Oasis fans are looking back in anger at their experience trying to purchase tickets for the act’s highly anticipated reunion tour, and the U.K. government is preparing to take action.

The U.K. government has vowed to investigate live event companies’ use of “dynamic pricing” after concertgoers accused Beverly Hills-based Ticketmaster of gouging them to see the recently revived band perform.

In a statement provided Tuesday to The Times, U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy promised to “include issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivise it” in parliament’s forthcoming consultation on consumer protections for ticket resales.

“After the incredible news of Oasis’ return, it’s depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans from having a chance of enjoying their favourite band live,” Nandy said in her statement.

Last month, feuding brothers and musicians Noel and Liam Gallagher announced that they would be reuniting as Oasis after 15 years apart. The “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” hitmakers are set to play 17 shows next summer at a variety of venues spanning Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin.

When tickets for the British rock band’s comeback tour went on sale over the weekend, customers complained on social media about waiting in Ticketmaster’s crowded online queue for hours — only to be denied entry or encounter unreasonably high prices.

Some fans accused the Live Nation-owned company of actively hiking ticket prices during the sale based on consumer demand. X users posted screenshots of their struggles and alleged that standing ticket prices increased from £149 (about $195) to £355 (about $465) before the events sold out.

Representatives for Ticketmaster and Live Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Some screenshots of the Ticketmaster website shared on social media depict an infobox justifying the controversial cost of a so-called “In Demand Standing Ticket.”

“The Event Organiser has priced these tickets according to their market value,” the description reads, noting that “availability and pricing are subject to change.”

A parliamentary consultation on secondary ticketing and dynamic pricing in the live events business is slated to commence this fall. The consultation will consider a range of approaches to regulating ticket prices, including limiting the price of resold tickets to a standardized percentage of the original cost or restricting the amount of tickets that a single party can resell.

In the U.S., Live Nation and Ticketmaster are now under escalating antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department earlier this year sued the company with the goal of breaking up the dominant concert promoter and ticket seller, accusing the combined firm of monopolistic practices.

President Biden joked he was once “disappointed” to find out his great-grandfather was not part of a violent group that killed bigoted mine foremen.

The president spoke about his ancestor, Edward Francis Blewitt, during a rally in support of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh on Monday.

“I remember when my great-grandfather was only the second Catholic elected statewide in the state Senate here in Pennsylvania,” Biden told the audience. “And I remember they talked about – when they’d run against him in 1906 – they said, ‘Guess what? He’s a Molly Maguire.’”

BIDEN TEAMS UP WITH HARRIS ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL FOR 1ST TIME SINCE DROPPING RE-ELECTION BID AGAINST TRUMP

“A lot of the English owned the coal mines and what they did was they really beat the hell out of the mostly Catholic population in the mines. Not a joke,” Biden continued. “But there was a group they called the Molly Maguires. And Molly Maguires, if they found out the foreman was taking advantage of an individual, they would literally kill him. Not a joke. And they would bring his body up and put him on the doorstep of his family.”

Harris nodded along as the president told the story of his maternal ancestor, an anecdote he previously used while on the campaign trial with former President Barack Obama.

“Kind of crude, but I gotta admit they accused my great-grandfather of being a Molly Maguire – he wasn’t, but we were so damn disappointed,” Biden told the audience before assuring them, “That was a joke. That was a joke.”

MARGIN OF ERROR RACE BETWEEN HARRIS AND TRUMP AS 2024 ELECTION ENTERS FINAL STRETCH

President Biden speaks during a campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at IBEW Local Union #5 in Pittsburgh. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The Library of the Pennsylvania Senate confirms that Blewitt was the second Catholic person elected to the state assembly in 1907; he followed William McSherry, who served from 1813-1817.

Biden’s appearance in Pittsburgh marks a return from approximately a week of low profile vacationing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. 

That vacation immediately followed an entire separate six-day getaway to Democratic Party donor Joe Kiani’s California ranch estate. Biden cleared his work schedule ahead of the multi-week holiday.

Flanked by labor union leaders, Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to union workers during a campaign event at Northwestern High School in Detroit. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Biden’s disastrous performance against former President Donald Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume on existing concerns from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. 

It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race, which he did on July 21 before almost immediately endorsing Harris.

Most of the latest national surveys show Harris with a slight single-digit edge over Trump, but the presidential election is not a national popular vote contest. It is a battle for the individual states and their electoral votes.

Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

I became a one-way pen pal for democracy in 2018, writing letters and postcards to strangers in the lead-up to that year’s midterm elections.

I had spent the months before marching for women, science, immigrants and Muslims. Then I decided marching wasn’t enough. I needed to engage individual Americans about electing politicians who shared my values.

So that September, I attended a grassroots event to learn about volunteer voter outreach hosted by a Los Angeles group called Civic Sundays. We could choose to learn how to knock on doors, call and text prospective voters or write postcards to engage people.

I’d never heard of writing postcards to strangers as a way to encourage them to vote. But I was charmed by the thought of an analog means of saving democracy. Civic Sundays and other organizations, many of which sprang to life following the 2016 presidential election, supply volunteers with lists of names and addresses of registered voters. The writers supply penmanship, stamps and sometimes the postcards themselves.

I joined a large table of people with seemingly professional-level glitter and Magic Marker skills. While their postcards looked like illuminated manuscripts, I painstakingly struggled to make mine legible. A fourth-grade teacher once told me my writing resembled a hostage taker’s ransom note, but fortunately, I didn’t have to take a handwriting test to get a seat at the postcard table (some organizations do actually require one).

I found the work rather wholesome, but I wasn’t sold on the idea of trying to engage a population that couldn’t be bothered to vote.

The more postcards I wrote, the more I started to wonder: Who were these infrequent voters? Why weren’t they doing their civic duty? If I looked their address up on Google Maps, what would I see? Unmown lawns? Gated mansions?

I became racked by a desire to know who exactly were these shirkers of civic responsibility. But we’d been given clear instructions: Do not personally engage the recipients of your missives. Instead, we followed a clear and concise script of just a few sentences.

I participated in another postcard-writing campaign for the 2020 presidential election. This time, I specifically requested names from a swing state, Michigan. As I wrote to these strangers, I became increasingly frustrated, imagining them enjoying their weekends without a scintilla of voting guilt while I agonized over whether they might be offended by a postage stamp with a cat on it.

When I mentioned these frustrations to a cynical friend, he told me to read the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s famous 1966 “Letter to a Young Activist.” I should have been suspicious, seeing as my friend would be the last person to write a postcard to a stranger. Sure enough, Merton’s words did not reassure me about the fate of my postcards. “[D]o not depend on the hope of results,” he wrote. “When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”

After reading Merton’s letter, I spent some months not writing the scofflaw voters of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona or anywhere else.

But when the 2024 election campaign started up, with the future of the country once again on the ballot, I asked for another postcard list.

This time one of the choices was to write to people in my own state, California. This felt more like writing a neighbor than someone far away and utterly unknown. Once I had my list and started reading the names and addresses, I realized some of my postcards would be going to people who lived near the town where I work.

And then it happened. I recognized a name. The Gen Zer who needed a nudge to vote was one of my thoughtful, capable students.

I finally had an answer about the people I was writing to. They were just like the rest of us: unmarried singles and matriarchs of big families, people who drive electric cars and people who drive big trucks, charming people and irritating people and neighbors who played their music too loud but were sweet with their kids. People so busy leading their lives they sometimes forgot or opted not to vote.

Recognizing just one name made me certain I had to keep penning these epistles of democracy, to keep reminding others, even if they didn’t listen or want to hear it, that their vote mattered. With new insight into Merton’s famous missive, I had to put my trust in, as he put it, “the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

Melissa Wall is a professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge who studies citizen participation in the news. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.