Of the 20 Labour conferences I have attended, this year’s was—by a distance—the most successful in raising the party’s mood. The paradox is that it has been transformed without anything much changing, in terms of specific policies. Rather, Keir Starmer and his team have changed the light that’s shone on their offer: ditching the unsparing glare of a strip bulb for the warm if selective glow of a dimmer switch.
Still, this shift is overdue, and a precondition for the opposition to secure any real mandate to make change happen.
Despite a year of huge poll leads and a breakthrough Scottish byelection just days before, I arrived in Liverpool to find spirits strangely flat. Before the big speeches, I chatted with activists on a host of stands. Some were trying hard to be grateful for small things, others admitted that their only motivation now was negative: booting the Tories out.
The Disability Labour campaigner sought solace in a procedural commitment to involve disabled voices in policy development, but worried what the leadership’s rhetorical tick about “working people” implied for his more severely disabled brother, for whom working wasn’t an option. The man from the local Liverpool constituency party bemoaned an abject lack of the optimism he could recall before Tony Blair came to power. One young woman from Labour Students expected a bit of a struggle to get most of those in her university halls to vote; another—studying engineering—railed against the idea that so little could be done about Brexit, which had robbed her of exciting career options.
The despondency was not hard to understand. Until this week, Starmer had pursued the classic politicians’ trick of playing to the base to secure his candidacy for power, before swerving away from it to focus on cautious swing voters in the country. But he had taken it to shameless new heights.
Activists understood that a dash of patriotism was a shrewd corrective to Starmer’s spell in Jeremy Corbyn’s top team, and also that the extraordinary costs of the pandemic would have implications for what a future Labour government could afford. But they had not expected their “unity” leadership candidate to ditch the tax rises for top earners he had proposed expressly on the basis that there could be “no stepping back from our core principles”—and at precisely the moment when the arithmetic made them more necessary. Nor indeed the lurch from “public services should be in public hands” to vague talk about private health providers.
While the political scene was dominated by the implosion of Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss, anyone paying attention to Labour witnessed a dizzying and seemingly endless march to the right.
As recently as July, I wrote a piece in Prospect which sought to balance the latest trio of reversals—on rent controls, international aid, and draconian Tory legislation on political boycotts—by highlighting three areas where Labour might yet do something bold: axing the impoverishing two-child welfare limit, cutting the price at which councils could buy land for housebuilding and expanding workplace rights. Within weeks, Starmer had expressly stated he would keep the two-child limit and demoted Lisa Nandy, who had been leading the drive on cheap land for homes, while the papers were full of stories about how all the extra workplace rights were being diluted.
This drift continued until days before conference, as the party pointedly ditched its pledge to strip private schools of their charitable status.
The only way resolve was being projected was in the form of retreat.
Suddenly, however, all that has changed.
Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves this week gave solid Labour speeches which would not have sounded out of place if neither Tony Blair nor Jeremy Corbyn had ever happened, and we were back in the Labour conference hall of John Smith.
Fire was turned away from the left inside the hall and towards the right outside it. Witness the unapologetic decision to ditch the costly performative cruelty of the government’s Rwanda policy, without waiting for the courts or anything else.
Even more revealing, however, were the things that weren’t said.
Reeves sensibly qualified her talk of public investment and VAT on private schools with promises of prudent financial stewardship—but not with any repeat of her recent reassurances to the wealthy that they would be spared painful taxes.
Starmer talked of saving the NHS through investment and reform aimed particularly at preventative care—but avoided all the usual code words for inviting private providers into the health service.
On workers’ rights, the meek summer talk of careful consultations that would respect “the breadth of employment relationships in the UK” now yielded to blunt platform promises to ban zero-hour contracts, from Starmer and Reeves alike.
If Starmer’s previous rightward march was an extreme example of a familiar pattern, this second—more modest, but unmissable—lean back to the left is less familiar. It may cost him a little enthusiasm on the Times comment pages, and among its most devoted readers. But most of the plutocrat-owned press is so irredeemably hostile already that I can’t see too much damage being done to his standing among its Middle England readers. The new approach enables Starmer to go into an election with more enthused activists, hopes of somewhat better turnout among the young, and less danger of haemorrhaging idealists to the Greens.
Presumably the focus groups—about which Starmer offered a nice little self-effacing quip in his speech—suggested this trade was worthwhile.
It is far easier to hope for change in this new warm-glow lighting, but the arrival of power will soon switch the punishing strip light back on. That is most obviously true in relation to public spending, which in truth remains the key to most hopes of Labour members, and yet will be tight even if the leadership wisely avoids saddling itself with further self-denying fiscal ordinances.
But it will be true, too, in relation to foreign affairs, once Labour’s positions become national policy. As political journalist Steve Richards demonstrates in his eloquent new post-war history, Turning Points, the fiasco of British involvement in Iraq derived from Blair’s shallow insistence on approaching international relations through the prism of domestic political calculation. Listening to a one-time human rights lawyer like Starmer decline to urge a grieving Israel to show restraint towards the people of Gaza, as its ministers deny them water and talk of “human animals”, you could hear that happening again: an over-correction of the Hamas-indulgent Corbyn position, which had itself only ever prevailed within Labour as an over-correction of Blair.
And it will be true, too, when the big political success of this week—highlighting bold housing targets—moves from theory to practice. Starmer’s suggestion that he will crack down on MPs who stand firm against unpopular developments in their constituencies could easily break his brittle (though for the moment total) command over the party if tested when times are hard.
Nonetheless, Starmer can be content that the most obvious looming problems are now those he will face when he has already won power. And this week, he gave permission to the people who will carry him there to hope that Britain can change.
