Throughout university, I had a picture of him, looking handsome and assured, blue-tacked to my wall. (I took it down when he backed the Iraq invasion.) Some friends laughed when they saw it; others took offence. But they would soften when I explained why it was there.

Blair transformed Britain for gay men like me. By the time New Labour left office, Section 28 (a clause introduced by Margaret Thatcher which outlawed the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools) had been repealed. The age of consent between gay and straight people had been equalised. Same-sex civil partnerships had been legalised, and bans on gay people serving in the military had been lifted.

Blair was a champion to those from less privileged backgrounds, too. The Sure Start program – which set up in low socio-economic areas and brought centralised access to health, early education, and family support services under one roof for children aged under five and parents – is widely considered a major success of the time.

Maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses, too, though. Critics rightly point out that, in opposition, Blair abstained from voting on lifting the ban on gay people serving in the military, and it took his government all three of its terms in office to achieve the landmark measures towards equality.

But Blair was operating in very different times to those we live in today. A sizeable cohort of the public and the media was openly hostile towards gay equality measures. The tone change from Thatcher – who notoriously said children who “need to be taught to respect traditional moral values” are “being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay” just a decade prior to Blair’s ascension – was stark.

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Sadly, today’s Britain is a world away from 1997. Any excitement and pride has long been replaced with a deep cynicism and Brexit division. Immigration, a crumbling healthcare system, job insecurity and growing inequality are front of mind for British voters, who have a growing distrust in politicians and their ability to do the job.

Whatever your views on their politics, Thatcher, John Major, Blair and Brown were strong leaders. Yet, they were replaced with utter charlatans in Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and to some extent, Rishi Sunak, who’ve made the country an international joke. Where Blair arrived at a point of hope, Starmer enters at a point of despair. Such comparisons of radical social transformation, even if Labour does win by a landslide, are frustratingly utopian.

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto has been called “quiet radicalism”. It echoes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “don’t scare the horses” small-target strategy to get Australian Labor back in power for the first term, saving ambitious and riskier policy plans for later.

The rot in Britain is now so deep that the political options for repair will have to extend well beyond Starmer’s first term, assuming there is one. If he doesn’t squander his projected landslide, however, and can become more visionary and bolder, there’s still space on my wall for a new picture.

Gary Nunn is a freelance writer and author based in Sydney.

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