Browse Items (44 total)

Even before the 1983 election Labour looked like it didn’t have the solutions to Britain’s biggest problems. This 1979 Conservative Party poster credited with helping Margaret Thatcher win the election held that year, made this point most forcefully.

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John Smith believed Labour lost the general election in 1992 because voters found Neil Kinnock unappealing. Smith was confident he had the skills to win over voters. After reducing union influence in the party, in 1993 Smith called a halt to further…

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Blair believed Labour lost the general election in 1992 because voters thought the party was still run by the leftwing. So he changed Labour’s constitution and policies. His most effective change was calling the party ‘New Labour’. Even the…

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There were always satirists who joked that Blair had sold Labour’s soul in exchange for Conservative votes and that his government was influenced by former Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher. Every government misstep confirmed the satirists’…

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Local Labour candidates echoed the party’s national strategy of appealing to disillusioned Conservative voters.

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Not everybody in the party agreed with New Labour’s direction. In Islington North Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign material made no reference to Blair or New Labour or even its five Pledges!

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Labour ran as a pro-EU party. But not everybody was keen on Europe. UKIP contested a general election for the first time in 1997 while the Referendum Party won 811,827 votes for its demand that all Britons be allowed to decide whether the country…

In the run up to the 1997 general election, the Conservative produced an infamous ‘Demon Eyes’ poster which showed Tony Blair as the Devil. It illustrated their claim that Labour had not changed and that Blair would say anything to win power.…

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Locally Conservative candidates tried various ways of stemming the Labour tide: invoking the threat of EU federalism, Labour’s threat to the economy and its record in local government. None of them worked.
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