Right. Keir needed a good speech - and that was a good speech! Or at least, it was a good speech that was unfortunately followed by a longer, much duller and far more muddled speech.
But it also leaves us sort of where we were (as these speeches always do). If you were keen on Starmer but worried about his party, you still are (which is why I think those heckles do actually hurt, even though he dealt with them well).
If you think Starmer is a good administrator but worry about his political antennae, the failure to chop much of the second half (where the crowd basically went into a coma) probably reinforces that.
I also do feel - and this is a bit cruel - that on a very basic level the public will find it hard to elect someone quite so adenoidal. (See Milibands passim.)

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More from @rcolvile

23 Sep
Narrator: 'those who work hard and play by the rules' did not, in fact, originate in Priti Patel speeches justifying her cruel immigration policies.
I mean Google is literally a thing.
It's in one of Gordon Brown's party conference speeches for Christ's sake britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive…
Read 4 tweets
23 Sep
Fascinated that @Keir_Starmer has picked the 'contribution society' as his big theme - since we've just published a major report on contribution in welfare (which I wrote about here capx.co/fair-welfare-c…). But our report highlights the tensions for Labour/Starmer here. (1/?)
These are the first three of Starmer's 10 principles. They are absolutely where the public are. That shouldn't be a surprise - @claire_ainsley, his head of policy, literally wrote the book on this ('The New Working Class').
On welfare, as @JamesHeywood & @jondupont showed in our paper, the public don't think the system is fair. A big part of that is because they don't think it values past contribution - same with eg social housing allocation.
Read 11 tweets
23 Sep
The Fabian essay is emblematic of Starmer's leadership so far. Interesting in places and almost certainly the right direction for his party but just kind of... bland.
It deals with the massive divides within the Labour movement by basically glossing over them and asserting that the Tories are bad and Labour are good. None of that Cameron/Blair sense of admitting the voters might have had a point in rejecting the party at multiple elections.
There are fights picked with the Corbynites but entirely by implication...
Read 4 tweets
5 Sep
Have written my column on a hugely important new @CPSThinkTank report, which raises the alarming prospect that the NHS could be in for a repeat of the Lansley debacle. Quick thread on thesis/findings. thetimes.co.uk/article/minist…
The immediate problem for the NHS is money. There are still Covid patients taking up a chunky (and increasing) proportion of the bed base. And they need reduce capacity to do other stuff (because staff have to get in and out of heavy-duty PPE, patients need to be isolated etc)
On top of that, Covid has seen waiting lists soar to 5m - which @sajidjavid warns could hit 13m. And then there's social care to fix. So clear that £££ is coming/needed.
Read 22 tweets
4 Sep
On social care reform, there is a hugely important element which absolutely no one is talking about, which is where funding sits (1/?)
As @DamianGreen pointed out in his @CPSThinkTank paper, the effect of making councils responsible for funding has been to make them utterly allergic to building or investing in care homes or retirement housing - because older people have become a cost they have to pay for.
This is a big reason why we have decrepit care homes, and a scandalously tiny amount of specialist retirement housing (we are building approx 7k a year, we need approx 30k). And why, across social care system, productivity has gone DOWN by 20% in the last 20 years.
Read 5 tweets
29 Aug
Have written my column about the autumn of discontent that's looming for the govt - chiefly because of the cavernous imbalance between the demands on the Treasury and its ability to meet them thetimes.co.uk/article/sunak-…
The headline talks about Boris's 'wild promises', and there are certainly a few (cough royal yacht cough). But the bigger problem is the sheer number of causes that are highly deserving & that the govt is explicitly committed to, but which each need a few billion (or much more).
Eg:
- Social care
- NHS backlog
- New hospitals
- Levelling up strategy
- Business rates reform
- Net Zero
- Education catch-up
Read 7 tweets

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