Essay On Why Labour Win The 1997 Election

One of the main reasons Tony Blair and the Labour Party won the 1997 General Election is the effective use of the media to sway voters. There are many sides to this argument, one tactic used is the presentation of Blair to the public during interviews and public appearances. In a Labour party election broadcast, Blair says “I thought politicians were complete pains in the backside” (BBC, 1997) when asked about what he thought about politicians when he was 18. This is just one of the many ways Blair and the Labour Party attempted to show the public he wasn’t just an ‘ordinary’ politician. Blair, instead, opted to utilise popular culture as a means of identifying with the public. The ’90s was a time where British music, film and sport were as

This view can be summed up in the election data, particularly the turnout. The general election of 1992 had a turnout of 77.7%, the highest since 1974. The electorate voted for John Major instead of the party as a whole because they bought into his leadership style. Major successfully managed to disassociate himself from the thatcher years. A culmination of many issues led to the 1997 electoral defeat of the conservatives. This included strong opposition to the Maastricht treaty, Black Wednesday, and criticism over the handling of the Bosnian war. All of these issues were compounded by the public consensus that the Conservatives had just been in power for too long. The General Election result in 1997 was ‘a vote against Conservatives, not conservatism’ (Crewe et al., 1998). ‘The trauma of Black Wednesday 1992 had enduring effects. It not only tore the government’s economic and financial policies into tatters; it massively dented its overall reputation for competent management, an area in which Conservative governments had always been thought superior to Labour’ (Morgan, 2001). The Election of 1997 had a turnout of 71.4%, the lowest since 1935. This shows a lot of people not only did not trust the Tories but Labour as well. As previously discussed, the

The Major years saw the UK pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) as it could not stop the pound from falling below a lower limit. ‘The subsequent prosperity of the U.K. during the mid-1990s was seen as happening in spite of government policy’ (Kenton, 2008). On foreign policy, Major’s administration will always be overshadowed by their actions (or lack of) over the Bosnian War. Many viewed the British Policy of non-intervention as fundamentally wrong, including one of the UK’s closest allies, the USA. Furthermore, polling done by Ipsos in July 1995 suggests 65% of the British public were dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the Bosnian War. With all this in mind, together with multiple scandals within the Conservative party, one might assume it would be harder for things to get