On the first day of Labour’s annual party conference, a Mail on Sunday story alleged that education secretary Bridget Phillipson had used part of a £14,000 donation from the same Labour peer who funded Keir Starmer’s designer glasses to pay for a party marking her 40th birthday. The donations were “declared properly and thoroughly” and the do, Phillipson told Trevor Phillips on Sky News, was “in a work context”.
Similarly in a work context, from Sunday to Wednesday this week, the Labour faithful and a slew of corporates keen for access to a new government pounded the corridors of conference venue the ACC in Liverpool. In their thousands, they queued earnestly for speeches, debates, receptions and fringe panels on causes as disparate as berry-growing or the crypto-economy.
It rained in Liverpool on Sunday and barely stopped until Tuesday. The perpetual grey skies and soaked shoes of delegates seemed too perfect a metaphor. After all, what should have been a victory parade for the first Labour government in 14 years had been marred by weeks of bad news: on gifts and donations and cabinet office infighting, the backlash against planned cuts to the winter fuel payment and the party’s poor performance in the polls.
The conference slogan “Change Begins”—a small but crucial shift from the “Change” of the election campaign—was hammered home in promo videos featuring the 4th July exit poll results, and, in block capitals, “CHANGE BEGINS NOW”.
Did attendees agree that this promised change had begun? And, if there is such a thing as a definitive mood at conference, was this one positive? Everything depends, of course, on who you ask. On Monday morning, queuing in the rain to enter, a long line of activists handing out leaflets looked grim-faced in their cagoules, much like Starmer at the Paris Olympics.
Outside the conference, there were protests against Brexit, against the winter fuel payment cut (a non-binding vote on the policy initially tabled for Monday, the day of Rachel Reeves’s speech, had been moved to Wednesday, much to the chagrin of the unions that had called for it), for a wealth tax, against abortion (replete with enormous and gruesome imagery), and against the war in Gaza (though the sign reading “Zionists control the Labour Party” hinted at a separate line of complaint).
These various discontents were a reminder of divisions on the left and the shallowness of Labour’s electoral coalition. More than half of Labour’s many seats have a majority of less than 20 per cent, with challenges incoming from Reform and the Greens. Given this reality, one Labour backbencher told me, many new MPs at conference this year are “twitchy”, terrified of going off message and getting a scolding, and scared of losing in 2029.
At a Unite the Union rally against the winter fuel payment cuts—where “Murder on the Dancefloor” played, by chance, somewhere in the background—members of the Merseyside Pensioners Association were out in the pouring rain. “If you attack the poorest in society to fill that £22bn gap that’s not a good look, is it?” said Steve Millward, 72, who left the party when Jeremy Corbyn was kicked out. “If they were doing what they should be doing, I’d be in there fighting with them.”
There had been hints that Reeves will be generous in the 30th October budget, but Millward wasn’t holding his breath—and on the donations scandals his verdict was scathing: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Also on the left, but still in the party, 25-year-old Em Wright, a member of Green New Deal Rising, was getting through a list of 20 MPs she wanted to lobby on the need for a wealth tax. Wright thinks Starmer’s Labour lacks clarity of vision and boldness in action. “I ask myself who Labour is for and I don’t feel at home as represented by the leadership,” she said.
But for some, this is a time of possibility, of promise. Jane Giddins, a 64-year-old party delegate from NE Somerset & Hanham, had rejoined the Labour party 18 months ago, having realised that Jacob Rees-Mogg was still her MP “and I had done nothing to stop him. My grandfather died fighting fascism so the least I could do was deliver a few leaflets.”
At conference, Giddins felt inspired “to hear people talk about the things we’ve been talking about for years and are now in a position to deliver”. Giddins, who has a background in finance and is now a novelist, has “huge confidence” in Reeves. “We will make this country better… I mean it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Patience and trade-offs are major themes of Starmer’s Labour. Both Reeves and Starmer riffed on these in their set-piece addresses on Monday and Tuesday. Change has begun, but we also must wait patiently for the outcome of these changes, which will, of course, require the requisite tough decisions. The pay-off will be worth it: “national renewal”, no less.
The question is whether, in our hypersonically paced era, anyone can muster that patience. In “high-level” terms, the direction of the government is good, one London councillor told me, but the speed of travel is too slow. Another education reform advocate was frustrated at an enduring lack of substance on actual policy. Over a free coffee from Renewable Energy UK’s stand in the exhibition hall, right next to that for the National Grid, two lobbyists summed up the mood as the dawning of the realisation that “it’s time to get to work, and this is hard!”
Surely, if there was a celebratory vibe to be found, Labour Together’s yimby drinks reception would be the location, given that the centre-right thinktank is so aligned with the current party leadership. Lucy Rigby, the new MP for Northampton North, was greeted with cheers when she opened with “Hello yimbys! And fellow growth zealots!”, before namechecking various moves Labour has made to ease planning bottlenecks.
“I’ve been to every Labour conference since 2009 and this one really does feel different,” Rigby told me afterwards. “There’s a lot of energy. It’s very busy.”
Does she understand why some people think the Starmer government’s vision is fuzzy? “I don’t feel there’s a vision gap. I feel pretty certain about where are going.” The key, she added, is confronting “barriers [to growth] and tearing them down and we need to do it at pace. Because this prize of a growing economy and rising living standards is exactly where we need to be.”
On Monday, the rain continued as the chancellor took to the stage for her speech, her constant smile trying to communicate that there are things to be pleased about here. And for many, the hint that she would soften the fiscal rules to enable more public investment was indeed reason enough to genuinely smile.
But by Starmer’s speech on Tuesday, the rain had stopped. And, it turned out, happiness was there the whole time, in the prime minister’s speech, even if policy substance was somewhat elusive. “We do need joy. We do need that in our lives,” he told the party, lest anyone accuse him of joylessness. If only the victorious party, gathered together for its annual conference, was able to feel it, too.
By Wednesday, when a protest against cuts to the winter fuel payment took place inside the conference exhibition hall, and party members voted in favour of a motion for reversing the policy, Starmer had jetted off to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. His conference speech had been received with a minutes-long standing ovation. But what cut through to the outside world, as much as his move towards emphasising the pay-off from the nation’s patience, was a viral gaffe about sausages.
It’s hard to keep an electorate—and a party—going on sacrifice today and jam tomorrow. A former Tory strategist watched the proceedings, bemused. “I would bet my life that they won’t win a second term—if they keep going like this.”
