WeeklyWorker

02.10.2025
They were the days

Fear and loathing in Liverpool

Can Sir Keir and his gormless front bench turn things around? Paul Demarty reports on Labour’s conference, Andy Burnham, bashing migrants and the risky strategy of talking up Farage and Reform UK. It could all horribly backfire

Party conferences are always, to some extent, hostages to fortune.

Things can go terribly wrong in the room - we all remember poor old Theresa May in 2017 - her speech interrupted first by a merry prankster handing her a P45, and then by repeated coughing fits, while the display behind her slowly disintegrated. Nothing so humiliating befell Sir Keir Starmer and his gormless front bench this past weekend in Liverpool. The surrounding news cycle, however, was notably unkind. His consigliere, Morgan McSweeney, has been dragged into a political funding scandal, hot on the heels of the resignation of Paul Ovenden for mean text messages about Diane Abbott and the downfall of Angela Rayner over tax-dodging.

As for Starmer himself, on the eve of the conference, Ipsos released a poll which found him to be the least popular prime minister ever (or at least since they started doing approval ratings in the 1970s). Opinion polls must be treated with a little scepticism, but anecdotal evidence seems to confirm the picture (consider only the anti-Starmer chants echoing around football grounds every weekend). Desperate Labour eyes turn to Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, as a possible replacement: he is, after all, reasonably popular up there, and Manchester seems to be in pretty good nick. He denies any interest, in the sort of half-smiling way people do, when really they come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

The big policy announcements essentially all had to do with immigration - unsurprisingly, since at present the main beneficiary of Labour’s malaise is Nigel Farage and his Reform UK outfit. Revived plans for digital ID cards - a hobby-horse of the Labour right going back to Tony Blair - were pitched entirely as a measure against illegal immigration. Shabana Mahmood, elevated to the home office because she is considered a hardliner, proposed various measures to make it more difficult for migrants to retain indefinite leave to remain (IDR), with a battle shaping up between Labour and Reform over this category. (Farage had already trailed simply abolishing it.)

The rhetoric from the top table, meanwhile, targeted Reform relentlessly, repeatedly accusing the party and its surrogates of racism. In his closing speech, Starmer claimed Farage was a “snake-oil merchant” who “doesn’t like Britain” - no lies detected - and asserted, to general approval:

If you say or imply that people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin, that mixed-heritage families owe you an explanation, that people who have lived here for generations, raised their children here, built lives here … if you say they should now be deported, then, mark my words, we will fight you with everything we have, because you are an enemy of national renewal.

Such was the rhetoric that Farage claimed Starmer “directly threatened the safety” of him and his colleagues - the standing orders among the far right since the death of Charlie Kirk being to imitate the sort of intolerable, whiny cry-baby that might have been teleported directly from a student union general meeting in 2015. We look forward to the Reform UK safe spaces policy with great interest.

Calculation

The political rationale here would seem to be related to what the lobby journalists believe is McSweeney’s strategy: to set up a straight fight between Starmer and Farage at the next general election. Given such a choice, he supposes, defectors to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and - if it ever gets off the ground - Your Party will come crawling back (and even now, with Reform topping opinion polls, head-to-head questions pitching Starmer against Farage tend to come out in the Labour leader’s favour). Promoting chauvinist anti-immigration policies may shore up Labour’s vote in some places, but also ensures that everyone is talking about immigration, which will tend to raise the profile of Reform. Meanwhile, Starmer and co can emphasise the ghoulishness of Reform-ism in their public rhetoric.

That said, it is a tricky manoeuvre, as is evidenced by both Starmer’s and Mahmood’s conference turns. Both denounced the Reform IDR plan as racist; but, if it is racist, it is surely because it is attacking IDR, and so are they. It is the difference between someone who uses a racial slur against a minority and someone who beats them to death in a hate crime. The two cases differ in important respects, to say the least, but they are both cases of racism. Voters with a strong moral objection to immigration fearmongering are directly alienated by the very methods used to lure them back at a later date. It is risky, as Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton could probably tell you.

The policies, meanwhile, are vulnerable to telling attacks. If IDR is the problem, Reform might well ask, why tinker with it and not get rid of it? ID cards, meanwhile, are bluntly risible as a solution to the problem of migrants illegally taking jobs. These workers are already off the books; how is digitising the books supposed to help? There is definitionally no sanitised, bureaucratic means of suppressing these workers - any effective approach will look rather like the terroristic activities of America’s ICE agents, only far worse.

Beyond the immigration talk, anyway, there was little else memorable on display. A motion designating Israel’s conduct in Gaza genocidal passed - a symbolic victory, given the way Labour ministers ignore conference decisions, but nonetheless a good thing. Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised a library for every primary school in Britain (and conceded that she could no longer avoid tax rises, which will no doubt be the more well-remembered part of her speech). Some paltry amelioration of the two-child benefit cap was trailed ahead of the budget. An extremely limited return of student grants was mooted, wholly unequal to the looming crisis of higher education.

King of north

Even by the standards of Labour conference, then, this was a peculiarly empty event: little of substance, plenty of pompous speechifying by people who have the general look of having been drastically over-promoted, living in fear of Farage, an ale-sodden demagogue and former spiv.

Can Starmer survive? He is fortunate in that Burnham, the man who right now appears to be his chief rival, is awkwardly ineligible at present for the job, not being an MP (there is some talk of retirements being hurried along, so he can win a seat in the Commons soon). For now, he can focus on building his national profile. He is talking left, at least by post-Corbyn Labour standards, demanding the nationalisation of water and other utilities. He told the New Statesman that “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets” - a clear barb against the treasury-brained timidity of Reeves.

His alternative, at this point, thus seems to be a soft-left populism with a distinctly regional accent. I, for one, remember mocking Burnham in 2015 for his talk of “getting out of the Westminster bubble”, but fair’s fair: he really did it; and sparring with the Tories down south from his Mancunian bully pulpit helped rebuild his reputation in national politics. He is not likely to drop the ‘provinces versus the capital’ schtick now.

The deputy leadership election is being viewed as a proxy battle between him and Starmer, with Lucy Powell standing in for Burnham (and leading the polls by some distance as I write). If Powell wins, and if Labour suffer too bad a drubbing in the next local elections, and if Burnham procures himself a parliamentary seat, a coup is hardly unlikely. None of these are especially big ‘ifs’. Burnham has since made some attempts to quieten down speculation by backing Starmer, but we have a long way to go in this parliament. Time is on his side.

Whether he would have greater popularity in the event is another matter. Having started talking vaguely left, he would surely enjoy the relentless enmity of the papers of the yellow press and their digital-native successors. (Remember the treatment of Ed Miliband, basically portrayed as if he was Mao disguised as a think-tank analyst.) The difference between a minor embarrassment and a disastrous scandal is largely a matter of will on the part of the media.

Even on the substantive points, one can see hostages to fortune. Defiance towards bond vigilantes is always nice to hear, but it is not really that long since Liz Truss was defenestrated by such people, with the connivance of their allies at the Bank of England. These institutions really are powerful, and it will take more than a recitation of the St Crispin’s day speech to frighten them. It may well be the case that Reeves is more timid than necessary, and it is certainly true that she has disgracefully taken aim at children and the elderly to make the numbers add up to her satisfaction. But the constraints are real: she is not merely afraid of her own shadow.

The political economy of Britain is extensively financialised. The exchequer ticks over largely on income tax takings from a relatively small layer of upper professionals, whose most important role in the world economy is lubricating global tax evasion. We have little industry, and what there is has been plugged into supply chains dominated by others. We are not even close to self-sufficient in food production. Even patently necessary state actions, like the renationalisation of utilities, are unacceptable to the international markets, since they amount to expropriations and therefore threaten other investments; and, because we are entirely dependent on our specific role in global finance, these investors find it easy to threaten governments into backing down in all but the direst of emergencies.

If Farageism is anything but snake-oil, then it amounts to merely doubling down on this situation. The remaining crown jewels of the post-war boom - crucially the NHS - will be sold off to American insurers and similar parasites. Corporate taxes will bottom out further. This much is obvious, even now that Reform is a little more cautious about putting out its full turbo-Thatcherite programme, in the name of fake populism. If Burnham does not have an answer, however, he is equally peddling snake oil, and ‘sensible’ politics will remain a matter merely of making the best of managed decline in vassalage to the United States.

On the Marxist left we do have an answer, which is disloyalty to the nation-state and international action. Britain probably cannot feed itself if cut off from the global market, but Europe could. However, most of the far left prefers to behave as if it was possible to have socialism - or failing that, ‘anti-austerity’ or suchlike - in Britain alone. As such, we too are selling snake-oil. At the end of this road, sooner or later, lies the political victory of a Farage-like figure.