To sell Tony Blair’s New Labour to the middle class and the media, campaign gurus Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson looked to Bill Clinton’s successful campaigns in the United States. Clinton famously walked out at rallies to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” If Blair wanted his own centrist earworm, Labour’s historic anthem, “The Red Flag,” clearly wouldn’t do.

“The Red Flag” was written by Jim Connell, an Irish nationalist and trade unionist. Connell composed the song on a train ride in 1889, amid the massive London dock strike and the aftermath of the Haymarket massacre. Its original lyrics imagine revolutionaries joined in song, fighting to raise “the people’s flag” over a world where the rich resist their struggle with bullets and chains. Originally published in the left-wing periodical Justice, “The Red Flag” was sung at the Labour Party’s inaugural meeting and the close of every party conference since, with the exception of several during the Blair years.

Blair wasn’t the first Labour leader to try to ditch the anthem. In 1925, Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, held a competition to replace it, but the judges rejected all of the entries. When Blair succeeded 75 years later, his chosen alternative was “Things Can Only Get Better,” a bouncy pop hit from the Northern Irish group D:Ream. Unfortunately, things didn’t get all that much better under New Labour, and D:Ream came to regret lending its track to the government that got Britain into the Iraq War. After a supporter of Blairite leader Keir Starmer disrupted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s general election announcement with a speaker playing the song, D:Ream’s members said that their first reaction was “Not again.”