In many ways Labour conference does not change; swarms of lanyarded politicos file past police officers, camera crews and an incongruous assortment of demonstrators. On Liverpool dock, two protesters struggled into a large, homemade costume, becoming a white elephant with “Carbon Capture and Storage” written on its side. Near the entrance to the secure zone, a line of bloodstained dolls had been laid out to remind the political class of the mass killings of children in Gaza. Next to them a man held up a placard that said: “Pedestrianise the M6”. At the entrance the Brexit protester Steve Bray exercised his democratic right to be ear-splittingly annoying. Through the fence he bellowed at Michael Gove – who could indeed be seen strolling the conference floor, lapping up curious glances – that he hoped one day to see him in court.
Inside the conference, amid the forest of stands at which lobbyists pitch their causes, the canteen was selling Pepsi. For many years, Pepsi’s adverts have referenced its much more popular competitor, and especially its association with Christmas: “Try a new tradition,” they urge. The animated polar bears and holly-jolly trucks of Coke ads are lampooned in a way that Pepsi’s executives doubtless think is clever and subversive. The consumer sees these ads and thinks: “Mmm, Coke”. On what may be a related note, Pepsi’s market share has roughly halved over the past 30 years.
The Labour Party is currently pursuing the Pepsi strategy of mentioning its main competitor at every opportunity. At conference in Liverpool in late September, Labour presented itself as a party divided into two camps. There are the people who think Labour needs a complete change of management in order to beat Nigel Farage, and the people who think that only by sticking together can Labour beat Nigel Farage. There is one thing both sides can agree on, however, and that is they need to talk endlessly about Nigel Farage.
As must everyone else. At the Lib Dem conference the previous week, Ed Davey had complained that “the BBC and others give Farage so much time and attention”, in a speech in which he named Nigel Farage 31 times (his deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, was not mentioned once). The newspaper spreads covering the opening of the Labour conference contained pictures of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in Liverpool, but also of Nigel Farage, who was not in Liverpool, but whom it was apparently still necessary to depict. The BBC paused its coverage of Reform press conferences and its reporting of polls in which people have been asked about Nigel Farage so that its journalists could ask Labour ministers: “Nigel Farage?” To which the answer is invariably: “But what if Nigel Farage, though? And if we don’t then well, quite possibly, Nigel Farage. Because what is the alternative, hmm? Nigel Farage?”
This was the sound of a party, and a country, talking itself into the idea that a man who took eight attempts to become an MP and whose party has five seats in the Commons is definitely going to be the next prime minister. In a decade we have gone from being unprepared for political earthquakes to assuming they will happen at every opportunity. In speech after speech in the main hall of the conference, the threat from Reform was made ever more real. David Lammy said that Farage was “measuring the curtains of Downing Street”; Shabana Mahmood decried “the false promises of Farage”. Rachel Reeves warned that Reform is “the single greatest threat to our way of life”, that it is “opposed to the very principle” of the NHS, that it is “in bed with Vladimir Putin”.
Reeves also issued a command: “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that there’s no difference between a Labour government and a Conservative government”, as if this is something people are constantly telling each other. She repeated this four times, as if she imagined the Labour members would rush from the conference hall to fill every Waitrose and Wetherspoons in the land, ears open for fatuous comparison.
As political oracy goes, “stop saying we’re the same as the last lot” isn’t exactly Calgacus, the Caledonian chief whose tirade against the Romans, as reported (or possibly made up) by Tacitus, is the original belter of British political speech (“To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they create desolation and call it peace”). For all their warnings of the earthquake to come, the speeches given on the conference floor all had the strong feeling of being written by committee. They were Word documents in which everyone had been expected to comment.
This is the format most political speeches today follow: “Well done to everyone/Because we have done this policy/And this one/And of course this one [applause]/And well done to our carers and to our builders and everyone else who either has a proper job or who wants one/Because my Dad had a normal job actually/And you can go to Cornwall or Peterborough or Hunstanton [smile as a crowd member from Hunstanton whoops] and you can see that we believe in things/But the other party does not believe in things/And they failed and made everything bad/Or they would do that given the chance/And it is our most sacred moral duty to prevent that from happening/Because I went to a hospital or maybe a job centre recently and something happened that both neatly illustrated my politics and reminded me that I’m just like you guys/And that, Conference – [increased volume, visible emotion] that is what we are fighting for [standing ovation].”
In a bar in the conference’s secure zone I spoke to a former speechwriter for the leader of a political party, who said that political speeches – which were once printed in full in tabloid newspapers – are now written mainly as containers for one or two important lines. The focus of a speechwriting team is on those chunks that will become broadcast snippets and X posts. They agreed that modern speeches can be anodyne, the work of teams seeking measurable indicators of performance, such as the number of times people break out into applause.
Great political speeches are not produced in this way. In 1983, Neil Kinnock wrote his baleful, prophetic warning against the coming age of neoliberalism (“I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old”) in the back seat of a Ford Sierra as his wife drove him along the M4 to South Wales. Barack Obama wrote his 2004 keynote to the Democratic National Convention alone in a hotel, longhand. He adapted its most famous line – “the audacity of hope” – from a religious sermon. These were real statements of conviction from individuals. The closest I heard at this year’s Labour conference were the unscripted thoughts of politicians at fringe events, where emotion and sincerity were allowed out (Ed Miliband was notable at these events for his regular use of the F-word).
Consider the difference in sincerity between Tony Blair’s patriotism in 1996 (“1,000 years of British history… the first parliament… an empire, the largest the world has ever known, relinquished in peace, the invention of virtually every scientific device… the most sustained example of bravery in human history”) and Labour’s recent squeamish embrace of the flag. Without conviction, speeches rest on a framework of cliché. Reeves said we had “turned our backs on the path of decline”; Starmer took the podium to announce that Britain was at a “fork in the road”. This is the language of people arriving at a crossroads, squinting at their map, refusing to ask themselves that most galling question: are we lost?
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s conference speech: our writers’ verdicts]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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