‘A new dawn has broken has it not?’, asked Tony Blair as the sun first blinked over London’s South Bank on the early morning of 2 May 1997. Blair was addressing a crowd of supporters following Labour’s first general election victory since 1974, an election that saw the party win 43.2 per cent of votes cast and achieve its biggest ever Commons majority, even bigger than Clement Attlee’s in 1945. It was a victory that laid the foundations for an unprecedented 13 years of Labour government.
After this year’s local elections nobody in the Labour party is talking about a new dawn. In reality, the results are nowhere near good enough for Keir Starmer to credibly make this claim.
As the results dribbled in on Friday, the Mile End Institute held a conference on 1997 to mark that election’s 25th anniversary. Some of the conference participants played an important role in that victory and in the ensuing government, notably Caroline Flint, Margret Hodge, Peter Mandelson, David Miliband, and John McTernan. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Labour’s current situation.
There are certainly some similarities between the situation facing Labour in 1997 and today. Most obviously we have a Conservative government that has been in office for over a decade which is mired in questions about its lack of moral probity and competence. As in 1997, public services are in a desperate state after years of neglect.
But Britain in 2022 is suffering in a way it was not in 1997: the world economy is in an uncertain shape and a recession seems imminent, while inflation and rising taxes are eroding living standards which have been, for many, at best stagnant since the 2008 financial crash. In contrast the 1997 election took place during one of the longest economic booms on record.
The electoral terrain is also distinct. Labour’s problem before 1997 was difficult but relatively simple to solve. The traditional working classes had largely stuck with the party throughout the Thatcher-Major years. But to win power Labour needed to extend its appeal to the more affluent, especially in the Midlands and south. The arguments it need to achieve that were primarily about material issues: it had to convince voters it could manage the economy and was competent enough to tax and spend. Culture and identity were on the margins. And Europe, when it was raised, hurt the Conservative party more than Labour. Today, Labour faces a more complex and multi-dimensional problem: if it wants to emulate the 1997 landslide it has to rebuild the ‘red wall’ in the north and knock down the ‘blue wall’ in the south, win the argument on the economy, and keep an eye on the culture war.
To be fair to those old New Labour hands who spoke at the conference, nobody claimed Starmer has it easy or offered glib back-seat advice. There was however some implicit criticism. David Miliband in particular emphasised the importance of the party having clear ideas and a vibrant sense of a national project. Blair’s victory, Miliband said, was based on a vivid articulation of the country’s problems, while his solutions could be summed up in just five simple pledges. Miliband did not say so but he obviously felt this kind of thinking is currently lacking. As others have observed, for all his words and policies, many still do not know what Starmer’s Labour stands for. And while Mandelson praised how quickly Labour under Starmer had recovered from its dire position in 2019, he stressed how much hard work was still required in the two years that remain until the next election: he did not sound too optimistic that Labour would be elected.
The local elections were no new dawn for Labour but projected vote shares based on these local results do suggest the party is on course to be the largest in the Commons. Perhaps it is time to shelve the comparisons with 1997 – it just puts too much pressure on the party leadership. After over a decade in opposition and less than three years after its worst election defeat since 1935, Labour is perhaps not in such a bad place. A more relevant comparison might be with the 1964 election, which saw Harold Wilson end 13 years of Conservative government. Wilson is associated with recasting Labour’s purpose for the 1960s Space Age, claiming the party would unleash the ‘white heat of technological change’. But despite this vision and Wilson’s rhetoric of a ‘New Britain’ Labour did not increase its vote share by much compared to when it lost in 1959.
Labour crept back into office in 1964 with the slimmest of Commons majorities, largely thanks to a Liberal revival, which took votes from the Conservatives. The parallels with this week’s local elections – which saw the Liberal Democrats make impressive gains in the south – are striking. Keir Starmer still has a huge void to fill when it comes to national vision. But the 1964 election at least suggests there is a path to victory for Labour.
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