1997, Twenty-Five Years Later Anas Dayeh “There it is, ten o’clock, and we say Tony Blair is to be Prime Minister, and a landslide is likely” Indeed, even after twenty-five years, these words haven’t left our memory. After eighteen years of tory rule, Labour finally won. Not only had they got enough MPs to form a government but they achieved a historic landslide. With the current government, and every one of its outrageous scandals and shambolic policies, it is difficult to envision a time when the UK had a government that actually cared about people. Many young people like myself spent our teenage years knowing only austerity, cuts to our youth centres, tripling tuition fees and chaos added to every aspect of our lives.
LOOK LEFT
“A new dawn has broken, has it not?” It truly had. For millions of people across the country, that day gave them hope that their lives could at long last improve. One of the main priorities of Blair and Brown’s government was the national minimum wage. A policy that is not necessarily seen as radical today, yet one which both the Tories and Lib Dems
activelly campaigned against. Such policy reminds us that what is defined as ‘radical’ changes over time, and what is seen as radical today, might be seen as the norm in twenty-five years. Immediately after its introduction, two million workers saw their wages rise. That’s more individuals and families finally having greater disposable income, and better living standards. The achievements don’t stop there. There’s much, much, more that could be said about Sure Start, Educational Maintenance Allowance, the shortest NHS waiting times since records began, more doctors, nurses, and teachers, and the very long list of achievements. Things could only get better from the breaking of that new dawn and for many people, they did. “And it is wonderful! we always said that if we had the courage to change then we can do it, and we did it!” It’s always difficult to make change, and hard to agree on what that change should look like. If the 2019 General Election taught us anything, it’s that the Labour Party
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