Todays Political Mood More Anxious Than When I Came To Power Tony Blair

Sir Tony Blair has been out of power in government for 17 years.

Yet he thinks he's learned almost as much after leaving Number 10 as when he was in it.

One of the key insights from the revolutions in behavioural economics and neuroscience of the past 20 years is the degree to which our biases and experience frame our understanding of fresh information.

Even when we don't want to, we make sense of the new by reference to the old.

It is inevitable, then, that the recent election of a Labour prime minister after more than a decade of Tory rule has occasioned endless comparison with the last time that happened, in 1997.

Both Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Tony are lawyers by training.

Both have cast themselves against the Left of the Labour Party.

But the similarities pretty much end there.

"The zeitgeist today is different," Mr Blair says.

New Labour was approaching not just the turn of the century, but of the millennium, and the mood in the country was "pretty optimistic".
  



BBC