Memories of a Labour landslide
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
It probably sounds like I am overdoing it, but I think the peculiar circumstances of May 1997 both in my own life and (rather more importantly) in global affairs meant that the Labour landslide of that year was a magical, joyful moment. As much as I look forward in 2024 to Britain having a responsible government and to the Tories being forced to take a good hard look at themselves, we’re in a very different time, whatever the election result.
Imagine a world in which the West has won the Cold War and ended history. 9/11 hasn’t happened, the British economy has been growing at a healthy clip for the past few years, nobody is very bothered about climate change, Russia and China are on a steady march towards democracy, you’re about to graduate with a good degree you didn’t have to pay for into a healthy job market, house prices, whilst steep, are not at a level that makes you question whether you’ll ever own a place, and a centre-left modernising government led by a historically charismatic figure has just been elected by a landslide.
I remember the evening of the 1997 results very clearly. I was in my final term at university but I don’t recall worrying about exams on that particular night. We crowded into a TV room and watched the results come in with bewildered joy. I was awake for Portillo but the most exciting moment was foreign correspondent Martin Bell in his white suit running as an independent in Tatton against Neil Hamilton, the sort of sleazy nationalist Tory who’d have fitted in well in Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit party (he ended up as UKIP leader until earlier this year).
Having grown up in the 1980s the first election I’d followed closely was 1992, and I recall very well going to bed with the exit poll that predicted a hung parliament that would almost certainly make Neil Kinnock prime minister. The morning was a reminder of two important truths: that polls can be wrong and Conservatives tend to win the election. So the sight in 1997 of many famous Tories who had been part of the political landscape in the 80s and 90s losing their seats was genuinely hard to believe.
Some similarities with 1997 are apparent this year: there is clearly an anti-Tory mood across the country. The Tory party seems tired, corrupt and out of ideas. Even its supporters struggle to come up with a good reason to vote for them. We can expect a lot of tactical voting which will mean that for the Lib Dems their national vote share isn’t nearly as important as where people are voting. Nobody is really sure just how badly the Tories will do, but the consensus is they will do something between very badly and terribly badly.
But the similarities with 1997 end there. Keir Starmer will already know the British economy is in a mess. He probably has had less time to focus on the parlous international situation. One of the first things he’ll do as Prime Minister (if the opinion polls are correct) is attend the NATO Summit in Washington DC on 9 July. It’s not any old summit, being the 75th anniversary of the alliance, and as a first major international outing for a new Prime Minister, it’s a perfect opportunity. World leaders will want to meet the new British leader and he will get great photo-ops with the likes of Macron, Zelensky and Biden in his first few days. (It makes you wonder why on earth Rishi Sunak chose this timing for the election but compared to some of his other blunders it’s a minor error.)
This summit was supposed to be a celebration of NATO’s 75 years, but the agenda will be pretty painful. Ukraine is not winning its war and it will, once again, leave the summit feeling its NATO membership aspirations are not being met. Overshadowing the whole event will be the awful prospect of a second Trump presidency, which would spell disaster for the alliance itself. Meanwhile, Europe seems incapable of manufacturing sufficient weapons to support Ukraine in its war, even as its economic might dwarfs that of Russia. Our own military is pathetically overstretched and under-resourced.
Once a new Prime Minister is back from the summit, the challenges of a possible far-right government in France will present themselves. It will be very difficult for Britain to find common ground on a cross-channel approach to small boats with a government whose entire raison d’être is centred around appearing tough on migration. Europe will have enough on its plate dealing with populist nationalist governments in France, the Netherlands and Italy and will have very little bandwidth for addressing special pleading from the British government for a better deal with the EU. The ongoing Gaza crisis and the wider regional instability make the Middle East a particularly difficult area for the new government. And this sits in a global context of a rising China and the climate crisis. There are no easy options in any of these situations. Britain’s standing in the world is far diminished from where it was in 1997 and its influence and room for manoeuvre are similarly reduced.
So it will be fun to watch some people who should lose their seats get their just desserts, but it won’t be much fun to be British Prime Minister with the world in the state that it’s in. Being young in 1997 really was very heaven.
This is a great article which really sums it up well. This government is a morally bankrupt, dishonest and incompetent mess and has been for the last 3 years. So it will be most enjoyable to seem the Tories (hopefully) get absolutely smashed and some truly awful human beings losing their seats (truss would be truly great).
But the world seems like it’s a mess right now. With hard right parties on the March, autocrats throwing their weight around and a bad economic situation, the hard work will start from day one. And I feel none of the problems facing the UK have quick fixes so I worry the new government will quickly become unpopular.
Still if you’d told me on election night in 2019 that the Tories would get badly beaten at the next election then I’d have taken it.
Thanks for a great piece Arthur. Your sentiments about this coming election mirror my feelings, and probably those of many more. This will be my first vote in a UK general election for 40 odd years (I’ve been abroad), but there’s no-one I feel like voting for, and more importantly, there seems to be no literature coming through the letterbox, so I’ve not even any idea who my candidates are!