‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. So wrote Dr Johnson. Sadly for the good Doctor he was an avowed Tory and so, according to the rules of Labour conference, a de facto evil and probably racist monster. Alas, if only the Labour party had heeded the great moralist’s words, we might have avoided the clatteringly embarrassing display that was the Prime Minister’s speech today.
As delegates arrived they were handed British, Welsh and Scottish flags. Even a few St George’s flags were fluttering – look away now, Emily Thornberry! Alas, no Northern Irish ones; presumably Lord Hermer thinks they’re against international law.
No. 10 had been briefing the press that Starmer was going to make a big open appeal to ordinary British patriots. To show just how normal this was going to be, a huge block of seating near the front had been reserved for something called the ‘Society of Labour lawyers’. This is an organisation which seems to vie with the Luftwaffe and the Spanish Armada in the ‘damage done to Britain’ stakes. Meanwhile the blobular mass of backbench MPs were back in the cheap seats next to the journalists, where they whooped and gave standing ovations at frequencies and decibel levels that would shame the telecasters of North Korea.
No sign of the King Under The Water though. Having prowled around the conference like a lion in a David Attenborough documentary who’d had his attempts at marking his territory flustered, Andy Burnham was nowhere to be seen.
Before the speech began, there came a broadcast video listing various government successes: slogans like ‘legal aid boosted’ and ‘Ninja swords outlawed’ beamed around the hall. Hip hip hooray, went the MP blob! Quite a few took selfies. Only Labour could try to pitch an appeal to ordinary people by filling their venue exclusively with wonkish goons who treat Darren Jones as if he’s Madonna.
The patriotic theme continued; ‘It’s an urgent task’, began Sir Keir. This was ‘a fork in the road – we can choose decency, or we can choose division’. Perhaps the single most repeated buzzphrase was ‘patriotic renewal’. Naturally, he’d said every word of this speech before. Sir Keir warned of ‘a fight for the soul of this country, and we must all rise to this challenge’. Cue more flag waving; this was Maoism courtesy of the Early Learning Centre.
The problem with all Sir Keir’s patriotic shtick is that it’s tired, reheated and a vision probably unrecognisable to 99 per cent of the people he actually needs to win round if he has any hope of keeping his job. On the subject of which, vast swathes of the speech were dedicated to Reform. Mr Farage has been given such extensive free accommodation inside Sir Keir’s head that you’d think he’d recently arrived on a dinghy. ‘Do they love our country… Our beautiful, tolerant, diverse country?’ Sir Keir bellowed. Here there was the air of Dr Frankenstein cradling his monstrous creation. He accused Reform of ‘stirring the pot of division’. The kettle might have been more appropriate, given Labour’s own record in that area.
Incidentally, shortly after Sir Keir’s call for ‘decency over division’, in an effort to show just how patriotic they were, No.10 dispatched David Lammy to claim that Nigel Farage had ‘flirted with the Hitler Youth’ when younger. I know the passage of time has never been Mr Lammy’s strong suit but it’s worth pointing out that Mr Farage was born in 1964. It’s also probably worth mentioning that smearing your opponents as Nazis doesn’t fall under most people’s definition of ‘open and inclusive’ but there we are.
The real nadir came at the end. He talked about visiting an old lady in Oldham, who was afraid of addressing issues in her community due to fear of being called racist. Over ‘a cuppa and a rich tea biscuit’, Sir Keir had listened to her concerns. He warned delegates of the dangers of patronising working-class voters, which was a bit like warning the Pope about Catholicism. Today’s Labour party essentially exists to scold and belittle ordinary people: asking their delegates not to do so is like begging water not to be wet. Not treating your voters like scum should be politics 101; it was testament to how ingrained this attitude is in Labour that Sir Keir presented it as some radical new approach, as if he were sharing the secrets of alchemy with conference. Unfortunately, moments later he went on a winsome verbal detour about ‘investing in chippies’, so patronising to working-class people that he might as well have delivered it in the accent used by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. His own advice had gone in one ear and out the other.
This tyrannous twee only got worse as he reached his climax. He turned the patronis-ometer up to maximum and praised his ‘fellow partners in the project of Britain’. By this he meant, and please do make sure you’re near a bucket when you read this, ‘the grit of the Lionesses, the swagger of Oasis’. Clearly he thinks that pumping the general public with this brain-rotting, sub-Paddington guff will stop them noticing the catastrophic problems around them. ‘I do not accept Britain is broken,’ said the man who consistently said the opposite until the day before yesterday.
He mentioned a teenager called Caitlin who’d set up a girls’ football team. A boy called Isaac who’d scrubbed off some racist graffiti, a man called George who delivers food parcels ‘with a smile’. He also went off on a weird tangent about the Euros and, in particular, how happy and unified the public had been in 1996. Gosh, what could possibly have happened in 1997 to change that? I guess we’ll just never know.
Sir Keir clearly thought this was a great cri de couer, a ‘which way Western (or Eastern) man/woman/neither’ moment for the nation. Instead it was just yet more of the same. A stale repetition of all the failed liberal mantras that got us into this mess. Here was a deputy head trying to rally the staff room after a special measures report from Ofsted, except Sir Keir showed no contrition, no recognition, no responsibility.
Unfortunately for the PM, political legacies, as his predecessors are finding out, are based on deeds not words. His claim to love this country as he gives away its territory, bankrupts its farmers, perverts its constitution and, increasingly, fails to provide justice or security to its citizens, rings ever more hollow. The last refuge of a scoundrel indeed.
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