18 September 2024

What’s the story?

Voters have lost their sense of what Starmer’s Labour is for. He must use his conference speech to tell them.

Labour’s Liverpool conference isn’t a Westminster politics pit stop. It’s not an interruption or a roadside caff for leftish passers-by. This is the ultimate audience. This is the big opportunity. How Keir Starmer performs on the banks of the Mersey in front of his home crowd will define the rest of his year.

And yes, we need a better story this autumn. After mistakes, we need a harder political edge. The polling is bad. Unforced errors have led to rotten headlines, and too many small, negative pictures mean few people now notice the big picture. The pensioners’ fuel allowance cut and stories about big-money influence have hurt and upset many of Starmer’s natural friends.

But if one of them, the New Statesman, can offer anything, it must start with perspective, and a sense of Labour history. Two conferences that followed Labour’s return to power, 1964 and 1997, both in Brighton, help explain Starmer’s task in Liverpool. They were about hope, blame and direction. Tony Blair’s “new Labour, new Britain” riffed on Harold Wilson’s “Labour’s new Britain” of 33 years earlier. It was all newness, freshness, a page turned.

But blame, too: when Wilson looked back in anger on the “13 wasted years” of the Tories, he was setting an example for Starmer and Rachel Reeves with eerie precision. Wilson complained to his blustery, rain-soaked conference, its drably besuited male delegates perched on canvas stacking chairs, about the “tired and spiritless economy” the Tories had left him. When Labour arrived to open the books, he revealed, things were even worse: “No one will now underestimate our economic inheritance, the worst in that its gravity was denied and denied again for political purposes before the election.” He went on to talk about tough choices, which in those days meant import controls, before promising they’d be lifted as soon as possible.

Blair, with a much stronger economic inheritance, naturally spoke less about it. But again, he went big on Conservative failure: “After 18 years of Tory government, of cuts and closures, of declining public services, the country was taxed more…” He, too, spoke of tough choices: “Within days of taking office, we took one of the hardest choices of all: we gave the Bank of England the right to decide interest rates… And in the short term it’s tough. Interest rates have gone up. But I say to people, better to go up now, still only by 1 per cent, than to go back to the days of the last Tory government when mortgages were at 15 per cent for a year.”

So: a new era of stability – so far, so familiar. But the great difference between Wilson/Blair and Starmer is their early emphasis on youth and vigour. Wilson, with the recent memory of old Alec Douglas-Home on the grouse moor, repeatedly used the words “dynamic”, “robust” and “thriving”.

Blair was promising a “young” country. Like Wilson he was selling ambitious transformation: “When people say sorry, that’s too ambitious, it can’t be done, I say: this is not a sorry country, we are not a sorry people. It can be done. We know what makes a successful creative economy. Educate the people. Manage the country’s finances well. Encourage business and enterprise. But each bit requires us to modernise and take the hard choices to do it. We have been a mercantile power. An industrial power. Now we must be the new power of the information age. Our goal: to make Britain… a nation, not of a few talents, but of all the talents.”

Well, we are not a young country today. It’s not just the ageing population; the public mood is knackered, winded, greying and creased. Starmer has been criticised for adding to this – and I rather agree – but his grizzled, dour demeanour chimes with a beaten-down mood. You might even call us a sorry country.

An older, wiser man for older times? Blair was only 43 when he became prime minister, and Harold Wilson, in his pouchy grey suit with his pouchy grey face, was only 48; Starmer was 61. But this isn’t just about age. It’s a political and rhetorical choice.

For those who say Starmer needs some of Blair’s ambition, it is partly already there, in big promises of the five “missions”. Can they be delivered? Starmer’s predecessors were determined to reshape government – Wilson by shackling the Treasury, Blair by strengthening the centre. For all the early stumbles, Starmer is driving ahead with an even more ambitious plan for the centre. The appointment of Michael Barber, who worked as head of Blair’s Delivery Unit, is not a return to 1997, but part of a dramatic restructuring of Whitehall that brings in new teams of outsiders to deliver Starmer’s vision.

The most consequential ministers have already started work. Wes Streeting’s appointment of Tom Riordan, who integrated health and social care when he was chief executive of Leeds City Council, as second permanent secretary in the health department is a key example. Simon Case’s reported decision to resign as cabinet secretary gives Starmer a big chance to find a radical head of the civil service.

But of course, all leaders are circumscribed by events. Wilson and Blair both enjoyed a brief honeymoon on the international stage; in the US, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, respectively, were still haloed in liberal optimism. Starmer isn’t so lucky, although with Tory hotheads urging a go-it-alone missile confrontation with Russia this winter, some of us are grateful to have cautious grown-ups in charge.

But the most important contrast with the 1964 and 1997 conferences concerns the party itself. Wilson was leading a Labour movement that had only just survived a titanic struggle between left and right. As Denis Healey put it, “our bitter internal wrangling at the time gave us a reputation for division and extremism”.

Blair was luckier because Neil Kinnock had done the hard stuff for him. But in 1997 the party was still unsure where it was heading. The cabinet was not just his loyal cheerleaders. Observing Robin Cook’s wholly unsuccessful attempt to look pleased as he hailed Blair as “the most popular prime minister for a century” is still amusing. In the background, Clare Short already looks deeply sceptical, while Gordon Brown stares stonily into the middle distance. There is nobody in this cabinet, not even Reeves or Streeting, who is a restless rival to Starmer. He did his own purging, and if anyone thinks this administration is plagued by “division”, they should go back to the history books to find out what that really looks like.

But even more so than on Blair’s big day, today’s Labour is yearning for a sense of direction. Starmer should run towards the challenge because, again, conference is his home crowd. For all the feuding and the rivalries, Labour is also a family, a community, a swathe of the British public mobilised around common values. In different ways, Wilson and Blair drew moral strength from the conference hall, even when they challenged it.

Today, the sinews linking the Labour movement with the cabinet seem weaker. In part, that’s because of the near-terminal shock ministers experienced during Corbynism – which was a child of the politics of Tony Benn, who in turn learned from the older left of the Tribunites; that story goes back long before 1964. But for any successful Labour government, the movement should represent family strength, not an alien threat to be flinched from. I am always struck at conference by the unemphatic, common-sense, everyday decency of delegates.

Too many this September have been left without a strong sense of the evolving thinking of the leadership. Starmer needs an active, voluble officer class in the Commons, constantly making his case, constantly reporting back. If Starmer’s cabinet had this, it wouldn’t have made the political error around the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance. How does a party talking about the burden falling on the broadest shoulders end up using the shoulders of poorer pensioners?

The Tories have been talking about the need to publish a social audit, but what Starmer needed was a political audit, thinking about clustering the words “winter”, “fuel” and “pensioners”. What about voters in marginal seats just won by Labour? Why was there no exemption for the 1.6 million genuinely poor pensioners affected?

And this, I think, takes us to the heart of the matter. We have a disciplined administration with hard-working, serious people all through it. But is it – are they – political enough? Who is the core audience? What are the irreducible principles? The fuel allowance row has shaken everyone’s certainties. As the government is battered by events – riots, Russia, rebellions – we haven’t got an answer yet.

The danger is drift in a hostile world, the smaller pictures crowding out the bigger one. The Prime Minister says everyone needs to be a better storyteller – including him. But that raises the question of what his story should be. In previous conference speeches, Starmer talked about the need to rebuild Britain. That was the right story. Recently, he has been talking about “social rot” and the economic trouble he has inherited. Though he has not been specific enough, and risks putting off overseas investors, on public spending he is right.

So, what is the missing narrative? It’s direction. It’s purpose. Everything hangs on the economy, on creating a Britain that’s growing, not shrivelling. We need a clear explanation of how each policy connects to that: “fixing the finances” isn’t about fixing the finances, it’s about growth. Green investment is about growth. More houses, growth. Immigration control, growth (for British workers).

You get the picture. But there is a second strand, which we will hear about from Starmer in Liverpool. Remember his response to the Grenfell report, when he told MPs he wanted “a profound shift in culture and behaviour. A rebalancing of power that gives voice and respect to every citizen, whoever they are, wherever they live.”

That “rebalancing” is Starmerism. Labour needs a narrative of why growth matters – not the “shining city on the hill”; nor a puritanical work-for-work’s-sake doctrine, but that a more prosperous country will be a more tolerant country. A country where bitter divisions are washed away, where we can discuss our past without screaming at each other. A country in which people in their twenties want to have children because they feel optimistic again, and have homes; where our common life is opening out, not closing in.

We need, in short, to know where we want to go. Both Wilson and Blair came to their Brighton conferences to explain how Labour values provided their road map. Both came to praise the past; to speak to the family. Before Wilson spoke, an aged Clement Attlee was applauded into the hall. Blair acknowledged his Liberal forbears David Lloyd George and William Beveridge, but also Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Keir Hardie, Kinnock and Michael Foot.

When the hard-right media constantly sprays extreme and despairing views of modern Britain at us, a balancing, alternative understanding – the normality of the labour movement – has never been more important. There is strength and nourishment in it.

Old acquaintances: Harold Wilson’s team sing “Auld Lang Syne” at Labour’s 1964 conference. Photo by PA Images / Alamy

Take, for instance, the revival of racism. In 1964 Wilson devoted a big chunk of his speech to electoral extremism: “On the doorstep there were Conservatives, to say nothing of their near-fascist allies, who were prepared to exploit primitive and ignorant passions for the squalid purpose of winning unworthy votes.” Blair, in the same place, talked about the kind of people who had voted Labour: “Theirs were the smiles of tolerant, broad-minded, outward-looking, compassionate people and suddenly they learned that they were in the majority after all.”

This would be described as “ordinary hope” by Marc Stears, whose UCL Policy Lab recently published a collection of essays on the subject. As Barack Obama said: “There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground, and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics.” All around Britain, people are getting on with tying their communities together. Ordinary party members; ordinary hope.

What the Labour family can offer is a defence against intimidation and distraction. That’s relevant because the final comparison to be made between this year’s conference and those of Wilson and Blair is about the media and social space. Both former prime ministers had to negotiate with right-wing media tycoons, for sure, but they enjoyed comparatively slow news rhythms, curated by professional, mostly predictable journalists.

Now, we have a jeering, untrustworthy global distraction machine, spitting out jokes, lies, fabrications and exaggerations to everyone whose thumb hovers over a smartphone. Most of the traditional Conservative press now follows the extremism of “social media”. Since the election it hasn’t bothered itself with the briefest reflective pause. It’s in the revenge business.

This was different for Wilson and Blair, who both enjoyed a relatively respectful honeymoon with the Tory press. Today’s government must live with warp-speed heckling, even though its project of rebuilding is necessarily slow. The news cycle has spiralled at one velocity in one direction; Labour’s plans move at quite a different pace in another.

These are dilemmas of timing, of concentration, of focus. The answer can only be that central narrative about the government’s purpose – economic growth for social justice – to which everything connects. Before Liverpool, a distracted public has been losing any sense of what Keir Starmer’s Labour is for. He cannot, he must not, leave the Mersey with that still true.