Oh Tony, we’re not in 1997 anymore.

By Matt Bromley

I was in my final year of university when New Labour swept to power. I returned home to vote in my first ever General Election and remember staying up late to watch the results on TV. 

The sight of Tony Blair and his entourage entering Downing Street the next morning, union flags flying, crowds cheering, made me feel hopeful that the tide had finally turned on a decade of Thatcherism. I was barely out of nappies when ‘milk-snatcher Maggie’ took power and my childhood was marred by the deliberate deindustrialisation that devastated northern communities like mine which had been built around coal, steel, manufacturing, and organised labour. 

I remember watching nightly news bulletins on the miners’ strikes when pits closed and tens of thousands of jobs disappeared. Local economies collapsed and many communities never fully recovered. Because working-class communities revolve around a strong social identity – working men’s clubs, welfare institutes, brass bands – these closures removed not only jobs but an entire social infrastructure. 

To me, Thatcher’s legacy was one of mass unemployment. But the effects extended beyond economics. Research since has found correlations between deindustrialisation and poorer physical and mental health, addiction, family instability, lower educational outcomes, and reduced social mobility. Many former industrial towns across Yorkshire still experience lower average wages, lower life expectancy, and weaker transport and investment infrastructure than more prosperous areas of southern England. 

By 1997, therefore, I was more than ready for Blair. And, at first, I wasn’t disappointed: New Labour oversaw one of the largest expansions of public spending and social reform in post-war Britain. While critics claimed Blair accepted too much of the Thatcher-era economic settlement, no one can deny that he reduced poverty, widened opportunity, and improved public services. Policies like child and pensioner tax credits, increases in child benefit, winter fuel payments, and targeted welfare support led to large reductions in child and pensioner poverty. By the mid-2000s, hundreds of thousands of pensioners had been lifted out of relative poverty, and child poverty fell significantly after rising sharply during Thatcher’s reign. 

The creation of the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998 was one of New Labour’s most consequential reforms. Before this, many sectors operated on extremely low pay, especially in hospitality, retail, care work, and cleaning. The minimum wage raised incomes for millions of workers, particularly women and young people, and helped reduce the most exploitative forms of labour. 

Under New Labour, NHS spending roughly doubled in real terms. The government built new hospitals, dramatically reduced waiting times, bolstered staffing, increased GP access, and modernised equipment and buildings. This led to shorter cancer treatment waits, faster operations, lower maximum waiting times, and major increases in nurse and doctor numbers. 

Education was central to New Labour’s agenda. Investment included rebuilding schools, reducing infant class sizes, expanding university participation, literacy and numeracy strategies, and large increases in school funding. Programmes such as Sure Start, Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), and AimHigher were specifically designed to widen opportunity for poorer children and teenagers. Sure Start in particular became internationally recognised as an ambitious early-years intervention targeting disadvantage.

Blair also helped secure the Good Friday Agreement which largely ended decades of sectarian violence, created new political institutions, and stabilised relations between communities in Northern Ireland. 

New Labour introduced several major constitutional reforms, too, including devolution to Scotland and Wales, the London Mayor and Assembly, reform of the House of Lords, incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights through the Human Rights Act 1998, and greater transparency through Freedom of Information legislation. These reforms redistributed political power away from Westminster and strengthened certain civil liberties protections. 

New Labour transformed legal rights for LGBT people. Major changes included the repeal of Section 28, equalisation of the age of consent, civil partnerships, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and anti-discrimination protections. These reforms significantly changed the legal and social status of LGBT people in Britain. 

I’m not blind to Blair’s flaws. Although New Labour reduced inequality and improved social justice, he did not fundamentally change the economic model Britain inherited from the Thatcher years. In truth, I think New Labour relied too heavily on financial services, tolerated widening wealth inequality, failed to reverse deindustrialisation, and embraced too many market mechanisms in public services. And then there was Iraq. 

For these and other reasons, I’d lost faith in Blair by the time he left office in 2007, but I’ve never forgotten what he achieved and have retained a respect for him since. And so, I was disappointed with his recent intervention into the Labour Party leadership debate. Admittedly, he was right about one thing: Labour has made mistakes since entering government. Sir Keir Starmer had a disciplined electoral strategy but arrived in office with something altogether less coherent. Starmer soon discovered – to our cost – that winning power and using it are not the same thing. Blair was also right to warn that Britain faces profound long-term structural challenges. Weak growth, stagnant productivity, welfare dependency, and regional inequality are real problems and they’re driving people to the extremes: either far-left to the Greens or far-right to Reform. 

But Blair’s latest intervention – a sprawling essay published by his Institute for Global Change – ultimately feels less like a roadmap for Britain’s future and more like an attempt to resurrect a political settlement whose failures are now impossible to ignore. At its heart is a familiar Blairite instinct: trust markets, get in bed with big business and the US (no matter how corrupt its administration), embrace technological disruption, and occupy the elusive “centre ground”. The difficulty is that the world which once sustained that formula no longer exists.

To misquote Dorothy, we’re not in 1997 anymore.  And, it seems, Blair’s not the political Wizard he once w-OZ.

Take artificial intelligence. Blair speaks about AI with the zeal of a Silicon Valley evangelist. Certainly, AI will transform the economy, public services, and education. But technology is not, in and of itself, an economic strategy. Starmer’s more cautious approach is probably the wiser one. Ministers are trying to balance innovation with regulation: encouraging investment while recognising legitimate public anxieties about accountability, misinformation, and labour-market disruption. That is not anti-growth; it’s common sense.

Equally puzzling is Blair’s apparent impatience with net zero targets – odd because Blair commissioned the Stern Review, which made the economic case for climate action nearly two decades ago. Yet recent events only reinforce the argument for accelerating the transition to renewable energy, not slowing it down. Global instability in oil markets and another set of record-breaking temperatures this month are reminders that energy security and climate policy are now inseparable. 

What jars most, however, is Blair’s reluctance to acknowledge how profoundly Britain changed after he left office in 2007. Within months came the financial crisis – a catastrophe that exposed the fragility of the liberalised economic model embraced not only by Thatcher but largely accepted by New Labour too. That model promised dynamism and prosperity; instead, as I’ve already borne witness, Britain experienced deindustrialisation on a vast scale, widening regional divides and a labour market increasingly defined by insecurity and low pay. Manufacturing declined, trade unions weakened, and employers gained ever greater leverage over workers. Here in Yorkshire, the consequences are still visible. Communities hollowed out by industrial decline have spent decades waiting for the promised benefits of economic modernisation to arrive.

Blair dismisses Labour’s proposed employment reforms as a nostalgic return to the 1970s. But many workers would recognise them as something much simpler: an attempt to restore basic balance after years in which “flexibility” too often meant casualisation, exploitation, and stagnating wages. 

There’s also a deeper historical irony here. Deindustrialisation did not stop under New Labour; rather, as I’ve said, Blair broadly accepted the Thatcherite settlement (deregulated finance, weak industrial policy, and an economy heavily dependent on services and property). For a while, cheap imports, cheap credit, and booming asset prices disguised the underlying weaknesses. But when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the model collapsed with it, and we finally saw the man behind the curtain. What died in that moment was not simply a banking system but the wider assumption that lightly regulated global capitalism would steadily deliver prosperity for all. Wealth didn’t trickle down, it defied gravity. 

Since then, Britain has drifted: weak growth, flat or falling living standards, and rising public anger – and with it a return to a dangerous kind of nationalism. Blair’s answer is essentially more of the same — move to the centre, align closely with business, cut welfare, and embrace disruption. Yet the political centre itself has shifted because voters have grown increasingly sceptical of an economic model that appears to reward wealth more than work. 

Starmer undoubtedly has political weaknesses of his own. His inability to connect emotionally with voters remains a serious problem. But it is not serious politics to suggest that Labour’s answer lies in abandoning climate commitments, shredding workers’ rights, or pretending that the grievances driving public dissatisfaction are somehow imaginary. And it’s delusional to ignore the growing inequalities in our society. 

Thanks for the memories, Mr Blair. Now take the balloon back to Kansas.