Sir Keir Starmer couldn’t offer his Labour Party boosterism, but he did offer them reassurance.
In a policy-light speech of just under an hour, the Prime Minister sought – and largely succeeded – to reset the gloomy political narrative that he’s been responsible for pumping out. His turn wasn’t laugh-a-minute, although there were some well delivered jokes. But it did show the party in the hall and the voters watching at home that he is serious about the upcoming economic sacrifices eventually producing results.
With a grim Budget looming, today was about making a convincing argument that this isn’t austerity 2.0. That Labour are not cutting spending to shrink the state for ideological reasons, but only because they have been forced into the “tough” decisions left by the “rot” of the Conservative administration.
He deliberately rebuffed the 2010 Tory phrase, “We’re all in it together”, to demonstrate he is listening to the voices both in his party and around the country pleading for investment in public services.
At the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool there has also been an extraordinarily unsubtle softening up exercise going on behind the scenes, with hints that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will alter the Government’s borrowing rules to allow for greater investment.
In his keynote address, the Prime Minister promised “light at the end of this tunnel” amid criticism that his own mithering has made economic confidence even worse. But Starmer’s doom and gloom was apparently all part of a cunning plan. He was trying to show he had deliberately set out the scale of the Government’s fiscal challenge, and it was now time to set out the next part of the story.
Starmer mounted a defence of his downbeat rhetoric over the past nine weeks, describing it as an honest prescription that would resonate with a public fed up with broken promises. “I know this country is exhausted by and with politics,” he said. “I know that the cost of living crisis drew a veil over the joy and wonder in our lives and that people want respite and relief, and may even have voted Labour for that reason.
“I know after everything you’ve been through how hard it is to hear a politician ask for more, but deep down I think you also know that our country does need a long-term plan and we can’t turn back. The state of our country is real.”
Of the three policy announcements from the speech, the most eye-catching came when Starmer said he would use planning reforms to make sure veterans, domestic abuse victims and care leavers will be given better access to social housing. These groups will no longer have to prove they have a local connection to an area and can apply to any local authority anywhere in the UK for life. This was a clever policy designed to appeal to the patriotic “hero voters” that Labour needs to consolidate to hold on to power.
Hero Voters are the category who switched away from Labour in 2019 because they felt rejected by former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s values, but were won back in 2024 by Starmer’s focus on key economic concerns, including affordable housing and job security. Non-graduates were often pro-Brexit and keenly patriotic. Marrying help for veterans with help for the most vulnerable won plaudits in the hall and will go down a storm with this section of voters and beyond.
But the speech, inevitably, had a few hiccups. In a slip of the tongue, he appeared to call for the return of “sausages” not “hostages” from Gaza to Israel, which led to ripples of amusement among the press corps, kettled together in a block of the audience. Time for a remake of the classic Walls advert featuring a dog.
A passage of the speech about violent far right thugs drew a standing ovation from the crowd. By and large, it was a speech without incident. There was only one lone pro-Gaza protester and he was dealt with in seconds by crowd stewards and rebuffed by the clearly pre-prepared line from Starmer: “I think this guy has a pass for the 2019 conference.” Having expected a protest of one sort or another, it was almost a relief when it was out of the way.
Written mostly by Alan Lockey, the author of the last two conference speeches with help from other senior aides, and at around 60 minutes this was a much tighter speech without the bagginess of earlier years. A senior party source told i in advance of the speech: “Under an hour and they call you a lazy bastard, over an hour they call you a long-winded bastard.”
In a section which felt authentically Starmer, the premier said he is “guilty” of being the working class man made good, reminding listeners that it’s the people who don’t break through who should be championed. That was in a section of the speech which referenced his love of classical music including Beethoven and Brahms. He said that even now he turns to classical music in the moments when the “reviews aren’t that good”. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow,” he deadpanned.
There was another deliberate moment of humour from the Prime Minister, who recalled a family visit to the Lake District last year. The couple who owned a cottage where Starmer holidayed as a child found him loitering outside and invited him in for a trip down memory lane. It was only later the husband of the couple clocked who Starmer was. The wife politely remarked “Oh, if I’d known that you were a politician, I’d have pushed you down the stairs when I had the chance!”
For Starmer, the joke encapsulates what his team worry is the “calcified cynicism” endemic to Britain’s attitudes to politicians as a class. Here, the Prime Minister was begging for more time to deliver. He bought off the audience in the hall and earned several spontaneous standing ovations amid ones that looked planned, plus a rolling ovation for the last section of his speech.
The Labour Party was reassured. He’ll be hoping the country gives him a break too.
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