1997 General Election
The 1997 General Election in the UK marked a significant political shift, with the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, securing a landslide victory after 18 years of Conservative rule. This election saw the largest swing to a single party since 1945, leading to a major overhaul of policies and the beginning of a new era in British politics.
5 Key excerpts on "1997 General Election"
eBook - ePubBreaking the deadlock
Britain at the polls, 2019
- John Bartle, Nicholas J. Allen(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...The 2017 election saw the highest levels of volatility on record and the 2015 general election a substantial rise in votes for minor parties. The party system was in considerable flux, and even the stable period between 1945 and 1970 was relatively brief in long-term perspective, as John Bartle argues in Chapter 4. 4 Jonathan Mellon, Geoffrey Evans, Edward Fieldhouse, Jane Green and Christopher Prosser, ‘Brexit or Corbyn? Campaign and inter-election vote switching in the 2017 UK general election’, Parliamentary Affairs, 71 (2018), 719–737; Fieldhouse et al., Electoral Shocks ; Edward Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Geoffrey Evans, Jon Mellon and Christopher Prosser, ‘Volatility, realignment and electoral shocks: Brexit and the UK general election of 2019’, PS: Political Science & Politics (forthcoming). 5 Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker, ‘Tilting towards the cosmopolitan axis? Political change in England and the 2017 general election’, Political Quarterly, 88 (2017), 359–369; Paula Surridge, ‘The fragmentation of the electoral left since 2010’, Renewal, 26 (2018), 69–78; David Cutts, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath and Paula Surridge, ‘Brexit, the 2019 General Election and the realignment of British politics’, Political Quarterly, 91 (2020), 7–23; Paula Surridge, ‘Beyond Brexit: Labour’s structural problems’, Political Insight, 11 (2020), 16–19; Paula Surridge, ‘A mountain to climb: The Labour together 2019 election review’, Political Quarterly, 91 (2020), 659–663. 6 Cutts et al., ‘Brexit, the 2019 General Election...
eBook - ePubBritain and Europe
A Political History Since 1918
- N.J. Crowson(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Nor was there much positivity from some of the party political campaigning. The Conservatives infamously produced a poster advertisement ‘The ventriloquist’s dummy’ showing Blair sitting on the knee of Germany’s Chancellor Kohl. It was widely denounced by pro-European Conservatives, once more emphasising Conservative divisions, and the poster was then bastardised by the Referendum Party to show Major sitting on Kohl’s other knee. 2 Nor were matters helped by Jacques Santer’s speech in April, as president of the European Commission, during which he labelled Eurosceptics as ‘doom merchants’. 3 The intervention was unwelcome to all British party leaders, even Tony Blair, and he found himself increasingly needing to take a tougher stance, emphasising his commitment to a referendum on the single currency and pledging that if he were representing Britain at the forthcoming Amsterdam inter-governmental negotiations he would use a veto on fishing quotas. 4 Yet in terms of how the British public viewed Europe, the May 1997 General Election was significant because it challenged the notion of the electoral viability of Euroscepticism. The presence of two avowed Eurosceptic parties, the Referendum Party and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), ensured that at cross-party meetings European matters received a disproportionate amount of coverage, thereby skewing the impression that ‘Europe’ as an issue mattered. The natural sentiments of John Major ensured that Conservative policy whilst leaning towards a Eurosceptic position was reluctant to embrace the wholesale opposition favoured by some of its parliamentary party and activist membership. Labour, for the sake of electoral success, had succeeded in papering over its own divisions and only the Liberal Democrats appeared wholly committed to Europe. The Referendum Party contested 547 seats gaining 810,778 votes, but only 3.1 per cent of the vote in the constituencies it challenged...
eBook - ePubBreaking peace
Brexit and Northern Ireland
- Feargal Cochrane(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Despite the Tories’ significant lead in the polls prior to the election, it had dwindled during the campaign as a result of Theresa May's abject performance and Corbyn's ability to connect with voters in key areas. Aside from the personalities of the leaders, Labour had produced a very effective and well-costed manifesto that offered an attractive range of options to voters and a catchy slogan, ‘For the many, not the few’, which resonated during the campaign, while the Conservatives had arguably a less inspiring or well-targeted document to offer the electorate. The election result saw the overall Conservative lead over Labour shrink to just over 2% (42.4% against 40%) but more importantly in terms of seats won, the Tories lost their overall parliamentary majority, winning 318 seats to Labour's 262 – a gain of thirty seats for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, despite intense media hostility, not to mention efforts to remove him as leader by many of his senior colleagues. In what amounted to a political earthquake, given the pre-election expectation that the Conservatives would trounce Labour, Britain had a hung parliament with no governing majority. The result reflected the wider political environment in that the UK was split over Brexit and had delivered a result that gave no party overall political control at a time when a clear policy was desperately needed in terms of making progress on Brexit negotiations with the UK's European partners. More immediately, the lack of an overall majority for the governing Conservative Party left it needing support from other parties at Westminster in order to form a new government. The parliamentary arithmetic made it very difficult for Labour to reach a figure where it could govern effectively...
- Dennis Kavanagh, Iain Dale(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...LABOUR PARTY GENERAL ELECTION MANIFESTO OCTOBER 1974 Britain will win with Labour Date of Election Thursday 10 October Party Leader Harold Wilson Candidates 623 MPs 319 Votes 11,457,079 % of Vote 39.2% Foreword by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, OBE, FRS, MP In February we put before the British people our Manifesto, ‘Labour’s Way out of the Crisis’. It was a programme for getting Britain back to work, for overcoming what was universally acknowledged to be the gravest economic crisis Britain had faced since the war. A programme to be carried out by a Government of all the people working together. Labour formed the Government, got Britain back to work and showed our determination to fulfil the programme which we had put before the people. No postwar British Government has achieved more in six months. But at every turn we have found ourselves faced in Parliament by a majority which could, and did, coalesce to frustrate the policies we had put before the nation. What is still more serious has been the widespread expectation of an inevitable and early General Election, which created uncertainty in industry and the other institutions of our British society. Soon the people must decide on the Government to whom they want to entrust the future of themselves and their families for the next five years. • They will judge each Party on its record in office, when it had the responsibility: on its record in honouring the pledges it had made to the country. On its willingness to undertake measures which would enlist the support and enthusiasm of our people in fighting the economic crisis. • They will judge on the policies which each Party puts forward, asking themselves which Party can best be trusted to make a reality of those policies. • They will judge not only on policies and records, but on the calibre and experience of the men and women who will be responsible for carrying out those policies...
eBook - ePubThe Slump
Britain in the Great Depression
- John Stevenson, Chris Cook(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Curiously, during the lifetime of the second Labour Government, Labour had lost only three seats – at Fulham West, Shipley and Ashton-under-Lyne – but far more significant in terms of any future General Election had been the Liberal collapse. In every contested by-election (except for Scarborough, where no Labour candidate stood) the Liberal share of the poll had fallen, in many cases disastrously. This, however, was of little comfort for the Labour Party. For the lessons of the by-elections were clear. Long before MacDonald ‘betrayed’ the Labour Party, the electorate had already given clear indications of its disenchantment with the shortcomings of the government. There was a second, and perhaps even more fundamental, reason why the Labour Party faced a General Election with much to fear from the voters. The reason lay in the circumstances of the 1929 election. In that year, though emerging for the first time as the largest single party, Labour did not fare nearly as well as some historians would have us believe. In the euphoria of Labour’s success in May 1929, a variety of features of the party’s victory had been obscured. Though the party had, for the first time in its history, become the largest single party, a large proportion of its victories had been won with the slenderest of margins. In addition, the chance workings of the electoral system had actually benefited Labour. With fewer votes than the Conservatives, Labour had actually won more seats. As a result, with many seats won by narrow margins, even a small decline in Labour’s popularity at any subsequent election was likely to produce widespread losses. Labour had a further source of concern. Many of these Labour victories had been achieved in three-cornered fights on a minority vote. No less than 41 per cent of Labour-held seats in 1929 had been won on a minority vote, compared with 21·9 per cent in 1924...
