BRIGHTON, England -- Brit-ish Labour party activists are confident that Tony Blair will lead them to their first general election victory in more than 20 years.


Two people received a rapturous reception at the annual conference of Britain's main opposition party on Tuesday. One was Blair. The other was a recently widowed and tearful pensioner, Mary Wilson, whose husband Harold was the last Labour leader to be elected prime minister in a general election in 1974.


At a conference in Scarborough in 1963, Wilson launched Labour's election campaign which the following year gave the party its first taste of power since 1951.


There are many parallels between the speech Wilson delivered then and the one Blair, seeking to end the Conservative Party's grip on power at an election due by mid-1997, gave in Brighton.


Both came from young leaders posing as the representatives of a new political generation.


Wilson was 47 in 1963, Blair is 42. Both said they wanted not merely to win the next election, but to make Labour the natural party of government in Britain.


Both had the comfort of knowing that their often fractious party was so desperate for power that Labour delegates anxious for grandiose government spending plans were ready to keep quiet to give voters an impression of cohesion.


And both pledged to use a coming technological revolution to produce a more equal, prosperous and moral society.


"Knowledge in this new world is power, information is opportunity, and technology can make it happen if we plan and think ahead for the future," Blair said.


It was an echo of the 1963 Wilson speech in which he pledged to harness "the white heat of this [technological] revolution" to create a new Britain where time-honored work practices would be scrapped.


But Wilson's story contains a warning for Blair. In government, party differences resurfaced and he was soon spending more time mending splits in his cabinet than striking out in bold new policy areas.


Before he was defeated in 1970, the enthusiasm with which Labour took power had been reduced to a dull cynicism. Labour regained power in 1974 but Wilson resigned two years later.


Beneath the surface in Brighton, resentment also seethes among Labour left-wing delegates.


They accuse Blair of trimming too far to the center of politics, of an authoritarian style of leadership which Blair joked had earned him the nickname of Stalin.


"I joined this party to change society, not to run capitalism more efficiently than the Tories," the far-left miners' union leader Arthur Scargill said despairingly.


Blair hopes the constitutional changes he has forced through will help him to control the party more easily than Wilson.