What does the Labour party stand for? That’s the big question that Keir Starmer needs to answer this week, and so far it’s proving rather more difficult to answer than you might imagine. Its frontbenchers are mostly working on policies that won’t be announced this week, so they are resorting to talking about the party’s heritage and listing the increasing number of elections the party has lost. A line that I’ve heard from a number of shadow ministers on the fringe over the past few days is ‘we need to learn from the losses of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019’. I’ve heard rather fewer assertions about winning the next election, though. And where there are announcements they seem entirely random rather than part of a wider attempt to tell voters what kind of party Labour is under Starmer.
Last night at a fringe meeting organised by the Fabian Society, the woman in charge of Labour’s policy review, Anneliese Dodds, didn’t offer many clues about where the party is headed either. She largely answering questions from the audience with the reassurance that their particular issue was being considered by the policy review. She was joined by John Healey, the party’s shadow defence secretary, who has edited a pamphlet about how Labour can win the working class vote again. He explained that both Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner had decided to prioritise ‘working families’ and that this week they would ‘start to’ answer the questions of ‘what sort of country we are going to be’ as well as Britain’s ‘place in the world’.
Where there are announcements they seem entirely random
He was up again this morning to give his speech in the conference hall along with shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy. Both of them continued to talk as much about Labour’s past as they did about what it was going to stand for in the future. Healey listed the reasons Labour should see itself as a party of defence:
We are a party with deep roots in defending this country. Throughout the last century, it’s been working men and women who’ve served on the frontline. Fighting and sometimes dying for our country. It was Labour that established Nato and the British deterrent — commitments that have been unshakeable for every Labour leadership since the end of the Cold War.We are a party with deep pride in forging international law and security. The Geneva Conventions, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty were all signed by Labour prime ministers.
‘Unshakeable’ was doing a lot of work in this context: Labour has indeed never abandoned its policy of supporting the Trident nuclear deterrent, but Jeremy Corbyn rendered official party policy pointless when he declared in a broadcast interview that he would not press the nuclear button if he became prime minister. Perhaps the Corbyn era was the reason Healey felt he needed to go back so far into Labour’s history in his speech in order to present the 2015–2020 period as a blip rather than a firm direction for the party.
Nandy was punchier — at least in a Labour context — arguing that it was important for a government to continue engaging with difficult countries and regimes. She included China on that list, saying Labour would stand for:
Engaging with a Chinese government essential to progress on climate change while standing firm in defence of human rights, freedom and security… The Tories say we can turn our backs. Conference, they are wrong… Building walls is easy, building bridges — in the world, in the country and, let’s be honest, with each other — that’s the hard part.
The way in which frontbenchers are talking about Labour’s identity and the challenges it faces suggests that they don’t think the membership has quite accepted how much the party needs to change — and that they are softly coaxing it towards this change. But there isn’t a vast amount of time in which to do this.
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