Keir Starmer gave a formidable speech to the Labour conference today. It was easily good enough to inspire the party’s natural supporters to cut him some slack over the bumpy months ahead.
In doing so, the Prime Minister also clawed back some of the ground lost through the needless mistakes that have afflicted his rookie administration and shifted the dial just a bit from doom-mongering and towards hope for the future.
Starmer’s spirit of doggedness may be the key to explaining how far he has got in life without exhibiting any sign of natural brilliance
While he will never be a Boris Johnson-level natural communicator, Starmer nonetheless has improved his delivery very markedly to the point of it becoming perfectly serviceable. The PM even dealt with a late heckler with aplomb, claiming the chap must have got in with a pass to the 2019 (Corbyn-era) party conference.
This performance uplift brought to mind one of those gruesome life-advice aphorisms which do the rounds on social media from time to time: hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Time and again, Starmer pledged not to be deflected from his long-term missions by short-term squalls. ‘The weak and cowardly fantasy of populism is water off a duck’s back,’ he proclaimed.
This spirit of doggedness, which may be the key to explaining how far he has got in life without exhibiting the first sign of any natural brilliance, will make him a tough opponent for any Tory – or indeed Nigel Farage – to dislodge.
In his final peroration he finally got specific about what his ‘mission-led’ government is going to achieve: people will have more cash in their pockets and better access to the NHS. Town centres are going to be ‘thriving’ and streets safe. Not so much the land of milk and honey as a land of security and money.
The bad news for supporters of the Starmer project is that the policy agenda which is meant to deliver these outcomes is a very mixed bag – and that is to be charitable. Perhaps planning liberalisation really will deliver a productivity-enhancing uplift in infrastructure and housing. Starmer’s messages about communities needing to host prisons, extra housing and new electricity pylons above ground were impressively blunt, after all.
But can something called ‘new foundation apprenticeships’ really ‘eradicate inactivity and unemployment for our young people once and for all’, as he claimed of it? One has one’s doubts. And how is making Ofsted reports more opaque and less useful when tracking the path of school standards going to improve the education system? (Clue: it won’t). And bad-mouthing the Tory Rwanda plan in front of an audience of supporters is one thing, but controlling illegal immigration without any kind of deterrent will require a lot more than doggedness. And putting the headquarters of ‘Great British Energy’ in Aberdeen won’t make electricity any cheaper.
On immigration in general, Starmer is in a far more comfortable place than are the Tories. He lambasted them ruthlessly for having given voters ‘the exact opposite’ to the control of immigration that Brexit was meant to deliver, arguing they had done this deliberately because they are ‘the party of the uncontrolled market’. ‘Taking back control is a Labour argument,’ he declared. Given falls in net migration from the gargantuan numbers presided over by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are already locked-in, he has in his possession a cosh for beating the official opposition over the head with for some time to come.
On immigration, Starmer is in a far more comfortable place than are the Tories
But two threads running through his speech seem most unlikely to bear the strain expected of them. The first was the idea that the Tories failed economically because they did stupid things that are intrinsic to Toryism. In fact, the Covid lockdowns – that Starmer wanted more of – and an investment slump likely caused by Brexit getting blocked and its terms therefore remaining uncertain for years on end – a process which Starmer was up to his neck in – were the biggest avoidable setbacks.
The second was that he would be able to renew Britain because he had been able to renew the Labour party and steer it into power. Actually, his victory was one of blankness – largely based on not seeming threatening and therefore allowing habitual Tory voters to feel it was safe to go on strike. Turning Britain into a richer, more unified and happier country will be far more difficult than that.
Nonetheless Keir Starmer’s inaugural keynote conference speech as PM was one of the least disastrous things to have happened to the new government so far. If that sounds like damning it with faint praise then so be it.
Comments