Last year’s Labour conference speech saw Keir Starmer transformed – in a shower of fairytale glitter, thanks to the efforts of an errant protester – from an opposition leader to a Prime Minister in waiting. This year’s speech necessitated a similarly impressive magic trick, albeit one of a different flavour. As my colleague George Eaton wrote this morning, Starmer needed to use to today to “recast his image” and add definition to the new Labour government, while also injecting some hope and optimism into the doom and gloom narrative he’s settled into over the summer.
Rachel Reeves made a start yesterday, with a quite literal change of tone (she was smiling so emphatically you could hear the renewed positivity in her voice) and a promise of better days to come if the government made the difficult choices now. Her hint at further investment helped frame the government’s message in a sunnier light. Would Starmer do the same?
The answer, in a speech that lasted almost a full hour, was yes and no. Or perhaps yes, but in a radically different way. The prime minister began upbeat, marking the biggest conference attendance ever in Labour’s history and the party’s election victory in July. He smiled as he listed the government’s achievements so far, inspiring the first of many standing ovations from the crowded conference hall, and confidently dismissed the scandals and criticisms that have dominated coverage in recent weeks, describing them as “mere glitter on a shirt cuff. It’s never distracted me before, and it won’t distract me now.”
But Starmer is more suited to the serious than the starry-eyed. (As one conference attendee put it yesterday, he has the classic disposition of an Arsenal fan.) And the story he had to tell today was a serious one. It was a story of where Britain is now, where the government wants to take us, and how we get from one place to the other.
“Britain is no longer sure of itself. Our story is uncertain,” the Prime Minister explained, his tone sombre. The chaos and disappointment of the past 14 years has left us with a country where people can no longer be sure that things will be better for their children than they were for them. The list of everything that feels broken is almost too long to go through. People are exhausted, and sick of being told they need to sacrifice yet more. So: how would Labour change that?
The answer tied together things we have already heard from this Labour government many times before. Stabilise the economy. Fix the foundations. Rebuild the country, in a way that is “built to last, built with pride, but above all built together”. But Starmer’s narrative was different this time. He put the decisions his government has already made and the policies on its agenda into the context of that one overarching mission, acknowledging the potential unpopularity of some of the moves but attempting to reframe them under the banner of: “What will we get to show for it?”
This included building more prisons as part of the government’s strategy on law and order, and electricity pylons as part of upgrading the energy infrastructure – regardless of whether people opposed to these things near their homes. It included looking at the immigration system in the context of Britain’s skills shortage and taking steps to address it, even if businesses object or opponents of immigration still rage about numbers being too high. It included linking planning reform with the fate faced by homeless veterans, young care leavers and victims of domestic abuse, highlighting starkly how opposition to development has driven tragic consequences on an individual level and social decay throughout Britain.
And it included the first real explanation we’ve had for the decision to restrict the winter fuel allowance to only the poorest pensioners. After a month of Labour politicians shaking their heads sadly and suggesting they had no choice, which has done little to help them win the argument, Starmer tried a different tack. He put the decision in the context of stabilising public finances, in order to grow the economy and invest more in services, so that pensioners would in fact be better off in the long-term. People might still oppose the move. They might challenge the logic of that narrative. But the decision now sits within a wider framework that has an end goal in sight – an end goal voters can understand even if it causes pain in the immediate term.
In the run-up to this speech, Starmer had been criticised for not doing enough to outline the “sunlit uplands” people had in mind when they voted Labour in July, for not offering a sense of light at the end of the tunnel. That was a mistake, and it was one this speech sought to reverse. “If we take tough long-term decisions now,” the prime minister argued, “that light at the end of this tunnel, that Britain that belongs to you, we get there much more quickly.” For the unconvinced, he continued: “If you bury your head because things are difficult, your country goes backwards.”
This was not a speech bursting with optimism. Starmer dismissed “false hope” and “the politics of easy answers”. He called for patience, telling the audience: “We will turn our collar up and face the storm.” The speech all but promised further pain in the upcoming Budget, more unpopularity for the new government – we will all soon become as sick at the phrase “tough choices” as we were at Starmer’s “toolmaker” refrain.
But Starmer was right about one thing. Those listening to the doom and gloom rhetoric Labour has leant into these past two months have indeed been responding: “What will we get to show for it?” This speech offered the beginnings of an answer. It wasn’t a magic trick. More the magician levelling with the audience that magic tricks – politics of easy answers, deceptively appealing populist solutions – won’t work this time. And inviting them to come with him to find something that can.
[See also: Can Keir Starmer reset his government’s image?]
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