Homogenisation, or Two Digits to the BBC — and to Everyone Else?

Abstract

Politically the 1990s brought changes to the United Kingdom that had seemed unthinkable just a few years previously. Undoubtedly, Labour had changed, firstly in recovering from the electoral routs inflicted on the party in 1983 and 1987 by Margaret Thatcher and becoming, under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and then Tony Blair, an official opposition to be reckoned with. The Conservative election victory of 1992 was won, not by Thatcher, but by her successor John Major. He was an apparently dull politician, lacking Thatcher’s charisma yet benefiting from the wave of popular approval at her removal from office by her party and successfully guarding from the prying eye of the media a more exotic private life than most commentators at the time, or even since then, considered easily imaginable. Major’s popular image as a safe pair of hands (Starkey 2007: 93) was quickly superseded by one of a ditherer, lacking the authority to control either his government or his parliamentary party, neither tasks being easy with the slim majority he won in the closely-fought general election of 1992. By the time Blair rode spectacularly to power in 1997, in turn routing the Conservatives so decisively they would remain in opposition for three more parliamentary terms and giving Labour its biggest electoral win ever, Labour had been transformed beyond recognition by the experience.