Conference diary: Labour in Liverpool behaving like a party on course for victory
My first stop on my way to the Labour conference was the Royal Court Theatre right opposite Liverpool Lime St Station. A theatrical version of Boys from the Blackstuff is playing in the city where it is set. Alan Bleasdale’s five-part BBC TV series from 1982 has been converted into a brisk two-hour stage play by James Graham, who was born that same year.
Graham’s recent output ranges from the National Theatre’s Dear England, about Gareth Southgate the national team’s football manager, to the TV series Sherwood, exploring decades of a fallout from the miners’ strike in his native Nottinghamshire. He is so prolific, that my neighbour in the last seats available up on the balcony, another visitor from London, suggested he is turning out too much. Not judging by the quality of his output; James Graham is at the very least the David Hare of his generation.
The story of men on the dole has iconic status on Merseyside. The mostly late middle-aged audience packing the full house was primed for the catchphrases which Graham has kept in such as “Give us a job” and the confession box exchange: Priest: “I’m Dan.” Yosser Hughes: “I’m desperate, Dan”.
The original Blackstuff was seen as a riposte to early Thatcherism. It was broadcast when there were two million unemployed and de-industrialisation was gathering pace. Forty years on it feels more elegiac for a lost way of life than partisan political. Bleasdale’s original Play For Today was screened in 1978 before Thatcher’s watershed 1979 election victory. She is not a butt for vilification, in contrast to the kicking she gets in Billy Elliot, set in the North East a few years later. Bleasdale has even voiced respect for her minister Michael Heseltine who brought the regenerative garden festival to Liverpool. His characters blame accidents of fate which led to Liverpool’s decline instead. The Mersey was too shallow to accommodate container-carrying ships at its docks. “We were facing the wrong way” as trade with Europe grew.
Liverpool is a Labour city all the same, which explains why the Labour party has made a deal to bring its conference here for five years running. The Conservatives have yet to make a booking here. Last week’s fraying Conservative occupation of central Manchester felt like the end days of the Romans in Britain. It is business as usual in Liverpool as Labour attendees mingle unremarked upon with those out for the day in Albert Dock and Liverpool One.
Relations on the left were not always so amicable. The excesses of Liverpool Council inspired GBH, another Bleasdale TV drama, and prompted then Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s celebrated “Taxi Speech” denunciation, and subsequent purge, of Militant Tendency members. “You start with far-fetched resolutions…”, he bellowed at the 1985 party conference, “ …you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own members.” I was there in Bournemouth, shouldered out of the way by Liverpool Walton MP and NEC member Eric Heffer as he stormed out in protest. So, she reminisced, was Angela Eagle with her father, making up a lonely pair of cheerers in the Wallasey delegation. In 1992 Eagle was elected MP for Wallasey. She has held the seat ever since and is convinced the militant left is finished despite its second bloom during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
If proof was needed of how much has changed since Kinnock battled against unilateral disarmament it came in the annual debate on “Britain in the World”. No one heckled Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey as he spelt out full commitment to NATO and Ukraine and pledged “Britain will be better defended with Labour”. The black, red, green and white Palestinian flag was everywhere at the Corbyn-era conference in Liverpool. This year there was applause for Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy declaring “Labour utterly condemns Hamas’ appalling attack on Israel…Labour stands firmly in support of Israel’s right to defend itself”.
The outbreak of war in the Middle East will divert media attention from Labour’s conference. This is not a worry for the leadership. They increasingly look upon themselves as the next government – with an appropriate sense of priorities. They had already decided that there would be no dramatic fresh announcements to disturb the serenity of their current lead in the polls.
Rachel Reeves presented herself as Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, backed up by a brief video endorsement from former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney. Reeves worked there before his time. She made no significant new announcements. Her doctrine was “securonomics”, assuring “working people” that Labour can be trusted to look after their money. Her proposal of “a Covid corruption commissioner” underlines the fecklessness with which she believes the Conservative government has behaved and the “iron discipline” she intends to impose on spending. She adapted Ronald Reagan’s classic 1980 challenge declaring voters should ask themselves “Do you and your family feel better off than you did thirteen years ago?” (When David Cameron became Prime Minister). Her orderly oration, frequently interrupted by applause, looked like a Tory Chancellor’s conference speech of old. Labour apparatchiks joked that Reeves alone got more standing ovations than all the ministers together last week in Manchester.
Not much more of import is expected at the conference, except for Starmer’s leader’s speech on Tuesday afternoon. He will be auditioning as the next prime minister. No one is expecting him to change style. Everything he has said around the conference points to him turning in a similar performance to Rachel Reeves – his closest political ally. He will denounce the chaos which Labour allege the Conservative government has created in the UK. He will say that he is ready and willing to serve.
“So is this like 1992 or 1997?” a roving microphone wielder asked Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s communications guru. “It’s certainly not ‘97, it’s ‘96”, he muttered. Labour has got over a pang of panic last week and does not now expect Rishi Sunak to call a general election until May or Autumn next year. There is no Starmer version of “Blairmania”. PR experts claim they are not finding positive enthusiasm for Labour – just negativity about the Conservatives. Yet voters are still backing Labour heavily in opinion polls. That could be enough. Starmer seems to think so. He told journalists that to get to Number Ten he needs to go on offering voters “reassurance and hope” – exactly what the Boys from the Black Stuff were looking for in vain back then.
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