How should Keir Starmer take on 2024? By looking back a century to Labour's first government | Martin Kettle

Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived victory holds three key lessons and helps explain the difficulties and defeats since 1924

Next year’s general election will be the 22nd in Britain’s postwar history. Only a handful of these can be described as pivotal. Three stand out: Clement Attlee’s Labour victory in 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative win in 1979 and, more debatably, Tony Blair’s Labour landslide in 1997. Boris Johnson’s 2019 win might have been a fourth, but it has proved a lurch into a cul-de-sac. Today we may possibly be on the threshold of another of these rare change-making elections. Scepticism about that prospect is sensible.

As time passes, individual elections cease to echo with shared meaning as they once did. There is, though, one more pivotal general election that ought to resonate today. It took place exactly a hundred years ago this month. And it still makes three relevant calls on today’s politics.

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