Tony Blair's 1995 Labour Party conference speech, in which he declared he wanted Britain to be "a young country again," has found a new audience nearly 30 years later. The clip, posted by a TikTok account called "The Blair Era" with lo-fi Arial subtitles and Be My Baby by The Ronettes as backing music, has amassed 218,000 views.
For many in Gen Z, going through a New Labour obsession is almost a rite of passage. This resurgence blends nostalgia into a hyper-comforting, aesthetic-focused version of politics, presented in vertical video form, which sidesteps uncomfortable topics such as the Iraq War and tuition fees.
From Y2K to Cool Britannia
The path to this obsession was laid years ago, starting with Gen Z's fascination with Y2K culture. After consuming the 2000s, the generation moved on to the 1990s, sparking a Britpop and Cool Britannia revival, a £400 million-grossing Oasis reunion tour, and renewed on-screen interest in Princess Diana and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
This timeline is closely tied to New Labour. Noel Gallagher and Damien Hirst attended Blair's victory party at Number 10, the Kennedys dined with Blair in Washington, and Alastair Campbell, Blair's chief spokesman, coined the phrase "people's princess" after Diana's death. To Gen Z, New Labour appears glitzy and celebrity-adjacent, a cultural phenomenon.
The Blair vs Brown drama
The era's appeal also lies in its drama, particularly the rivalry between Blair and Gordon Brown. In 2025, TikTok users became captivated by the story, many hearing about it for the first time. Gen Z fangirls paired old clips with trending audio, including Charli xcx's Girl, So Confusing and Frank Ocean's White Ferrari, racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
This obsession is benefiting Labour politicians. Accounts that posted Blair vs Brown fan edits boosted Andy Burnham's social media profile ahead of the Makerfield by-election, creating montages of him from his New Labour days as junior minister under Blair before joining Brown's cabinet in 2007.
A message of hope
Campbell has also benefited, building a sizable following and a podcast career via The Rest is Politics. "Quality wins through in the end," he says of New Labour's resurgence. "Gen Z has a lot better taste than the old-fart generation gives them credit for." He cites his forthcoming book, Persivilience, saying: "One of the examples I give [in the book] is that much of the media at the time spent so much time and energy trying to portray us as 'spin-tastic' and only concerned about power for power's sake, whereas in truth New Labour was a serious political project which promised things could only get better — and they did."
Ava Evans, political editor of PoliticsJOE, agrees to an extent. "I think the big crossover is this message of hope," she says. "Burnham's conference speech was really about trying to push and pedal this message of hope, which is very similar to what Blair was doing in 1997." Evans believes Gen Z "romanticise" the era because "it was a time of economic upturn," adding: "It was a time when your parents could get takeaways and you could go on holiday maybe once a year. Whereas now no one's got any money." She also links the resurgence to the revival of digital cameras, camcorders and lo-fi video recording, noting that political footage filmed in low resolution in the 1990s and early 2000s has now been romanticised too.
In a world where it feels like things can only get worse, Gen Z seeks out its last memory of a country on the up. The trend glosses over bleaker aspects of the period, but TikTok does not trade in nuance. After an adolescence disrupted by Covid, a cost of living crisis and university strikes, stumbling upon a politician promising to make Great Britain a "young country again" is intoxicating.
