sentences:  The last franchise - ScotRail - was awarded only three weeks before the British general election of May 1997, in which the Labour government of Tony Blair was elected.The Labour Party had promised to halt the privatisation programme if it had won power soon enough, but O'Brien beat them to it.At the Labour party conference in September 1998, the then Secretary of State for Transport and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott MP announced that he intended to have a 'spring clean of the regulators', and O'Brien immediately offered his resignation.