Page 249 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 12
Looking back at New Times and its critics

Angela McRobbie

THE NEW TIMES PROJECT
Looking back at New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s,
edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (Hall and Jacques, 1989, referred
to henceforward as New Times), it is a volume which can be read as doing
a number of things at once. The voice is tentative for the simple reason that
on the one hand what is being broached is the kind of orthodox left
thinking which settled into a fairly defensive mode as the years of the
Thatcher government passed by, inexorably, it seemed. On the other hand
what is also happening is that a whole new set of social relations are
coming into being, some of which are the direct offshoot of Thatcher,
others which are connected but which are more closely tied to emergent
global patterns of economic life. Then there are also changes which are
happening in culture and in politics which are broadly oppositional, and it
is the task which the New Times work sets itself, to make sense of these
multiple movements by trying to keep hold of them, analytically, all at the
one time. The cautious tone is also underpinned by a hint of hopefulness.
There is an optimism in the phrase New Times. Without this it would be
more of the same old Hard Times which we were all getting used to.
It was hardly euphoric, but it was this upbeat, more positive tone which
caused some critics from the left to see New Times as virtually collusive
with the bubble of economic and consumer confidence of the mid-1980s so
carefully stage-managed by the Conservatives. All the more reason, a few
years on, and once the bubble has well and truly burst, for them to deride
the New Times writers for falling under ‘her’ spell. Granted, with the post-
industrial economy rapidly giving way to a post-employment economy, and
with there being more thrift shops on the high street than designer
boutiques, it may well be that the idea of New Times as marking a moment
of economic and cultural opportunity for the left has somewhat faded.
Marxism Today, the journal which announced ‘New Times’ as a political
concept for the left, and which also printed many of the articles included in
the Hall and Jacques collection, has since disappeared. DEMOS,