When did Labour lose its lustre?

Tony Blair and his wife Cherie on the doorstep of No. 10, May 1997

When Tony Blair took over John Major and 19 years of conservative power, Britain was on the doorstep of a new era. Fourteen years of Labour later, it seems legitimate to ask if the country has arrived a similar point again.

Before he swept to power, between 1994 and 1997, Tony Blair transformed the Labour Party into New Labour. In 1997 Blair won the general election by a huge margin and survived another eleven years and two more votes. The period was full of important events, a list that includes the handover of Hong Kong, the death of Diana, and the privatization of the Bank of England – all of which happened only during the first year.

The Blair years were marked by very charismatic leadership (almost presidential to some) and 40 successive quarters of economic growth. The subsequent years brought more important policies and major events – the Good Friday Agreement, the introduction of the minimum wage, the devolution to Scotland and Wales, the terrorist bombings of 2005 as well as three wars: Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2005).

These were years of new policies and of new political strategies. If Blair will be remembered for anything it will be as the patron saint of spin and image control.

The image of the Prime Minister was strictly controlled in this decade, a decade whose ups and downs slowly weakened the position of the Labour leader but did not put it in danger until the very end. Until the great stain on the career of the three-time PM: the Iraq war. The public in Britain was never totally convinced by the war, and the shadow cast by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq emerged as the skeleton in Blair’s closet.

Photo credit: weegeebored/Flickr

The ‘dodgy dossier‘ used to justify the war in Iraq stamped the expiration date on Blair’s career as Prime Minister and in 2007 Blair’s time ran out. With his popularity at its lowest ebb, Mr Blair decided not to lead the party into the fight for a fourth general election and it is Gordon Brown who now controls the government.

The timing was not the best for Brown, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and golden boy of economic policy during Blair’s years. Brown had been waiting to be first among the equals since the nineties. Rumour has it that, in fact, the two men had planned Blair’s rise and retirement to allow Brown to take over eventually. Instead of handing over a booming Britain, Blair left his successor a nation tired of war and hungry for quick changes.

Ever since taking over, Brown has struggled with the inheritance of two unpopular wars combined with the global financial crisis and the more recent Parliamentary expenses scandal. In these times when change was needed, Brown represented a backwards step for Labour, especially at the level of image control and political strategy, which is perceived as almost completely lacking in Brown’s curriculum.

So as Mr Blair in his early years represented the image of new, Mr Brown seems nowadays if not the past, at least a troubled present. The public’s opinion of him is not of somebody meant to take lead of a country in trouble – but of a symbol of this period of recession.

Appetising for voters? Picture credit: Deditos/Flickr

It bears remembering that after 14 years of government, today’s Labour seems very far from being “new”. The fact is that, if nothing changes, in the upcoming elections Labour will represent the past and the Conservatives the future.

This time around, the future comes in the form of an ex-PR man who is in some ways very similar to Blair: David Cameron, leader of the Tories. It was Cameron who, when Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, criticised him for being “an analogue politician in a digital age”. This opinion of Brown has not changed in the following years.

That was just the opening shot in a rivalry that has spanned for several years. Now, as the election campaign starts to heat up, it remains to be seen whether the renewal of the Conservatives will prove fatal to Labour’s long running dominance of the government.