Labour Party Conference: All that glitters is gold?
Image credit: Flick/Keir Starmer
Lucy Thompson was on the ground in Liverpool this week for the hotly-anticipated Labour Party Conference. Here’s what she made of it:
A conference hall packed to the rafters, snaking queues for the most innocuous of fringe events and plenty of backslapping following a limp Conservative Conference and by-election victory in Rutherglen and Hamilton West.
Listening to the speeches over the cheers of party members, I can confirm the mood at this year’s Labour Party conference was jubilant. With the Corbyn cobwebs swept away, there is no doubt this is a party renewed and ready for electoral battle.
But are they a touch too confident? While Labour politicians have hastened to say this mood has not bred complacency, is victory on the cards or could this be 1992 all over again? Here are my reflections after attending this year’s conference:
Bigger queues than ideas
Between the conference parties that this roving reporter attended, including one that featured two Shadow cabinet ministers Lisa Nandy and Thangam Debbonaire on the DJ decks, I found myself at many a Labour fringe event.
As many have noted, businesses were out in full force, with twice as many firms involved as last year. However, while the queues for fringe events were big (we are talking 30–40-minute wait times to talk about tax) the ideas certainly weren’t. Political consensus, party unity and criticising the Tories occupied the agenda.
At an event on immigration, Shadow Minister Stephen Kinnock talked about consultations on the points-based immigration system and drilled out lines about control and compassion and the ‘expensive press release’ that was the Rwanda policy. Tumbleweed, when it came to any groundbreaking ideas.
This was a similar story at the Tony Blair Institute, where Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, did a good job at setting the scene about tech’s opportunities and its potential role in delivering public services, but that’s where he stopped. The lack of new, radical policy arguably spoke to a broader point about the conference, which I will get to below.
Security or change?
On Monday, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered a barnstormer of a speech, laying down the Party’s battlelines and the economic threat of the Tories ad nauseam. With heavy reminders of the chaos of the Truss era, she outlined with coherence and conviction why Labour should be trusted with the economy.
The core tenet of her argument will land with many: ‘Never again will we allow a repeat of the devastation Liz Truss and the Tory Party have inflicted on family finances’.
But make no mistake, this speech was far from radical when it came to economic policy, exemplified by her commitment to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Where it succeeded was demonstrating that Labour is back in the political mainstream and would not be throwing any Truss-like curveballs. Above all, it was also an assurance of economic competency after the Corbyn years, hammered home by a strong focus on Reeve’s credentials and a surprise endorsement from Mark Carney, the George Osborne-appointed former Bank of England governor.
As the Conservatives attempt to brand themselves as the choice of change, Reeves’s speech tries to sell voters on economic ‘security’, a word which she uttered nearly twenty times.
This is a prudent strategy that gives Conservatives little to attack, but will this be enough on election day? As commentator Paul Mason noted at a Fabian fringe event, crisis framing could create problems for Labour – driving people to vote for what they are used to. Or could the opposite happen – will voters believe that the UK’s economic problems require greater radicalism and Labour needs to do more?
All that glitters is gold.
While Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s conference speech was scattergun, as analysed by our CEO Chris Wilkins here, Sir Keir Starmer’s speech was clear in its message.
A surprise glitter attack by a protestor gave the Labour leader an excuse to roll up his sleeves and pick up where the Shadow Leader left off, presenting Labour as the party of ‘housebuilding’ and ‘infrastructure’. Occupying a wide gap left by the Tories (who made cancelling infrastructure projects their conference centrepiece), Starmer said he would build 1.5m houses and create “the next generation of Labour new towns” on greenfield sites. His bold and pragmatic plan to save the “dream of home ownership” will likely play well in Conservative and Labour camps.
Clutching at straws, Conservative politicians criticised Starmer and Reeves for not mentioning the word ‘inflation’ in their speeches, but they spoke about rising costs in a way that may strike a chord with ordinary voters. Touching on his humble beginnings and distancing himself from Sunak’s helicopter habit, he described the ‘survival mode’ people are living in where they cannot afford to do ‘anything nice anymore’. Perhaps an obvious point, but it resonates.
With his five missions, Starmer is presenting a more hopeful vision of Britain’s future, rather than the decline of thirteen years past. A vision with no ‘crumbling schools’, rip-off energy firms and a country where the NHS works and people don’t have to crowdfund for an urgent operation.
Thin on detail, thick on rhetoric
But how will they actually deliver it? While the Labour Party speeches may have passed the conference test, Starmer is only halfway there to answering the key exam question: ‘If not them, why us?
He succeeded in putting Conservative failings on full display, but this may not be enough to win an election. The Prime Minister may have dismal ratings, but polling shows that half of people still don’t know what Starmer stands for. As of September 2023, Starmer is still in the negative ratings and as shown by a YouGov poll published just this week, working-class people may be deserting the Tories but they aren’t flocking to Labour either.
As one audience member at a New Statesman fringe event I attended observed, the Party could be falling into the same trap as the Democrats did in 2016.
Many questions still remain about how Labour will deliver its vision. What is their plan to deal with the cost of living? Beyond taxes on Nom-Doms and private schools, how will Labour plug the £7bn NHS cash crisis? And if they are reversing the Rwanda policy, what is their alternative for curbing illegal immigration? In Starmer’s speech, reference to the latter issue was avoided entirely – an oversight perhaps, considering it is the fourth most important issue to voters, nearly level with the NHS.
What next?
The atmosphere at Labour Party conference spoke for itself. The party has come leaps and bounds since Corbyn, and Starmer has built a competent shadow cabinet that demonstrated it is election-ready this week.
But let’s not get too excited. The party’s strategy of caution might work for now, but how it answers the thorny policy questions above will define its future success. If we believe the polling on Starmer, it still has a way to go.
By Lucy Thompson, Senior Associate