by David Talbot
New Labour is back in vogue. Judging by the sleek BBC documentaries and a buttonless Blair marking 25 years since his landslide victory, there has been much to savour for those who wish to bathe in nostalgia. None more so than the media, who in a bout of coalescing has decided that the only way elections are now won is if ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ is the theme tune.
As the 2022 local election results filtered through, much of the commentary fixated on Labour falling short of a 1997 Blair-era victory for Sir Keir Starmer. Few suggest that Labour is about to replicate the political meteorite that hit the British political landscape in the late 1990s. For one, Labour’s base is 70 seats lower than what Blair inherited in 1994. The party must win 124 seats – only twenty seats shy of its historic gains in 1997 – at the next election to have a majority of 1.
Labour has, though, fitted the angst of its internal struggles throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s into the spasm of four short years. Which other leader of a major political party would have to inform its membership, as Starmer did at party conference last September, that power “is the object of the exercise”.
Moreover, if general elections over the past decade or so have underlined one trend at all it is that – apart from the Conservative juggernaut of 2019 – the nation has struggled to come to a verdict at all. There is now a patchwork of peculiar local results; national swings broke down in the 1970s, and now even regional swings are a metric of the past.
This new electoral landscape has yet to filter through to the media’s framing of elections held in the twenty twenties. In the 1990s, it was ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’ that were the mythical and much sought after floating voter. Today, it is of course the ubiquitous Red Wall, which extends as far down as Thurrock, according to some commentary, and 1990s re-trends such as ‘Workington Man’.
