At the outset of the speech that closed Progress’ 30th anniversary dinner late last night, Wes Streeting threw his audience off the scent. “I’m delighted to see both the Chief Whip and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff here – forgive me if I do some live editing of my speech,” he quipped, theatrically discarding pages of his text.
After that, plenty assumed the Health Secretary would deliver an unnoteworthy tribute to the institution founded by Derek Draper, Liam Byrne and Paul Richards in 1996 as the campaign wing of New Labour. Instead, Streeting used his 24-minute address, drafted at 5:30pm that afternoon, to make another coded critique of Keir Starmer’s leadership and to offer the fullest account yet of his own political and intellectual vision
There were three messages at the heart of the speech, made to a 350-strong audience of cabinet ministers, MPs, strategists and activists at London’s Guildhall. The first was that Streeting has a philosophy, the absence of which both Labour’s left and right contend has hamstrung Starmer.
“Change begins with an argument, you don’t make progress without one,” Streeting declared, insisting that “the Labour Party and this Labour government has the philosophical resources we need if we choose to use them”.
He cast himself as the inheritor of the party’s “modernising, revisionist tradition”, citing Christian socialist RH Tawney, “militant moderate” Evan Durbin and late cabinet minister Tony Crosland, author of The Future of Socialism, as his lodestars. “There runs a single thread: freedom is hollow if it is hoarded and prosperity is brittle if it is unfair,” said Streeting, who praised Tony Blair’s revised Clause IV as “a sophisticated synthesis of liberalism, social democracy and socialism that speaks directly to the future challenges of the 21st century”.
The second message was that Streeting is a pluralist. As he recalled past internal attempts to ban Progress, he maintained that “having been on the receiving end” he would “always defend the tradition of the [Socialist] Campaign Group in this party and this movement”.
“We might not always agree, we might not always share the same branches of our party and our movement but we do have lots of ideological roots in common,” Streeting added of the Bennite home of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, lines that prompted murmurs of dissent from some in the room. “We should never fear the battle of ideas, not just with our opponents outside our party but also the people within our party who share so many of the same values but don’t always agree on the means to achieve the ends.”
With these remarks Streeting drew a seeming contrast with Starmer, who withdrew the whip from Campaign Groups MPs after they voted for the abolition of the two-child benefit cap, casting himself as a politician who would advance through persuasion not purges (an echo of the approach taken by Blair who tolerated serial rebels).
Streeting also notably praised the New Liberal tradition of LT Hobhouse, JM Keynes and William Beveridge and its “insight that liberty is not merely freedom from interference but freedom to act”. Would he, as Blair did, ever contemplate a deal with the Liberal Democrats as leader?
The third message was that Streeting is delivering at Health – and would deliver in No 10. In November, he revealed, in spite of strikes and winter flu, “we achieved the second largest fall in NHS waiting lists in a single month in 17 years”. And, despite his initial disavowal of dissent, he again implicitly rebuked Starmer for complaining that “pulling levers” too often did not lead to swift delivery.
“If the levers don’t exist we build them,” said Streeting, reviving the critique he made in his Institute for Government speech on Tuesday. “If there are barriers in our way we bulldoze them. If there is failure in the state we challenge it, tackle it and eradicate it.”
Streeting did praise Starmer for the “remarkable victory of 2024” as well as “the man who got him selected and us elected” (though, perhaps tellingly, he did not reference Morgan McSweeney by name). But the overriding message to Labour’s increasingly self-confident progressive right was that Streeting will be their political and intellectual champion in a future leadership contest (an occasion that he has told McSweeney he is “planning” for).
“As someone almost once said, we’re the future now, so let’s make the most of it,” remarked Streeting at the close of his speech, adapting Blair’s final Labour conference address as leader. He didn’t say that he believes the future could be his – but he didn’t need to.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: The battle for Labour’s leadership has already started]
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