By Martin Kettle – The Guardian:
The era when a barnstorming address would turn political fortunes is gone. The PM is out of step with modern digital politics and needs to catch up
Keir Starmer saved his best for the fragile circumstances of a difficult Labour conference. It may not yet be enough to save him. All the same, this was by some way Starmer’s most effective and certainly his most interesting conference speech since becoming Labour leader five years ago. Not a particularly high bar, it must be admitted, since Starmer is no great orator – but at least the bar is one that he cleared.
In the dire situation now facing Labour, this mattered a lot. In his earlier conference speeches, Starmer was always stolid and decent but at times painfully careful not to drop the famous “Ming vase”. The phrases that define those earlier efforts – mission-led government, a government of service or even the 2024 manifesto title, Change – may have meant something to Starmer and those around him. But they meant little to anyone else. They sank like stones into the contemporary sea of political indifference.
This time, though, Starmer laid it on the line more forcefully. Here in this speech, he told conference, is what Labour is in power to achieve, a renewal of Britain in which workers and minorities can get the justice and rewards they deserve in a united country. Here are some of the examples – a new approach to post-school education and training, a digital step-change in NHS services among them. All this was a fight for the national soul, between the division whipped up by Nigel Farage and the pragmatic decencies of the Britain that Starmer grew up in. Some of the phrases were still clunky. What does “a Britain built for all” say that something like “make Britain fair again” doesn’t say better?
There was only one problem, but it is a big one. This was the speech that Starmer ought to have given before the 2024 election, not now. At the very least, he needed to have given it straight after Labour had come back to office. Back then, the message that Starmer’s big project will take time might have inoculated Labour against some of the headaches it has faced in year one.
Instead, Starmer seemed almost paralysed by the immensity of the task that faced him when he became prime minister. It felt beyond him to lay out a clear goal and an honest prognosis of what it would take to get to it. He seemed stubbornly indifferent to the need to explain things to the nation. At least he seems to have got the message now.
Rachel Reeves, though not a brilliant speaker either, tried to revive a version of this on Monday when she said she knew things were difficult, that there were too many obstacles to change and that market confidence is hard to win and easy to lose. But this also is what she should have been saying from day one. Instead, she stumbled into a needless row on winter fuel payments. Both Reeves and Starmer need a modern version of the brilliant constant reshaping of the national argument by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. It may not yet be too late.
Except that even Starmer’s or Reeves’s best is not really good enough for the situation they face and for the alienated politics of the modern world. This is not to attack Starmer in particular. Nor is it to say that anyone else, Andy Burnham, for instance, would have been better.
In the old normal, the Starmer speech might have been enough. Starmer storms it – job done, the headlines could say. But traditional conference speeches do not cut it these days. They are a relic of the way politics used to be done, not a cutting edge weapon in the volatile world of contemporary digital politics. Starmer still struggles with this reality. At one point, he contrasted the “real Britain” of local activism with the indecency of the social media world. But it is the social media world that is reshaping politics, not local activism.
Conference speeches matter far less than they once did – maybe than they ever did. Leaders expend vast amounts of energy on them. Every year involved “agony, consternation, madness and creativity in roughly equal proportions” Tony Blair wrote in his memoirs. And Blair was pretty good at them. Yet getting a leader’s speech to cut through is almost impossible now. Most are here today and gone tomorrow.
Has any political speech of any kind actually made the weather in Britain since Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech in 1990, which set in motion the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher? Has any conference speech truly reset the political agenda since Aneurin Bevan’s “naked into the conference chamber” speech attacking nuclear disarmament in 1957?
There have, of course, been memorable moments – Thatcher’s “the lady’s not for turning” or her resolve after the Brighton bombing among them, Neil Kinnock attacking Militant and Blair scrapping clause IV. But these were more confirmatory and iconic, not gamechanging. Starmer will have felt that this year’s speech went well, but he should not delude himself into thinking it will make a lot of difference.
Party conference speeches need to change. The blogger James O’Malley wrote recently that, even for those who notice them, which most people do not, the speech will still just be another boring politician standing behind a lectern, unchanged despite a two-decade revolution in how most people engage with the news. Instead, O’Malley said, Starmer’s goal should be to go viral. He should use screens. He could film the speech as a video. He could bring on surprise guests. Hold your nose, Keir, and be more creative.
To win an argument like the one that faces Labour today he needs to prepare much better. Hone the argument more fully, turn it into a campaign, make it patriotic and practical – and use exciting words. Make the promises substantive but don’t promise instant rewards. You absolutely should not just say something for a one-day headline and then ignore it, as Starmer seems to have done on digital ID in his speech. That approach is guaranteed to lose control.
It may be true that the battle against Farage gives Labour an enemy to fight against, and a cause to believe in, and that this will unite and energise the grassroots. In the circumstances facing Starmer in Liverpool, that may seem like enough of an achievement. But, like conference speeches in general, it is unlikely to reach out for long to the uninvolved and indifferent. To these voters, Starmer is not a reason to vote Labour rather than Reform or Tory, as the Labour devotees will tend to see it. For too many, Starmer’s inability to solve this country’s economic and social decline may look like continuity hopelessness.
