Introduction: ‘New Times’ in British Politics

Abstract

Elections are the key means by which citizens in a liberal democracy can signal their preferences and intentions to political elites. But like the oracles by which ancient Greek gods divulged glimpses of the future to mortals, election results can sometimes be famously ambiguous — their meaning requiring to be picked over and reassessed for an extended period. This warning seemed thoroughly otiose in the first flush of Labour’s landslide victory in the May 1997 general election. The emphatic character of the outcome, with its dramatically reconstructed and feminized House of Commons, was apparently confirmed in significance as a radical change by the distinctive character of the new ministers’ initial policy announcements.