Obvs going to be completely overshadowed today, but Starmer is making his conference speech on here right now labour.org.uk/labour-connect…
Bits out beforehand suggest an attempt to outline a progressive patriotism capable of winning red wall seats back. That's important not just for Labour but for the broader liberal left, to see if it can summon the kind of language required.
The whole chatting-to-an-audience-which-is-not-there thing is weird, whichever way you shake it.
Think fire-side chats are probably the better way to go with these things, until covid passes.
Starmer says the covid crisis revealed Johnson's character. "He's just not up to the job."
"Debate between Leave and Remain is over. We are not going to be a party which bangs on about Europe... If the PM fails to get [a deal]... he will have to own that failure. It will be on him."
"When you lose an election in a democracy, you deserve to. You don't look at the electorate and think: 'What were you thinking?' You look at yourself and think: 'What were we doing?'"
"This party is under new leadership... We're becoming a competent, credible opposition... Never again will Labour go into an election not being trusted on national security, with your job, with your money."
"I don't want to win power just to be PM. I want to win because of the country I love and the values I hold dear."
Starmer now making the big break with Corbyn explicitly, rather than just implicitly. Nearly ever sentence of this is a rebuke to the former leader.
"I can see it, I can describe it, but it's all just a dream unless we win back the trust of the people. We've a long road ahead of us. Trust takes time. It starts with being a credible opposition."
"So to those people in Doncaster and Deeside, in Glasgow and Grimsby, in Stoke and in Stevenage, to those who have turned away from Labour, I say this: we hear you."
"Never again will Labour take you or the things you care about for granted. And I ask you: Take another look at Labour. We’re under new leadership. We love this country as you do."
That was a very strong speech. Impossible for it to have any real impact in the circumstances - delivered virtually, on a day the news agenda will drown it out. But the approach is entirely the right one.
Instructive to consider that speech in light of @Dorianlynskey take on the Corbyn post-mortem - "an irresistible argument for the unglamorous virtue of competence" politics.co.uk/comment-analys…
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Really is incredible to think that the Tories announced compensation for victims of two scandals, then did nothing to arrange the money. Labour has had to put aside a massive chunk of the money they secured yesterday to fulfil a promise the previous government made.
You can criticise Starmer and Reeves for all sorts of things - insufficient honesty at the election, insufficient bravery now - but it is astonishing how comprehensively the last government ran the country into the fucking ground.
And this is on the faintly superficial end of things. I'm not even mentioning the asylum policies which froze the system and therefore ate money on accommodation costs, or the totally imaginary spending plans, or the tax cuts they knew we couldn't afford.
OBR document unveiled by Reeves says the previous govt "did not provide the OBR" with all the information available to them and their spring Budget forecast would have been "materially different" if they had.
This is absolutely ferocious knives-out politics. Properly murderous.
I suppose there's a smell of blood, so journalists are circling for it. But if there's anyone in the world who gives a genuine dried fuck about Taylor Swift's driving arrangements I'd be astonished.
There's a lot going on here. 1) The press has a right-wing bias and broadcasters follow its lead, so media doles out a much harder time to Labour than Tories. We'd probably forgotten the full extent of this.
There'll now be an awful lot of talk about becoming-the-story and lack-of-narrative and press relations. Fine. Whatever. But that wasn't her role. It was to unlock the machine and get things done. The current noise is just the daily nothing-clatter of Westminster life.
The government will require a carefully organised undistractable approach to delivery if it's going to demonstrate improvement. And that won't come from constant briefings and hysteria. It'll come from the missions.
There's no intellectual debate to be had about what's happening. It's not about immigration, or integration, or Islam. It's about a bunch of violent thugs blaming Muslims for a terrible crime, being instantly disproved, and then continuing with their bullshit anyway.
If you start saying we need to change policy, or reconsider an approach to anything at all on the back of this violence, you are basically legitimising it. You are laundering the reputation of Nazi thugs.
There's really no complexity here at all. They're cunts. The reptile part of the human brain. They threaten the safety of Muslims and Asians in general. They need to be universally condemned by politicians and stamped on hard by police. That's it. That's the response.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. 1) In opposition, Labour knew the Tories were playing a stupid, irresponsible little game with their future departmental spending & tax cuts. And yet they played along anyway, because it was inconvenient to do otherwise.
2) The figures, particularly on asylum housing costs, were worse than we realised. Labour said wonk and wonk-adjacent critics would change their tune after the statement. They were right. Conservative irresponsibility was, as Reeves says, worse than we thought.
3) The core point is that the Tories basically sabotaged the state. Freezing asylum applications, even though it would cost millions in hotels. Promising tax cuts even though officials were earning them that the prison system was about to collapse. It's truly unforgivable.