It’s the hope that kills you – that’s how I have felt about every election for the past 14 years. That small swell of optimism almost instantly gives way to the embittered feeling that you have been a dreamer, a prize fool. So habitual has that emotion become that I’m not sure I, or many of my contemporaries, really know how to feel positive about politics any more. Tory governments comprising bigots, landlords and shysters have dominated most of my 20s and all of my 30s. Like cats that have been mistreated by their owners, we shrink from any kind entreaties with fear and suspicion. We have forgotten what it is like to be cared for.
I don’t want to be that way. So I have been thinking a lot about 1997: that bright May morning when I was nine years old. How happy my parents were. That’s all any child wants, really: smiling parents. (Last week, I saw a clip of a toddler who had been asked to video her parents dancing with each other. She had accidentally filmed it in selfie mode, so instead of seeing them dance, we see her big, beatific grin, her happiness at their happiness.) The feeling of jubilation in our house: I have never forgotten it, nor the sunny walk to school, the sense that something better was on its way.
I spoke to other people who remember being children at the time of the Labour landslide and they said the same. It is a vivid memory for so many of us. One recalls her mum doing the can-can around the house while chanting: “No more sleaze! Boom! No more sleaze! Boom!”. Another went canvassing with her dad and was so excited she asked all her teachers who they were voting for. Another bunked off with their mates to see Tony Blair walk into Downing Street.
These are powerful memories: the euphoria, the excitement, the Britpop. “Cool Britannia” was very much a media confection and yet, for children and young people, the perception that the Tories were stuffy and old and mean felt very real to us. And though we may not have understood why they were so hated, or just how long 18 years could feel to a person, the hope was infectious. Good things were going to happen, we believed, because that is what many of our parents believed.
If they had reservations about the Blair government, they kept them to themselves. My mother, who had never trusted Blair, certainly didn’t allow it to temper her joy that morning. Both my parents are socialists, voters the modern Labour party would regard as being on the far left – people whose votes, perhaps, they feel they could even do without. Both, like so many Labour voters, would later be disgusted over Iraq. Yet they knew then what I also know now in my bones, which is that people’s lives would be improved by a Labour government, even if it wasn’t quite the kind of Labour government you had dreamed of.
I saw my mother the other day, and we talked a bit about 1997. “Our lives,” she said, “would have been materially different under a Conservative government.” A year after the Labour victory, we would become a single parent family. We would struggle financially, but not as much as we would have done under the Tories. The support we received from the local authority as a result of my brother’s severe disability was life changing.
Which is why I cannot help but find the idea that nothing will change on 5 July insulting to anyone with a sense of history, or experience of deprivation or disability over the last 14 years. On social media, people have been sharing the images that they feel sum up the last decade and a half of government, from the Johnson administration’s pandemic parties to security tags on blocks of cheese, the Covid memorial wall, Grenfell Tower in flames. One person chose a screenshot of the gaunt little boy from the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about child poverty, the haunting part where he says: “We try not to eat a lot in one day, even though most of us are really hungry.” Could you look him in the face and say that life won’t be any different for him and children like him under a Labour government? I couldn’t. It has to be.
I have reservations over many aspects of this leadership. Being in Islington North, I may well end up voting for Corbyn because I want a voice in parliament calling for an end to the two-child benefit cap, and for protection and safety for the children of Gaza. The way Labour has treated some of its candidates has been appalling. I still haven’t forgiven Rachel Reeves for saying that Labour “is not the party of people on benefits”. Some of their rhetoric I find abhorrent.
And yet. On 5 July, I want my son to wake up to see me happy and hopeful. Like my parents in 1997, I want to relish a moment of optimism and jubilation, and not let my cynicism affect the mood of the house. My son is two and won’t remember this, but smiles are contagious, and the atmosphere will dwell in his lizard brain. I think older children and younger people especially deserve to be able to celebrate. The past few years have been very hard on them, and they must be allowed to feel optimistic about how politics can shape their lives.
Maybe I am deluded, and all my hopes for a better Britain will be dashed within months. Maybe we are all too bruised and battered to truly celebrate. But my God, I am going to try to relish the fact that we are likely to be waving goodbye to the biggest crew of craven, evil, morally bankrupt villains that ever pretended to govern this nation. Get the champagne out, dance for your kids, fizz with schadenfreude, cheer to change. Things really can only get better. They have to.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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