1992 - Twenty years on

Today is the 20th anniversary of the 1992 general election, when John Major confounded the polls and won a majority in Parliament, recording in the process the biggest vote ever achieved by a British political party.

That election victory is the starting point of my most recent book, Things Can Only Get Bitter, which looks at some aspects of the fallout from 1992. The central argument is that everything changed then, and that we are still living with the consequences today.

The Labour Party manifesto for that election was not one of the great historical documents of the movement, but it did open with a poem, Winter Ending, by Adrian Henri, and it seems appropriate to remember it now:

'A cold coming we had of it'
huddled together in cardboard cities,
crouched over shared books in leaking classrooms,
crammed into peeling waiting-rooms,
ice stamped into crazy-paving
round polluted streams.

Winter ending:
paintings, poems bud hesitantly,
tentative chords behind boarded facades;
factories open like daffodils,
trains flex frozen rheumatic joints,
computer-screens blink on
in the sudden daylight.

As the last cardboard boxes
are swept away beneath busy bridges,
the cold blue landscape of winter
suddenly alive with bright red roses.