Keir Starmer’s speech is a breakthrough

Only two things mattered about yesterday’s conference speech by Keir Starmer – that he was heckled by the far left and the fact that he hit the right note on economic security and crime.

The heckles were wonderful political theatre – and gold dust for the Starmer project. Although the themes of the shouts from the floor included Starmer’s attitude to Brexit, the general tone was recognisably Corbynite, including anger about the £15 minimum wage which has been embraced by the far left at the conference. The loudest and most persistent shouting from the floor began while Starmer was talking about his mother’s lifelong battle with Still’s disease. Bad look, hecklers.

Although Starmer’s riposte – “Shouting slogans, or changing lives, Conference?” – might not have had the electrifying drama of Neil Kinnock’s stand-off with Militant during the Labour conference of 1985, there are some useful parallels. It illustrated that Starmer is ruthless enough to take on his critics.

In the mid-eighties, under Kinnock, the party had begun to liberate itself from the perception that it did not respect the rule of law and had become an instrument of the revolutionary left. “I’ll tell you and you’ll listen,” Kinnock told Militant’s Derek Hatton on that day in October 1985 in reply to shouts from the floor. Kinnock’s conference speech that year and his open confrontation with the Militant Tendency marked the beginning of the end of the far left’s attempt to take over the party.

Starmer, too, seems to understand that the journey back to power will be tough. He has to make sure he has the right blend of personalities at the top. He’s getting there – in Rachel Reeves, for example, he has found a decent Shadow Chancellor. He has to show that, at every opportunity, he is marginalising the wing of the party that yearns for a return to Corbynism, albeit repackaged with a younger figurehead.

Yes, the speech was too long and sagged towards the end. But that doesn’t matter a jot – it’s the clips cut up and spliced together that are more likely to get through to voters on social media and on the news bulletins. His sections on crime and education were powerfully done – weaving together his personal achievements as Director for Public Prosecutions and well-judged tub-thumping outrage on poor school performance. This section was New Labour redux.

Starmer also married the visionary and the pragmatic in a manner that brought in Labour’s 20th century history. In a passage on “the brilliance of scientific invention” and the possible applications of technologies such as robotics in healthcare, he invoked Keir Hardie’s 1914 address, Sunshine of Socialism: “By the aid of the X-rays we can now see through rocks and stones… And so, in like manner, our Socialist propaganda is revealing hidden and hitherto undreamed of powers and forces in human nature.” Starmer delivered the 2021 update nicely enough, sans socialist propaganda: “We have to recognise the scale of what is happening and put the power of smart government behind it.”

Starmer’s gambit was an elegant harking back to both the early 20th century, a period when the Labour party made its first progress towards power, and the sixties, when the party last won a solid majority in the pre-Blair era. PM Harold Wilson, in his “White Heat of Technology” speech to Labour conference used science to take on the “natural Luddites” in the broader Labour movement.

Wilson wrote afterwards that he had intended to “replace the cloth cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour.” 

In marrying together Hardie’s vision of liberation through technology working in harmony with the manpower of the industrial working class and Wilson’s progressive, technocratic mindset, Starmer has signalled that the spirit of a future Labour government, if it happens, will combine both cloth cap and lab coat.

For the Tories, Michael Gove, and the able policy guru Neil O’Brien MP drafted in to help at the department for levelling up and somehow solving the housing crisis, will need to add some real ideological heft to the current government’s skeletal agenda that is mainly, so far, made up of Boris Johnson soundbites. Starmer is starting to build a decent-looking alternative.

The relative success of this year’s conference means that the Labour leader has earned the right to be given a fair hearing by the British public. There are many challenges to come – but he’s finally made a proper start.