“The return of the sausages”: well, I never thought I’d hear a prime minister calls for that in a party conference speech. Of course, Keir Starmer meant the Israeli hostages in Gaza, and he was quite right to demand that Hamas hand them over. But the moment captured the bathos of a speech whose solemnity was punctured by its own glaring flaws.
Yes, there were passages that struck their intended target. He was right to draw a sharp distinction between active “service” and mere “government”. It was important to spell out that the UK is (or should be) “a country that won’t expect you to change who you are to get on”. It was good to hear his promise that veterans in need, young care leavers and victims of domestic abuse will be housed. His critique of right-wing populism – “the politics of easy answers…mining the pits of division” – was also spot on.
Yet the speech, which occasionally descended into word salad, was less than the sum of its parts. It lacked a compelling story, or an overarching vision for Britain. And this rhetorical failure dramatised a much broader problem.
Starmer’s success reflects the stunning volatility of modern politics... But the fickleness of modern electorates cuts both ways
The first annual gathering of a party that returned to government less than 12 weeks ago, with a working majority of 167, after 14 years out of office, ought to be grand political celebration. Yet, to a peculiar extent, Labour’s conference in Liverpool has more closely resembled an exercise in damage limitation: a hasty course correction to counter the impression that the new administration has only gloom, pain and hardship to offer the voters. “There is,” Starmer insisted today, “light at the end of the tunnel”.
To add to his difficulties, the week before the conference was dominated by unedifying reports of senior ministers, including the PM himself, accepting all manner of freebies. So much for the party that promised to clear away all the “Tory rot” to which Starmer referred so sternly in his speech.
It is still not clear whether he recognises the scale or the specific nature of the challenges he faces. His success reflects the stunning volatility of modern politics: in four years, he was able to steer a party that, in 2019, suffered its worst defeat since 1935, to a landslide victory. But the fickleness of modern electorates cuts both ways.
According to a More in Common poll this week, 60 percent of voters expect Labour to lose the next general election; of Labour supporters, 17 percent already regret their vote.
To be fair, this is not entirely Starmer’s fault. The last eight years of Conservative mayhem have nurtured a political culture in which disappointment with government has become a reflex and disillusionment is the default position.
But that is the context in which he chose to run for the highest office in the land, and the core of his promise to his voters was a pledge to turn cynicism into trust. So it was depressing to hear Starmer try to one-up the Brexiteers by promising an even more macho border policy, claiming that “taking back control is a Labour argument”. What does that even mean?
Worrying, too, that technology barely got a look-in, and then only as an orphaned word on its own. At times, Starmer seems less a change-maker than a creature of the political paradigm that has prevailed for the past 45 years. And that paradigm is simply not fit for purpose in the 21st century.
The challenges of inequality, climate change, health care, longevity permanent digital revolution and increasing population mobility require entirely new thinking, not only on fiscal issues, but on the role, nature and organisation of government. Incremental change and a steady hand are simply insufficient to the task.
When he says that “we have to be a great reforming government”, because there is so little money to spend, one wonders if he has been watching the endless reorganisations of the public services in the past 40 years, and how much more he expects to squeeze out of the system. Why rule out the wealth tax that, sooner or later, is going to have to be introduced to help match revenue to contemporary need?
For all his declared love of “difficult decisions”, Starmer looks like a man who thinks that patience, a readiness to put up with unpopularity and a love of detail will be enough. They are all, of course, preconditions of success. But the mountain that he faces requires political imagination and will of a much higher order.
