Blair's Babes

'Spice Up Your Life' as manifesto for an 'ethical foreign policy'

In the latter half of 1997, the sheen was beginning to come off the New Labour project. High hopes for social justice and an ethical foreign policy were beginning to seem hollow promises, as the subject of tuition fees was broached, and sales of military equipment (for training purposes) to Indonesia continued unabated. As Andrew Rawnsley points out(1), it was the long, hot summer of 1997 in which Labour backnechers began to become uneasy about exactly what their government was planning to do.

Enter the Spice Girls(2).

Whilst the Girl Power has been discussed at length as a domestic phenomenon, the fact that the opening number of the album released a full five months after Labour's victory has, as yet, gone neglected. If we take nothing else away from the song 'Spice Up Your Life', let us remember it always as the moment in which Robin Cook's foreign policy was explained to us all.

The song begins in true Mandelsonian style, rejecting the outmoded stylings of the traditional political paradigm(3).

"Slam it to the left if you're having a good time."

A clear reference here to the elation felt by much of liberal Britain at Tony Blair's victory on May 1st. However, the Spice Girls qua Spice Girls had never felt bound by dogma, and it cannot have been coincidence that, in 1996, both Anthony Charles Lynton Blair and Geraldine Estelle Halliwell had expressed admiration for Margaret Thatcher. The girls go on to sing:

"Shake it to the right if you know that you feel fine."

Thus, whilst they berate the smugness and self-satisfaction of the Conservative party which had led to their defeat, they also offer a new inclusiveness. Wealth and privilege are 'fine', perhaps a reaction to the success of the girls' first albumm (and what a change from the simple socialistic ideals of wanting to "zig-a-zig-ah!").

Whilst hailed by many as 'post-feminist', the line:

"Chicas at the front - Hi! See ya! Hold tight!"

is a clear statement of intent, and should redraw the map of late twentieth-century sexual politics.

Having, in the first verse, established themselves as the face of the new populism, as ambassadors for the consensus which, we were told, was the new political state of the country, the song goes on to put its case of an ethical, yet interventionist, foreign policy.

It must be noted that in the middle eight, when the Spice Girls list the dances of the world, from lambada through the foxtrot, particular prominence is given to the dances of Central, Latin and South America, at a time when their economies were of particular concern to the World Bank, and the IMF(4). Clearly, here, they make a case for an international community, and one in which the developing world takes on a central role.

Nor are they content to leave the world to Chicago-school economists, those particularly in favour at the IMF. Their imprecation to "Shake shake shake shake haka", is a blistering indictment of the laissez-faire monetarism which formed the basis of World Bank loans.

The role of the UN in this project is debatable, but the challenge to the Foreign Office was clear. Was their role not to 'spice up' lives, both domestically and abroad? Could Robin Cook regain some of the momentum he had lost over that balmy summer, in a miasma of arms sales to dictatorial regimes, and the continual stutterings of the Owen Plan for peace in the Balkans, by adopting this vibrant, internationalist interventionism? Our invasion of Kosovo with NATO's assistance in 1999, shows that the lesson was heeded.

And still that rallying cry was yet to come. The Spice Girls had saved their clarion call for the establishement of a permanent world preacekeeping force for the verse proper.

The "colours of the world", "every boy and every girl", and the whole "people of the world" were invited to 'spice up their lives', whether through direct action, or simply through tacit support of trans-national institutions was left deliberately ambiguous. This inclusive, all-encompassing message has been lost in today's power politics, but was a striking and bold statement in 1997.

Perhaps the only evidence that such a call was ever made comes in the form of a book. George Monbiot's "The Age of Consent" finally collates all of the disparate strands of "Spice Up Your Life" and creates a new and powerful paradigm with them. A paradigm for which we should all thank the Spice Girls.

(1) Rawnsley, Servants of the People, 2001
(2) Spice Girls, Spiceworld, 1997
(3) Mandelson, "Rejecting the Outmoded Styling of the Traditional Political Paradigm", New Left Review, May 1994
(4) Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation and its Discontents, 2003
(5) Monbiot, The Age of Consent, 2003