Keir Starmer has said he is “bomb-proofing” all of his policy pledges to ensure a Labour government does not break promises, as he defended the lack of new announcements in his speech to the party conference.
On a broadcast round the day after his speech in Liverpool appealed to disgruntled Conservative voters to switch support, the Labour leader said his main feeling was defiance when a protester invaded the stage at the start of the address and sprinkled him with glitter.
“My overwhelming sense was: I’ve waited four years to get the Labour party from where we landed in 2019 to make this speech, which is very important to set up a positive case for Labour, and I was not going to be deflected from that,” Starmer told BBC One’s Breakfast.
“I had bits of glitter still in my hair, and I think on my shoulders as well, but we’ve worked so hard to change this Labour party.”
Quizzed about the lack of new policies, Starmer said this was very much the aim. “We put a lot of detail out through this conference, but I felt, when I was thinking about this speech, that just another bit of policy wasn’t what was needed,” he said.
“This needed to be an emotional connection with the future, a sense of: ‘Does Keir Starmer, does Labour, understand what people have been through these past 13 years?’
“I think too many people feel that after the last 13 years, almost the hope has been beaten out of the voters by the government, and we had to restore that.”
On one pledge made during the conference and reiterated in the speech, to build 1.5m new homes over a five-year period, Starmer said that while this was similar to Conservative promises, the difference was Labour would do it.
“The question isn’t whether the Conservatives will put a number up. They have. But they’ve consistently failed to deliver,” he said.
“What I’ve put alongside the number that we pledged yesterday is a plan for delivery, a determination to ensure that we bulldoze through the planning restrictions, and that we work with developers to make sure this is delivered.
“There was something very important that came out of yesterday, which is I am going through a process of bomb-proofing every single thing that we put to the electorate.
“After the last 13 years, I’m not prepared to have an incoming Labour government, should we be privileged to serve, that doesn’t deliver on its promises. So I have robustly tested everything.
“I don’t think it’s fair or right to ask the British public to go through more broken promises. So I will only put forward proposals if I am satisfied that we’re clear what we want to achieve, that we’ve got a plan for delivery, and we have already identified the partners who will deliver with us.”
In a later interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Starmer dismissed the idea that reforms to planning rules were a slightly technical focus for a Labour leader’s speech.
“It’s about social justice,” he said. “It is absolutely about social justice. Owning your own home is hugely important, particularly for working-class families.
“When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money … We sometimes struggled to make ends meet, but we owned our own home. And that gave us huge security as a family.”
In his speech, Starmer said he wanted to improve conditions for people growing up in working-class families who faced self-doubt, who “will have heard a nagging voice inside, saying: ‘No, this isn’t for you – you don’t belong here, you can’t do that.’”
Asked if he had been like this, Starmer agreed: “When I was growing up. I didn’t even envisage I’d be sitting in the studio with you as leader of the Labour party, let alone to have the opportunity to be the privilege to be prime minister.
“And there will be many working-class families, children who have as the biggest barrier not their talent, but this sense that this isn’t for them, that it’s for others. And I think it’s really important that we address that.”
