Many were expecting the first Labour Party Conference as the party of government in 15 years to be a jubilant, celebratory, affair. Up until today though, a combination of rough headlines and driving rain in Liverpool had left the conference feeling a little muted.
If the party faithful were feeling as grim and grey as the weather, they were well primed for the beginning of Keir Stamers speech, where he reiterated the state the Tories have left behind. But as they leave the sun has broken out over Liverpool and they are armed with hope and route to a better future.
The speech began with a diagnosis. One which placed the Conservative administration at the centre of many of the nation’s ills.
Britain, as Starmer painted it, is a country that has lost faith in itself. There are of course many things we are proud of and many patches of confidence (as Keir himself acknowledged) but this diagnosis is basically true. We cant build anything, our institutions are crumbling, faith that the future offers anything other than decline is in short supply.
Diagnosing ‘Brittle Britain’
This is ‘Brittle Britain’ as Starmer called it. A country whose self-interested government failed to adapt to local and global challenges, and where no effort was put in to balance the winners and losers of the massive economic, demographic and security shifts we’ve felt in the last decade.
Keir could easily have bounced from the problems of now and the failures of his opponents into the hope for tomorrow and the confidence people could place in him. He chose not to do this. Of course, there would be time for sunlit uplands – but first there were choices.
“Hard choices” has become something of a cliché. Along with ‘difficult decisions’ they were something the previous government was keen to we all know they were taking even as palpably nothing happened.
Keir acknowledged this problem, part of the wider collapse of trust in politics, and attacked it through simply engaging with the decisions themselves. If you want prison places, some communities will have to have a prison near them. If you want green energy, some places will have to accept pylons. If you want an end to the housing crisis, we have to build new homes everywhere.
Only by setting out the parameters of and then taking these difficult decisions can Britain face up to the problems it has. It is not enough to talk vaguely about ‘decisions’ – it is essential to make some. Even if, as Keir acknowledged, there are trade-offs and they will not be popular with all quarters.
No easy answers
There is a Labour vision for prosperity and properly funded public services, of a country less bound by class and ethnicity, of hope, and fairness, and opportunity. But in a straightforward defence of Labour’s more controversial decisions, Keir argued there is no getting there without making the choice to stabilise now.
Pain today to protect your mortgage and control inflation is the foundation on which Labour will build a better economy.
This is not to say that in making decisions the government becomes insensitive to the needs of the nation. Voice, and making sure everyone has an equal one, was a key theme of the speech. Indeed the difference between government for the sake government, as Keir would characterise the Tories, and his proposed government of service, he said, is listening.
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Keir insisted the government is listening and as a result of preserving the triple lock, no pensioners will be worse off as a result of means testing the winter fuel allowance.
A government that is genuinely of service, that genuinely listens and then acts on what it has learnt. From where we have been this, sadly, will seem a revolutionary idea. There are still massive issues of distrust dogging our politics and a resignation among many voters this summer that ‘nothing would ever change’.
There are few easy answers. The path from Brittle Britain to Bold Britain will not be straightforward. But by engaging with issues of substance, by demonstrating how he is willing to make some people angry to make the country better off, Keir Starmer has used his conference speech to show he is the kind of Prime Minister, and Labour the kind of government, to reverse the decline.
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