Starmer buys some time but Farage is ready and waiting
British PM spent much of his address at the Labour conference attacking Nigel Farage and is marginally stronger as leader – for now.
So there it is: what Sir Keir Starmer really believes in. Not much of his conference speech was surprising – beyond, perhaps, its uneventful delivery. Undisturbed by protest or heckles, the British Prime Minister did a good job.
Sometimes his oratory was flat, a few passages rushed. But mostly it was just fine. Expectations are always low – Labour’s internecine strife, global turmoil, Starmer’s limitations as a raconteur – and invariably he exceeds them.
No surprises there, then. Nor in the content. The text of the speech did contain Labour’s equivalent of a rare earth metal: a new policy that wasn’t leaked ahead of time. Abolishing the target for 50 per cent of school leavers to attend university introduced by Tony Blair’s government was significant, and reminds us of something often obscured by Starmer’s conscious and sometimes unconvincing imitation of New Labour’s choreography. His is a different kind of progressivism and this is a different kind of government. He, too, is a different kind of politician, and a different man.
Cabinet ministers had heard this sort of thing before. Addressing awaydays in February and July, Starmer offered them a similar analysis to that we heard at greater length in Liverpool: the old age of untrammelled globalisation is over, a new age of insecurity has begun and the centre-left must reckon with the big calls it got wrong on migration and national identity. The losers of that era – mostly men in blue collars, like a certain toolmaker from Surrey – were paid insufficient respect by the political parties founded to give them representation.
Thus he rebuked New Labour’s founding fathers, explicitly and subtly. In 1999 Blair declared that the class war was over. In 2025 Starmer spoke as often of the “working class” as much as “working people”, the sanitised line preferred by his election manifesto. In 2010 Gordon Brown went to Rochdale and called Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” for complaining about immigrants. In 2025 Starmer said he thought it a shame that a woman in Oldham only felt able to complain about anti-social behaviour by her eastern European neighbours after first offering him photographic proof that she was not a racist as she had attended an Asian friend’s wedding.
Now the rest of the Labour Party – and whatever members of the public are still prepared to pay this unpopular leader attention – has heard this stuff too. It was shamelessly class-conscious and at once defensive and critical of the state: in favour of strategic intervention in the economy and damning of abuses of its power from Windrush to Hillsborough and Grenfell.
Having heard all that, Starmer’s critics in Westminster may find it harder to sustain the argument that Downing Street is run by a cabal of frothing right-wingers and headbanging racists. Not least because the Prime Minister spent so much time denouncing Nigel Farage and overcame a long summer’s reticence to condemn the street violence of the far-right.
In short, Labour heard what it wanted to hear. You can quibble with the presentation – the flags, what one senior government describes as the “cliche soup” that made up stretches of the prose – but on that front it succeeded. It leaves Starmer in a marginally stronger position internally than he was in when he arrived in Liverpool.
And he has given an answer, for now, to those who complain he has no strategy to take on Farage. He drew clear dividing lines, although those on culture were drawn in a much louder shade of red than the economics.
It got him through the hour. It’ll get him through the week, this month. Then, in late November, comes the budget, and the real revelation of Labour’s political priorities. Starmer wrote the cheques, Rachel Reeves will have to cash them. The Office for Budget Responsibility and bond markets set hard limits that cannot be applauded away by relieved and grateful delegates: the flashes of indignation towards this government’s left-wing opponents within and without the Labour Party gave us hints of bigger arguments to come. No amount of thoughtful commentary on the shifting horizons of the centre-left will spare the Prime Minister and Chancellor the obligation to make the hardest choices they have yet faced in government.
Farage reminded us of the stakes in his reply. “We will teach Starmer a lesson next May that British political history will never forget,” he said of the local and devolved elections. These will tell us whether the public agrees that Starmer is really changing the miserable status quo that has driven so many voters to Reform and parties of nationalism and the radical left. “I am now, as a result of this week and the abuse that has been heaped upon our supporters and voters, more determined than ever. Don’t underestimate that.”
If Starmer cannot prove him wrong, Farage will be responding to a different prime minister next year.
The Times
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