Keir Starmer has his big speech today at Labour conference and, like Rachel Reeves’s offering yesterday, the Prime Minister plans to strike an upbeat tone while warning he can’t offer ‘false hope’. He will tell the hall in Liverpool that there’s ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ if the government takes ‘tough decisions now’.
He will talk about his project of ‘national renewal’, saying:
The politics of national renewal are collective. They involve a shared struggle. A project that says, to everyone, this will be tough in the short term, but in the long term, it’s the right thing to do for our country.
This is very Labour conference language: shared struggle and collective and all that sort of thing that doesn’t mean a huge amount to voters, but it is an attempt to signal to members in the hall that Starmer is going about fixing the country in a Labour way.
He is then going to announce something that sounds a bit more Conservative, which is a crackdown on welfare fraud. This will involve more powers for the Department for Work and Pensions to investigate possibly fraudulent activity, including getting banks to hand over information about their customers who might be claiming benefits they aren’t entitled to. The department recently warned that Britons were becoming more comfortable with the idea of benefits fraud, but this is still a much easier problem for Labour to tackle than the rising benefits bill overall. Cuts to welfare more generally will come later in the year. The government expects to save £1.6 billion a year from cracking down on fraud, though, and the policy ties into the wider focus on waste.
There will be the compulsory section attacking the Tories’ legacy and insisting that things were worse than expected on coming into government. But Starmer is expected to sound more upbeat about the future. What isn’t yet clear is whether he is going to offer anything big to move the party on from the constant rows about the winter fuel payment and internal disagreements. There are lots of things going on in this new government, but Starmer and his ministers don’t seem to know how to talk about them.
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