Labour Party badge

Shared by Geraint Davies
"There was an era when the Labour party sort of hit rock bottom electorially speaking. So the party had a lot of work to do to get electable. Neil Kinnock was who was perceived as being on the left of the party was elected, but he was a very pragmatic leader and he saw his number one job was to get the party into government. Which lots of people in my party seem to forget about.

So there was this one election when it was generally expected, the polls suggested, that at long last it seemed as though the work that Neil had done around the party was going to succeed and we were going to win the election. And everybody thought Labour would win. I can remember some friends of mine coming round so we were going to watch the results together so we could celebrate when Labour won.

Then the Basildon result came in, and Basildon was a bellwether seat. And when the Basildon result came in then it became clear that the polls had got it wrong and Labour weren't going to win.

Maybe it was just a personal thing, but I can remember going out the next morning after and there'd be a sense of gloom about it, because everybody had been expecting that there would be a new government and there wasn't. People were very unhappy about the new government even though it had been voted in. And you wore this badge to say well, you know, it was your fault not mine.

I had one of those. Everybody I knew did. It was just very common, and how it came about was just this very unexpected conservative victory."

Metals

Plastic