‘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.
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