Starmer: is Farage a patriot?

Keir Starmer’s keynote speech in Liverpool was punchier and more powerful than the Prime Minister’s usual interventions. The Labour leader announced that his party will scrap Tony Blair’s target that 50 per cent of children should go to university, replacing it with the aim of seeing two-thirds of kids get a degree or gold-standard apprenticeship. The PM told his party: ‘I don’t think the way we currently measure success in education… I don’t think that’s right for our times.’

Like many of his colleagues have throughout this conference, the Labour leader took aim at Nigel Farage and Reform. He questioned whether Farage is patriotic – ‘For me, patriotism is about love and pride, about serving an interest that is more than yourself, a common good’ – and asked delegates whether Reform’s goal was simply to ‘stir the pot of division’. He also doubled down on his weekend description of Farage’s policy to scrap indefinite leave to remain as ‘racist’. 

Starmer went further on flags than he has done before (as he addressed a room packed with people waving them), saying that some flag-waving is offensive. ‘This great party is proud of our flags. Yet if they’re painted alongside graffiti telling a Chinese takeaway owner to go home, that’s not pride. That’s racism.’ He told delegates: ‘Controlling migration is a reasonable goal. But if you throw bricks and smash up property that is thuggery.’ The Prime Minister is – finally – becoming better at getting to the heart of the nuances in the immigration debate, though branding naysayers as the ‘enemies of national renewal’ doesn’t sting quite in the way he might have hoped. 

Starmer calling the Reform’s immigration policy ‘racist’ on Sunday has certainly riled Farage. He gave a speech of his own this afternoon in which he slammed Labour’s rhetoric, claiming that it ‘directly threatens the safety of our elected officials and our campaigners’ and will ‘incite and encourage the radical left’. For the first time in over a year, Labour’s attack lines may actually be cutting through.