Sheffield Rally

The Sheffield Rally was a political meeting held by the Labour Party on Wednesday 1 April 1992, a week ahead of the 1992 UK general election.

The event was held at the Sheffield Arena, an indoor sports venue in Sheffield, England. It was attended by 10,000 Labour Party members, including the entire shadow cabinet, and is reported to have cost some £100,000 to stage. The party leader, Neil Kinnock, was flown into the city by helicopter.

The rally was modelled partly on American presidential campaign conventions, with sound and light performances on the stage and celebrity endorsements played on a large video screen. It is believed to have been the brainchild of Philip Gould, a political strategist who was also involved in the subsequent election campaigns of Bill Clinton.

At one point in the proceedings, Kinnock and the shadow cabinet paraded to the stage from the back of the venue, passing through an increasingly enthusiastic audience, with the shadow cabinet being introduced by titles such as "The next Home Secretary" and "The next Prime Minister"; Labour had been in opposition for 13 years and had already lost three consecutive general elections to the Conservatives.

This culminated in an emotional and animated Kinnock taking the podium and repeatedly shouting "We're alright!", which has often been re-broadcast since as an example of overconfident campaigning. Kinnock followed this by proclaiming "We'd better get some talking done here, serious talking".

However most analysts and major participants in the campaign believe it actually had little effect, with the event only receiving widespread attention after the election.

Jim Parish, Senior Campaigns Officer for the Labour Party 1985-93 and an organiser of the rally wrote, "the catastrophic 6-7 per cent drop in Labour support occurred before the rally and was - I am reliably informed - known in Sheffield that night."

In April 2010, Kinnock said, "It wasn't until about ten days after the election that people started writing about the 'hubristic Sheffield rally' and all the rest of it. Given my time again, I wouldn't repeat it - but the great legend is complete, bloody rubbish."

In the end the election was a victory for the Conservatives who finished 8% ahead of Labour in voting. It was widely regarded as one of the most surprising election results of the 20th century, as most of the pollsters had predicted a narrow Labour majority or a hung parliament - with the most likely outcome of the latter being a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Labour had surged ahead in the opinion polls during 1989 and widened their lead in 1990, but the resignation of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister on 22 November that year and the election of John Major as her successor had sparked a turnaround in Tory popularity, with the Tories and Labour regularly displacing and then replacing each other at the top of the opinion polls over the next 17 months.