Historic Elections: The 1997 General Election and Blair's New Labour Revolution

Ethan Reuter speaks with Sir John Curtice, Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, and one of Britain's foremost election analysts, about the 1997 general election that ended eighteen years of Conservative rule and delivered Tony Blair's Labour Party a majority of 179 seats. The conversation ranges across the sweeping constitutional programme of Labour's first term — Scottish and Welsh devolution, the creation of the London Assembly and mayoralty, the Human Rights Act, and the ill-fated push for English regional government — before examining the political conditions that made such a transformation possible. From the shadow of Black Wednesday and the sleaze that hollowed out John Major's government, to the demographic realignment that saw Labour capture vast swathes of Middle England, and from Blair's mastery of political symbolism and Cool Britannia to the question of whether New Labour was Thatcherism by another name, this episode asks what 1997 truly changed — and what the landslide of 2024 can and cannot learn from it.