Labour conference: Starmer won’t make uncosted spending pledges like Corbyn, says Lammy – live

Published on Settembre 29, 2021

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6.31am EDT
06:31

Tories are ‘ready for battle’, Labour’s campaign coordinator tells conference

Most references to Boris Johnson’s administration at the Labour conference have consisted of passionate claims about it being one of the most incompetent or reprehensible governments the country has ever seen. In her speech to the conference in the general election session, Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, took a rather different approach, telling delegates not to underestimate the Tories as opponents.

Mahmood said the Tories were “ready for battle”. She said:

For me, rule one of winning is ‘know your enemy’.

If Boris Johnson’s cabinet reshuffle showed us anything, it’s that our enemy stands ready for battle and has firmly set the terrain for the next election.

A culture war unlike any we have previously seen. And we need to rise to that challenge.

We need to understand what a winning voter coalition looks like. And start making the case for it – and to it.

She said Labour had to bring groups together to create a “winning voter coalition”. That meant abandoning “intolerance of diversity of opinion”, she said. She said:

We need to understand what a winning voter coalition looks like. And start making the case for it – and to it.

And we need to do our politics differently.

Conference, we need to move away from what has become our default political setting – that says to secure the support of this group of people, we must throw that group under the bus.

This intolerance of diversity of opinion risks paralysing our party and our politics. We need instead to build bridges between these groups.

She said claims in 2019 that the party was ready for a general election were false. She said:

Conference the last time we were all here in Brighton in 2019 speaker after speaker told delegates and voters from this stage that Labour was ‘general election ready’. The crushing result, only a few months later, told us that we very much were not.

This is not a factional observation or a political stick with which to beat anyone. But a simple statement of electoral truth.

She said Labour candidates had to be representative. She said:

We will also redouble our efforts to select slates of candidates that better represent the communities and the country that they seek to serve.

6.09am EDT
06:09

‘Relentless positivity’ key to electoral success, New Zealand strategist tells Labour

In his address to the conference by video link, Hayden Munro, the strategist credited with planning the New Zealand Labour party’s landslide win in 2020, offered his UK counterparts two key pieces of advice.

The first was about positivity. He told the delegates:

The first is the absolute importance of offering a hopeful and optimistic [vision]. These are times around the world that are really scary, are really challenging, and one of the first things that Jacinda Ardern did when she became the leader of the New Zealand Labour party was commit us to relentless positivity.

She made it a very clear rule to our caucus, to our party: no negativity attacks, we talk about what’s positive, the hopeful, optimistic vision that we have for New Zealand.

(Presumably calling your opponents “scum” would not meet with Ardern’s approval.)

Munro also stressed the importance of finding arguments that appeal to target voters. He said:

The second thing, and this is where I think this falls not just to the leaders of parties, but to campaigners – from activists to campaign leadership – is the absolute importance of running united, disciplined, focused campaigns that are grounded in credible research into what the voters that we need actually [want].

Persuasion is an away game. It happens in the other person’s [field], not our own. And we found that if we grounded in our campaigners in research and what works, we had a much better chance of success.

This was probably an easier message for the party, because focusing on the concerns of target voters is what Starmer is doing. As mentioned earlier, he has appointed Deborah Mattinson, the pollster who wrote a book about the views of Labour defectors in “red wall” seats, as his director of strategy.

At the start of his presentation Munro said that although he was introduced as someone who worked on the New Zealand Labour party’s successful 2020 campaign, he also worked on its 2014 campaign, which was its worst since the 1930s. He said this showed that if a party changed, it could transform its fortunes relatively quickly.

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5.43am EDT
05:43

The Labour MP Rosie Duffield attended an unofficial event in Brighton last night and, according to the Times (paywall), she objected to suggestions she was a “dinosaur” because of her views on trans issues. She said:

It’s ridiculous and nothing about me is a dinosaur. I’m angry at colleagues chucking me on the railway tracks. I’m even more determined. I’m not a transphobe, I never have been and I never will be. I simply want to use the word women.

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary who used the word “dinosaur” at a fringe meeting to describe people opposed to trans rights, told Times Radio: “I don’t recall ever calling my friend Rosie Duffield a dinosaur.”

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5.32am EDT
05:32

Political speeches are never delivered in a vacuum. How they are received is to a large extent shaped by what people already feel about the party, and the leader, and so here is a recap, with three charts from the latest polling from Ipsos MORI (pdf).

This shows what has happened to party support since the 2015 election.

This shows what has happened to Sir Keir Starmer’s ratings since he was elected leader.

And this shows how Starmer’s ratings compare with the ratings of other opposition leaders since 1980, at this stage in their leadership. Astonishingly, only two of these leaders have gone on to win a general election (Tony Blair and David Cameron). Starmer is polling well below both of them.

5.11am EDT
05:11

The Labour conference proceedings are just starting. Before the first proper session, on general election planning, they are dealing with some procedural matters, and a trans delegate, Jennifer Kaye, has just complained that the party is not doing enough to protect trans people. She said Rosie Duffield should have the whip removed. Another delegate has just spoken, also calling for Duffield to lose the whip, and complaining that a speaker was allowed to defend Duffield during the debate yesterday.

Nick Robinson may be feeling that this vindicates that his line of questioning to David Lammy this morning. (See 9.40am.)

4.57am EDT
04:57

Starmer won’t make uncosted spending pledges like Corbyn, says Lammy

Here are some more lines from David Lammy‘s morning interviews.

Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, criticised Jeremy Corbyn for making uncosted spending commitments and said Sir Keir Starmer would not make that mistake. He said:

We will not be making proposals that cannot be costed, the public need to know where the money is coming from.

Clearly it was the case at the last general election, we were coming up with policies like free broadband, policies on pensions for women, a four-day week, and the public were saying ‘how much is this going to cost’?

It was coming at the last minute, they felt confused and they didn’t feel able to trust us because of some of the issues that were dominating the party.

Keir is not going to make that mistake, things have to be costed.

Lammy said Labour did believe in common ownership, but decisions had to be taken on a case-by-case basis. He said:

A party that is set on an ideological mission is usually rejected by the British people. So, do we have a belief in common ownership? Yes, we do.

But you have got to look at the best value case as it sits at the time. We are some way off the next general election.

There may well be a case for nationalisation of the rail but it might be different in a different sector or an industry.

So we can’t just say – in the way that you might do if you were the politburo – ‘we are going to nationalise everything’, that doesn’t make sense.

You have got to look case by case, sector by sector.

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4.40am EDT
04:40

Lammy criticises BBC for asking about trans issues in interview ahead of Starmer’s speech

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, was doing the morning interview round on behalf of Labour, but it did not go entirely smoothly and he ended up attacking the BBC Today programme presenter Nick Robinson for asking him about trans issues.

All week, largely because of the controversy about the Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who decided not to attend conference because of the criticism she has received over her comments about trans women, Labour shadow cabinet ministers have found themselves being interrogated about cervixes and how a woman should be defined. They have not always found it easy to respond. (See here and here, for example.) Interviewing Lammy, Robinson asked him who he was referring to when he told a fringe meeting yesterday that people hostile to trans rights were “dinosaurs”.

That prompted Lammy to hit back, accusing Robinson of setting “a bit of a trap” and suggesting he should be asking about mainstream policies instead. He said that one in four trans people has attempted suicide, and that they needed better treatment, but he insisted this was an issue that never gets raised by voters on the doorstep. Then he accused Robinson of getting his priorities wrong. He said:

You could be asking me about climate change, you could be asking me about mental health, you could be asking about education, you could be asking about health. You are deliberately asking me about an issue that you know does not come up on the doorstep …

You, the BBC, are choosing to land on this subject that most British people aren’t talking about in a fuel crisis and spend minutes on this because it keeps Labour talking identity issues, and not about the substantive policies that Keir will set out.

Robinson justified his decision to raise the question by pointing out that Deborah Mattinson, the pollster who is now head of strategy for Starmer, has in the past said that a significant problem for Labour is that “red wall” voters do not relate to the values of its young, metropolitan, socially liberal activists (for whom trans rights are particularly important).

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at 4.48am EDT

4.22am EDT
04:22

Labour would reform Ofsted so it focuses on struggling school, Starmer to announce in conference speech

Good morning. Last year, when Sir Keir Starmer gave his first speech as leader to a Labour conference, it was online, which meant that it had all the excitement, immediacy and clout of Zoom call. As if that was not enough, it happened just as the second wave of Covid was taking off, and it was overshadowed by a Boris Johnson televised address to the nation later in the day announcing some new restrictions. The speech was well received on its own terms, but, as a leadership-defining moment it was always doomed to failure.

That is why today’s speech is particularly important. If Starmer cannot use it to jumpstart Labour’s performance in the polls (which currently imply the party is on course to lose the next election), he will be out of excuses.

Labour briefed some extracts from the speech overnight, saying that Starmer would promise to make mental health treatment available to everyone who needs it within a month, and create drop-in mental health hubs aimed at children and young people. Here is my colleague Heather Stewart‘s overnight story.

And this morning the party has released another snippet from the speech: Starmer will pledge to reform Ofsted so that in future it focuses on struggling schools, as part of a school improvement plan which the party says is intended to “boost the number of outstanding schools in all areas of the country; drive up standards; and enable every child to achieve their full potential”.

Here is an extract from the briefing released by Labour.

The national excellence programme will include: recruiting thousands of new teachers to address vacancies and skills gaps across the profession; reforming Ofsted to focus on supporting struggling schools; providing teachers and headteachers with continuing professional development and leadership skills training.

Even before the pandemic, 200,000 primary age children in England were growing up in areas with not a single primary school rated good or outstanding.

Labour says there are 200,000 primary-age children living in areas with no good or outstanding schools, and it says this is a particular problem in the north-east, where 11 out of 12 local authorities have a higher than average share of pupils attending an underperforming school. It also says “a secondary school pupil living in the north of England is around five times as likely to attend an underperforming school than one of their peers living in London”.

(Interestingly, in the briefing sent to journalists, Labour cites as the source for some of this data this report partly written by Onward, a mainstream Conservative thinktank.)

In his speech, Starmer will say:

I want every parent in the country to be able to send their child to a great state school.

On top of that, 40% of young people leave compulsory education without essential qualifications. What does that say about their future? We will not put up with that.

That is why Labour will launch the most ambitious school improvement plan ever.

There are only two items on the agenda for the day.

9.45am: Conference opens with a session headlined “General election report”. The contributors include Hayden Munro, the strategist credited with planning the New Zealand Labour party’s landslide win in 2020; Muthoni Wambu Kraal, national political and organising director for the Democratic National Committee in the US for the 2020 presidential election; Vaughan Gething, the Welsh government’s economy minister; Dan Norris, the Labour mayor of the West of England; and Shaban Mahmood, Labour’s national campaign coordinator.

12pm: Sir Keir Starmer gives his speech.

I will be focusing exclusively on Labour today. For the latest in the fuel shortage crisis, do follow my colleague Julia Kollewe‘s business live blog.

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Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com

Updated
at 4.43am EDT

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Labour conference 2021