Speech Unspun
New Year New Labour
Sir Keir Starmer’s New Year speech, January 2024, Bristol
National Renewal
It’s great to be here again looking at the next generation of aircraft wings. You can see some of the instruments behind me. This is the third time and I love it, and it features quite heavily in a number of my speeches… But look, there is one thing that we can be sure is coming this year and I’m ready for it… A year of choice…. The opportunity to shape our country’s future rests in your hands. And that is a new year message of hope. The hope of democracy. The power of the vote. The potential for national renewal. The chance, finally, to turn the page, lift the weight off our shoulders, unite as a country, and get our future back.
I have compressed the opening into a paragraph. In the speech as delivered, it was rather elongated, but you can see from here that it is possible to get to the right point more quickly. The aircraft wings was one of the few times in which Starmer made the listener use the imagination. His speeches are flatter than they might be because they tend to the abstract. The reference to the aircraft wings is good because it was gently self-deprecating and also because it signifies Starmer’s political claim to embody a modern industrial economy. I might have even have been tempted by the odd metaphor of take off and landing. The image of the aircraft wings also sets up the central message of the speech – national renewal. This is an encouraging choice, to my mind exactly the story that Labour should take into the election that Rishi Sunak has more or less confirmed will be in the autumn.
Mission Critical
That’s why the national missions we’ve set, the measurable goals. Whether it’s the highest growth in the G7, halving violence against women and girls, clean power by 2030 – they are unapologetically ambitious. I know they will take hard-work, determination, patience – a true national effort. And for many people that invites a sharp intake of breath, a raised eyebrow, a question – can this really be done?
Labour’s missions have been mocked but that is unfair. An opposition needs to give a flavour of what it wants and that is what the missions were designed to do. It was too early to offer detailed policy and the missions were an appropriate staging post. Nobody ever thought they were sufficient on their own and, indeed, the time in which they become obviously insufficient is now upon us. It was surprising to see them repeated in this speech without any real refinement. We now need to know whether the missions are targets or whether they are ambitions. You do not want, as a government, to have yourself impaled on a target to create clean power by 2030 if clean power arrives in 2031. The missions need to be defined as incentives rather than guarantees.
But more than that they now need to be specified. Lots of people in politics fool themselves that they are distinguished from their political opponents by wanting very different things. There are differences in value, of course, but the principal divisions are about method. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng also wanted Britain to have the highest growth rate in the G7. They had a very different way of getting there and that’s where Labour needs to fill in the gap – the method by which this desirable objective will be brought about.
Higher Standards
The hope of change and renewal, married to the responsibility of service, that’s what I believe in. And yes, I believe it’s still the best way to change our country for the better. Its success or failure, written into the walls of every community in this country. The hospital your children were born in, the home you live in, the wage in your pocket, the opportunities in your town, the sense of pride – or unease – when you walk down your street. That’s all politics.
This passage was presaged earlier in the speech in an excellent and well-written routine in which Starmer said that “trust in politics is now so low, so degraded, that nobody believes you can make a difference anymore…. after the sex scandals, the expenses scandals, the waste scandals, the contracts for friends, even in a crisis like the pandemic, some people have looked at us and concluded we’re all just in it for ourselves”. The recovery of the reputation of politics, and the return of high ethical standards to public life, is a major theme of this speech, and quite right too. Some political veterans might grumble that the conduct of public life is a distraction from economic questions but the decay of the Tory government is very much to do with its odour of corruption and entitlement. Starmer embodies a sense of decency and it makes sense to use this rhetorically as part of the construction of his political character.
However, there is a problem. Starmer’s team really do need to become more sensitive to cliché. This is a speech in which we turn the page, lift the weight off our shoulders, leave no stone unturned, find a hard road ahead but light at the end of the tunnel. Britain is crying out for change, standing tall again, looking forward. Objecting to these dead phrases is not the fastidious distaste of a professional writer (or at least not just that). One of Starmer’s central messages – and it is a good one – is that conduct in political life has to be better and that standards must be elevated. There will be no revival of faith in politics, and hence no trust that change can be made for the better, without such a change. If therefore he sounds like any old politician, mouthing the perennial cliches of political life, this exactly and dramatically undermines his claim to be the spokesman of a new politics. The spokesman for the new needs to sound novel and Starmer does not yet sound novel. He needs to take more risks with his words which will have the simultaneous effect of casting a more flattering light on his ideas.
Heavy Government
I promise a new plan with new priorities, five national missions that will sweep away the era of Tory division, a plan for the long-term. With higher growth, a reformed planning system no longer blocking the homes, infrastructure and investment we need. Safer streets, more police in your town, cracking down on anti-social behaviour. Cheaper bills, with GB Energy, a new public company, using clean British power not foreign oil and gas. More opportunities for your children, new technical excellence colleges training our kids in the skills they need and businesses want. Better mental health support in schools, expert teachers in every classroom, paid for – by removing tax breaks on private schools. And our NHS back on its feet, with a plan to cut the waiting lists, paid for by removing the non-dom tax status. Two million more appointments every year in an NHS clearing the backlog, seven days a week.
This rapid recap of the outcomes by which Starmer would wish a Labour government to be judged is, on the face of it, dizzying in its ambitious scope. It certainly implies a very active government and reposes a great deal of faith – of a vintage social democratic kind – in the capacity of a well-intentioned government to improve the lot of the people. This is precisely what was at issue in the early part of the speech and will be an intriguing part of Labour in power. To what extent can an active government will its world into shape after the mess the Tory party have indeed made of everything. We shall find out but the point here is that Labour sound very standard Labour. But then we heard this….
Light Government
But with respect and service I also promise this: a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives. Because that’s the thing about populism, or nationalism, any politics fuelled by division. It needs your full attention. It needs you constantly focusing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting, isn’t it? On the other hand, a politics that aspires to national unity, bringing people together, the common good, that’s harder to express, less colourful, fewer clicks on social media. And, in some ways, it’s more demanding of you. It asks you to moderate your political wishes out of respect for the different wishes of others. 45 million voters can’t get everything that they want, that’s democracy.
There was a passage in Starmer’s conference speech in which he made this point. With a distant echo of W.B. Yeats he talked about treading more lightly and here he does so again. It’s the best phrase in the speech and the most question-begging idea. It might be quoted back when Labour proves to be quite interventionist. It demands a whole speech of its own, to be worked out. Does it mean any more than that a Labour will feel different, will be less attention-seeking and more intent on achievement? Perhaps not, but it still sounds like exactly the sort of (welcome) sentiment that almost nobody in the Labour party can live up to.
Better Mood
It will feel different, frankly. The character of politics will change, and with it the national mood. A collective breathing out. A burden lifted. And then, the space for a more hopeful look forward… Only Labour can lead Britain towards national renewal… A new politics or the same old Westminster? Continued decline with the Tories, or national renewal with Labour? Nobody in Britain thinks the years ahead will be easy. But this year is the chance, the only chance, to change our course.
This is a clever passage which might be prophetic. A new government may change the mood of the nation, at least for a while, and that will be to Starmer’s definite political advantage. It will give him time and a period in which his actions are viewed in a favourable light. Let’s hope so because he has earned that right. To take the Labour party to the threshold of power from the position he inherited is a considerable political feat. And he ends in the right place too. Julian Barnes wrote that we all really only have one story and that is certainly true of a political party. The story of the successful Labour party is the story of renewal and that is the story that will make Keir Starmer Prime Minister.
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