Occasionally a party conference speech gets remembered and quoted for years, but more often they are largely forgotten soon after conference season and this speech was in the latter category – a standard conference speech, rather than a belter. It was calm, rather than excitable; sensible, rather than audacious; realistic more than inspirational. But after three years of Boris Johnson, and with Liz Truss as PM, there is a lot to be said for calm, sensible and realistic. It was a successful speech for Starmer, in that it did the job.
There was policy in it, but the key takeway from the speech – and the feature for which it will be remembered – is what it said about Labour being back in the centreground of British politics. Starmer said:
Conference, on climate change, growth, aspiration, levelling up, Brexit, economic responsibility we are the party of the centre ground.
Once again, the political wing of the British people, and we can achieve great things.
Last year, in his conference speech, Starmer was doing battle with leftwingers in his party – almost literally, because they were heckling him loudly. Today he performed a victory lap after marginalising the Corbynite left. One feature of this was the willingness to quote Tony Blair directly. Another was the explicit messaging about being pro-Nato and pro-business, and about putting country before party. The delegates seemed to lap this up, and there was particularly loud applause when he spoke about how he had to “rip antisemitism out [of the party] by its roots”. That sounded like a reference to Jeremy Corbyn no longer being allowed to stand as a Labour candidate, and it was significant he could say this without anyone in the hall objecting.
But it was not all undiluted Blairism. Starmer included a direct appeal to leave voters in which he went further than he has gone before in adopting what he described as the aims of those voting leave in 2016, and committing to implement them. This was not a message for the remainer, centrist dad wing of Labour.
On policy, the big announcement was the creation of a new state energy company. This meets the Labour demand for nationalised energy, without committing the party to the extremely costly option of buying back energy companies sold off by the Tories. Without having seen the detail, it is hard to know how significant this might be.
The home ownership goal firms up Labour’s claim to be the party of aspiration, and his comments about a prevention-first approach to public services implies that – at least behind the scenes – some creative thinking about policy might be happening.
Starmer did not say anything about electoral reform, which the party conference voted for on Monday and which he opposes. But he made a clever concession to leftish Labour thinking when he framed support for Ukraine in terms of opposition to imperialism.
Some of the anti-Tory material was particularly well crafted, with the jibe about Kwasi Kwarteng being the best of the lot.
Overall, it was a solid, confident speech from someone whose authority as leader has never been stronger, and whose party expects to win the next election. Like Blair – but without the ego and the evangelism.
But one other aspect of Blairism was missing too. Blair, in his capacity as a “warrior against complacency”, was forever telling his party before 1997 not to take victory for granted. Starmer did not really do that today, but perhaps he should have done. A Labour election win seems closer than it has been for at least a decade, but it is not a certainty.
