What does Keir Starmer believe in? Who is he for? Does he even want the job? These are the questions that have haunted the Prime Minister for months.
Starmer arrived at Labour conference knowing that he had to answer them. He took a more direct role in the drafting of this speech, work on which began over the summer at Chequers, than any other he has delivered.
The result was the best and most authentic address that he has given as Prime Minister. There is little risk that he will feel the need to retract phrases as he did so infamously in the case of his “island of strangers” speech earlier this year (which he, damagingly, went on to reveal he had not read).
Back in August 2024, standing in No 10’s rose garden, Starmer lamented that “things will get worse”. It was a gloomy speech at odds with a country that craved hope and Labour soon fell into unpopularity. But hope was what Starmer sought to offer today, casting himself as the champion of “national renewal” and Nigel Farage as a prophet of doom. The speech, which aides billed in advance as “highly political”, had a clear aim: to demolish the Reform leader’s claim to speak for working-class people and for Britain.
To a sea of English, Scottish, Welsh and Union flags, Starmer derided his main opponent (the Tories were barely an afterthought): “When was the last time that you heard Nigel Farage say anything positive about Britain’s future? He can’t. He doesn’t like Britain, doesn’t believe in Britain, wants you to doubt it.”
Condemned by some for branding Reform racist, Starmer doubled-down, declaring of Britain’s new ethno-nationalist right: “We will fight you with everything we have”. But this was not the speech of a complacent liberal. He used a lengthy section to argue that there is nothing racist about believing that immigration is too high and that change has been too fast. As such Starmer is aiming to position himself on the common ground of public opinion: for border control, against racism and thuggery.
It wasn’t only the populist right who Starmer sought to eviscerate. With an eye to Andy Burnham (who left the conference shortly before his speech) and Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer assailed the populist left for offering the “snake oil” of a wealth tax and threatening Liz Truss-style chaos through unfunded spending commitments.
By contrast, Starmer positioned himself as a hard-headed social democrat, one championing an interventionist state that protects national industries, raises public investment, expands workers’ rights and defends the vulnerable (Starmer was movingly introduced by Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall who declared that he, unlike other prime ministers, had kept his word).
He continued his departure from Blair-era thinking by abandoning the aim of 50 per cent of young people attending university in favour of two-thirds entering higher education or taking a “gold standard apprenticeship”. Starmer is not – and never will be – a Thatcher-style ideologue but this speech was the best articulation of what he believes: that the market is a good servant but a bad master. The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, could and should have been the moment that the UK abandoned a broken model of globalisation.
Will this speech transform Starmer’s political fortunes? No – with a few exceptions, conference speeches are rarely the turning points that some imagine them to be. But they are crucial signifiers that set the battlelines for the year ahead. Today, Starmer showed that he is a man intent on defying Reform, not imitating it.
The road ahead remains daunting: no Prime Minister has ever recovered from the depths of unpopularity endured by Starmer. But today he proved his determination to fight, fight and fight again for the party that he loves.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s conference speech: our writers’ verdicts]
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