Bottling it in Brighton: Keir Starmer and his conference speech

We waited 94 minutes for Keir Starmer’s Militant Tendency moment or his Clause 4 moment but they never came. This tells you everything you need to know about Starmer’s speech. He was happy to tell the Labour conference what they wanted to hear – lots of guff about the NHS, education, British values. But he was afraid to tell them what they didn’t want to hear. He didn’t dare criticise, or even mention, Jeremy Corbyn. He didn’t have the courage to attack Labour anti-Semitism during the Corbyn years or apologise for his complicity as a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. The difference between Starmer and Kinnock and Blair is that he told “ Conference ” what it wanted to hear. They told the nation what it needed to hear. They had the courage to take on the Labour Left in their big conference speeches. Starmer didn’t.

It was a terrible speech. Full of sentimentality, empty rhetoric about schools and the NHS that always goes down well with Labour delegates but thin on substance. He mentioned “ education ” nine times, but talking about education is not the same as coming up with new policies and saying how you will fund them. “The fight against crime will always be a Labour issue… We ’ ll fix it. ” How? Did 13 years of Labour government “fix” crime? “I believe in this country and I believe we will move forward.” What does this even mean?

 “ So, let ’s get totally serious about this – we can win the next election.” That’s just an empty assertion, it’s not “getting real” about the causes of that astonishing defeat in 2019. Where were the policies or even the analysis which showed why these policies were right, why they would work and who would pay for them? Sebastian Payne was surely right when he said, “the weakness was still on the front story: his solutions and alternatives to the Tories remain vague”.

Too often Starmer simply rubbished the Tories without making the argument. People “can’t trust the Tories with the education of our children”. “I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man, I think he’s a trivial man, I think he’s a showman…” That’s just a flat, dull version of calling the Tories or the PM “scum”. It went down well at Conference, but where’s the substance?

Then there were the errors. “Britain has the worst death rate [from Covid] in Europe.” No, it doesn’t. Far more have died in Russia. Britain comes ninth in Europe in deaths per million.

The speech was badly written. All that bland stuff about tools. “The word loom is another word for tool.” No, it isn’t. And, in any case, what’s this bland piece of verbiage doing 94 minutes into one of the most boring speeches ever given by a Labour leader? And then what was meant to be the rousing finale: “This is a big moment that demands leadership. Leadership founded on principles that have informed my life — and with which I honour where I’ve come from. Work. Care. Equality. Security. They’re British values. They’re the tools of my trade. And with them, I’ll go to work.”

Where was the humour, where were the really moving moments as opposed to sentimentality, where were the memorable phrases that people quote 20 years later? In 1995, like Starmer two years into his leadership, Blair came up with: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” 

Worse still was the hypocrisy of the Labour delegates. One of the biggest  cheers was for “In this conference hall, we are patriots”. These are the same delegates who two years ago cheered Jeremy Corbyn, who didn’t know what time the Queen’s Christmas speech was and who associated with the IRA and other terrorists. There was an even bigger cheer for Louise Ellman, the Jewish MP who was driven out of her constituency by Corbynite anti-Semitism, when Starmer said, “Louise Ellman, welcome home.” These were the same delegates who had cheered Corbyn just two years ago. If they had cared one jot about anti-Semitism they would have called for Corbyn to go. Starmer has still not eradicated anti-Semitism from the Labour Party and one moment of sentimental gush doesn’t mean that he has.

Starmer not only didn’t mention Corbyn by name. In his first speech to Conference as party leader, he didn’t mention his own complicity in the Corbyn regime. Wasn’t Starmer a member of the Shadow Cabinet that produced “a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government”? If he thought then that Corbyn’s manifesto wasn’t “a serious plan for government”, why did he serve in the Shadow Cabinet that produced it? Where was Starmer then? Others had the courage to leave the parliamentary Labour party when it was led by Corbyn. Did Starmer?

The speech was full of moments where Starmer played to the gallery. Snide remarks about teaching Latin at state schools. That nasty little joke: “My dad was a toolmaker. And in some ways so was Boris Johnson’s.” I thought Starmer was better than this.

There were good moments. Starmer eloquently established a sense of his own back-story. He dealt well with the left-wing hecklers: “Shouting slogans or changing lives?” That will be the phrase that people might remember. The pictures of a few isolated Corbynistas heckling as he spoke of his desperately ill mother will look good on the news. He came across as decent and, above all, not as Corbyn. There were no Palestinian flags in the hall, the chants of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” were confined to a lunatic fringe.

But Starmer’s speech was a fitting end to a disastrous conference. Scumgate. Leading politicians clearly out to replace the elected party leader. A motion attacking Israel. A party bitterly divided between the Left and the centre. The resignation of Andy McDonald, supported by Corbyn and McDonnell. Starmer’s decent enough, his heart is in the right place, but he’s not as charismatic as Blair or as smart as Brown. The faces in the hall showed they know it.

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