Starmer promises a Labour decade of national renewal

Sir Keir Starmer set out his stall for what he termed a decade of national renewal in his speech to the Labour party conference today.

Starmer managed to turn an early hiccup – a protester throwing glitter over the Labour leader and shouting about democracy and crisis – into a gift. He was quick to claim that his party had changed. His phrase “power not protest” was met with a standing ovation.

He took off his jacket and the dusting of glitter on his shoulders was a reminder that in the current optimistic mood, the Labour leader feels relaxed and confident enough to deal smoothly with any inconvenience. 

He jested that he felt sorry for Manchester having to host the circus that was the Tory conference last week and compared the Blair era with the recent years of Tory rule: “Thirteen years of things can only get better versus 13 years of things have only got worse”.

Against what he called 13 years of Tory decline, Starmer promised to answer the question: “Why Labour?”

“We are the healers…we are the modernisers…we are the builders,” he claimed, sounding almost evangelical. Starmer was strong on Israel, defending unequivocally its right to defend its people and saying that Labour has ripped anti-semitism out of the party, root and stem.

At conference in Liverpool, there was no escaping the mantra “Labour is the party of change”. But today Starmer told the country what the party used to be and what under him it is now trying to become: “A simple labour philosophy – no longer in thrall to gesture politics.”

He said Labour is a party of service.

In one of the most eloquent sections of the speech, Starmer invoked the party’s history to give the current moment an added sense of importance: “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology, that in 1945, to rebuild a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice, then in 2024, it will have to be all three.”

On green policies, he said: “Where Rishi Sunak says row back, I say speed ahead.” There were promises of funding to create New Towns and build 1.5 million homes. In an implicit jibe at Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murthy who has minimised tax through her non-domiciled status, Starmer promised to close that loophole and divert the savings into reforming the NHS. 

Once again, he repeated Labour’s intention to charge private schools 20 per cent VAT. Also on education, he criticised the Tories’ attempt to get rid of “rip-off” degrees but agreed that technical education must be improved as “the future must be trained as well as built” and so the party will “commit to building technical excellence colleges” across the country. 

He even tried to sound slightly conservative at some points, placing an emphasis on law and order and keeping the streets safe (an idea that could catch on). He mentioned that “politics should tread lightly on people’s lives” and that while grasping new opportunities, Britain must have the “strength to conserve what is precious”.

He concluded with a repeated appeal to the decade of national renewal. “I will fight for you, we will face down the age of insecurity together,” he said.

It is a sign of Starmer’s growing confidence and Tory disarray that even before having won a first term, he is pitching his premiership as a decade-long commitment. A lot can go wrong in ten years.

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