Free The Sausages!

UK Conference Coverage: Labour

You might have expected a triumphant mood at the conference of a party fresh off the back of one of the most spectacular political victories of the last century. Not so at this year’s Labour Party Conference. There was something muted and uneasy about the whole affair.

As one Labour peer, Lord Glasman, put it, Labour “have only been in government for two months, but it feels like three years”. Mired by stories of ministers accepting gifts for seemingly everything under the sun, and with the leadership doubling down on doom-and-gloom rhetoric surrounding public finances, Sir Keir Starmer, according to a recent Opinium poll, is now less popular than Rishi Sunak. Although not entirely negative – the Home Secretary’s vow to cut knife crime in half was well received – there is a general sense that Labour have fluffed the first 80 days.

A cursory look at the last decade-and-a-bit of British politics provides plenty of precedent for this. When the Conservative-Liberal coalition came to power in 2010, they certainly weren’t ready, only eventually fumbling their way to Brexit. Boris Johnson, with the help of Dominic Cummings, mobilized huge numbers of disaffected voters in 2019, but this quickly evaporated into their worst defeat in over a century.

For the Labour Party, 2017 was their most interesting year, under the leadership of the far-left Jeremy Corbyn. Since the 2019 election, Labour has set out to eliminate Corbynism, a sector of the party with genuine energy to radically change the status quo of British politics. If only the man had managed to better mask his sneering resentment of the country he was attempting to lead and hadn’t been so quick to attend the funerals of his favourite terrorists who hated it. This exorcism, combined with the Conservative government’s constant kneecapping, has meant that Labour has not engaged in serious reflection about where they want to take the country. They have eliminated the negatives but not accentuated the positives.

Sir Keir Starmer’s speech was telling. He was a little bit of everything. Pro-business, and pro-state; employing the language of contributionism alongside that of human rights; promising both “a shared struggle” but also “light at the end of the tunnel”. He emphasized the necessity for trade-offs and mentioned the building of new prisons, which might come as a shock to a public which has just been subjected to a mass wave of early-released violent criminals – a policy which had been announced within mere weeks of Labour taking office.

On Israel, the Prime Minister praised his “decisive government”, calling for “restraint and de-escalation” at the Lebanon border, imploring “all parties to step back from the brink”, a “re-commitment to the two-state solution” (which Hamas has forever rejected), and “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza”. He was light on the detail of how all these might be achieved. In an act of balance, though, and injecting a moment of comic relief, Sir Keir did demand the “return of the sausages”, before quickly correcting himself to “hostages”. Not very kosher.

For the contemporary Labour party, it is a balance that absolutely must be struck, and detail is an inconvenience. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has explained on Restoration the growing Islamic lobby in Britain. Labour feels that pressure. New Holocaust memorials, as have been promised by the Government, seem hollow symbols compared to the safety of Jewish children going to school. While “smashing the gangs” was a prominent motif in this year’s conference speeches, the more difficult questions about managing conflict between groups on Britain’s streets were parked for another day.

On the economy, Chancellor Rachel Reeves gave a taste of what her “securonomics” will entail ahead of next month’s budget. It looks as though it will be more state intervention, with plenty of care taken so as to not spook the bond markets à la Liz Truss’ short-lived premiership.

The Left in Britain will be happy to see commitments to a nationalized rail, bolstered employment rights, and a new public energy company, as well as promises to expedite planning applications which currently stymie any serious economic strategy and stunt potential for growth. This includes reversing the ban on the building of onshore wind turbines. This is a good start, but if Labour were really ambitious they would direct their protectionist inclinations towards accelerating Britain to a near future in which Rolls Royce Small Modular Nuclear Reactors are installed beside every town across the country. The goal should be to make energy in Britain so cheap and abundant that the winter fuel allowance for the elderly would be redundant.

This issue of the winter fuel allowance did hang over the conference. Sir Keir’s attempt at portraying a prudent, serious “the adults are back in the room” image included levelling with the public about the state of the country’s finances. According to the Prime Minister, cuts are needed to fill “a black hole”. In an embarrassing development for the government, the powerful Unite union won a non-binding vote on reversing the policy. This might have been more palatable to the public had they not been simultaneously digesting the extent to which ministers have been receiving gifts from wealthy donors, including clothes and Taylor Swift concert tickets for their children.

Being immaculately turned out in the best-of-British tailoring on foreign visits might not ordinarily be a problem. In fact, next time the opportunity arises, someone should probably tell Foreign Secretary David Lammy who clearly did not get the memo this time round. But at a time when the message is one of muddling through a difficult patch, with the Prime Minister telling his audience “we are all in it together” after running a campaign devoted almost entirely to the idea of “Tory sleaze”, it does not come across as politically astute.

British voters increasingly feel as though they have no real control over what happens with their borders. They are resigning to the fact that justice in Britain is handed down unevenly, and at an increasing rate. The Two-Tier Keir moniker is sticking.

Cries of “hypocrisy” seem to be the only ones which hold any power in modern democratic politics. One might suspect that if the public started seeing a real improvement in law and order and public services, they might care less about the Prime Minister getting free tickets to watch his favorite football team.

If the leaders of the Labour party get their heads down and focus on kickstarting a new golden age of British development, by reforming the planning system, and clamping down on the rising tide of illegal immigrant crossings, then the government might be capable of an historic achievement. Not if they continue drafting new definitions of Islamophobia and fiddling around with the Equalities Act. Britain has been uninspired by the first two months of Labour leadership. Unless they change tack, the next three years will feel like an Age.