blur” by that point). Noel Gallagher, meanwhile, has described the former PM as “the last person that made any sense” as recently as 2021.

What did Britpop bands offer Blair, exactly? Well, they made Labour look young, trendy, and in-touch with the country’s cultural scene, laying the blueprint for decades of cringeworthy political endorsements. But – more importantly – they did all of this without levelling any meaningful critique at the party’s increasing conservatism, or stirring things up with a radical vision for the future. Even as war loomed in 2002 and other musicians called for a democratic debate about the UK’s involvement (shoutout George Michael), Noel Gallagher told NME: “I play guitar in a band and we’re really good. Arsed about anything else.”

Ironically, this apolitical slant made Britpop the perfect figurehead for Y2K Labour. Despite appearances, the likes of Oasis were a safe, politically detached, anti-intellectual alternative to the genuinely countercultural bands that came before them (including those the Gallaghers themselves cited as influences, like the Beatles or the Sex Pistols), or their more politically engaged, multicultural contemporaries working in electronic music. No wonder Tony Blair – who stood accused of dumbing down both the arts and politics, echoed today in critiques of Keir Starmer – was such a “fan”. As the ‘occult history’ podcast Ghost Stories For the End of the World puts it: “[Britpop was] what people were sold in lieu of an authentic counterculture.”

Back in 2014, Mark Fisher (AKA K-punk) also suggested that “Blair’s Britpop flirtations” marked dark days for left-wing politics, which has repeatedly failed to harness the energy of real countercultural movements. In a blog post, newly-resurfaced by Repeater Books, he wrote: “By the time that explicit attempts were made to link the parliamentary left and rock/pop – in the earnest hamfistedness of Red Wedge – it was already too late. Blair’s Britpop flirtations, meanwhile, were like a double death, (the end of) history laughing at us: the corpse of white lad rock summoned to serenade socialism succumbing to capitalist realism.”

Is all of this really enough to say that New Labour secretly pushed the Britpop agenda for its own benefit, the same way Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock were propped up by the CIA – a “well-documented fact” – in the 1950s? Or that Keir Starmer had a hand in Oasis’ resurrection in 2024, to serenade us as we succumb to whatever grim regime is next on the horizon? How did “Wonderwall” infiltrate the Sir Lloyd Stage at this year’s Carnival – was it planted there by MI5? It’s all a bit unclear. Like most conspiracy theories, there could be a much simpler answer than a network of deep-state scheming. Oasis might just have been swayed by the forces of their time: capitalism, acting less like a champagne supernova than a black hole, sucking up everything in its path.

Either way, we can safely expect that Keir Starmer’s government will try to leverage the new reunion – and the weird “anti-woke” energy and national pride that’s rippled out across the British Isles – to their own ends. Expect to hear a lot of Oasis in the coming year, as Labour attempt to drown out their own dire omens: “Things will get worse.”