With the hail of bad freebie stories echoing the Mersey downpour, this looked set to be a less joyous conference than was due a party that had just gone from its worst defeat since 1935 to a stunning majority in one jump. But that victory was still in the air: the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, boasted there are more female Labour MPs than all the Tories on the opposition bench put together; and time and again people assail you with astonished tales of their local forever-Tory seat gone Labour – East Thanet, Hertford and Stortford.
However, there is no escaping it: the freebies scandal soured the opening atmosphere. The FT splashed that public confidence and spending was spiralling down after the “‘Things will get worse’ before they get better” foreboding from Keir Starmer. No one disputes that Labour inherited a country in an abysmal state, but with too much “no jam today” it overdid the workhouse gruel. One wise headteacher told me that Labour’s task felt to her like taking over a failing school. And with polls sinking, the urgent task was to cast out fear with a breath of hope.
Waiting for the budget has become like waiting for Godot. With all ministers banned from announcements until budget day, still weeks away, media malice fills the void. Every seasoned politician should know this rule: feed the beast before it eats you. Senior Labour insiders admit they were unprepared for the gale-force daily onslaught: they lack an effective rebuttal attack dog to fight back every minute of the 24-hour clock.
Reeves’ task was to lift the despondency and let the sun shine in, and she did. She dispelled the fear that austerity 2.0 was on its way: no real-terms cuts to government spending she said. Talk of economic “pain” without saying who was due to get it in the neck left people assuming that everyone was in for same the treatment as will be meted out to pensioners above pension credit level. But Reeves has always said it would not fall on “working people”. And those listening hardest will know that the burden is for those “broadest shoulders” that Starmer mentioned in his rose garden speech. Reeves picked up this thread when she blasted tax evaders and avoiders, announcing more tax inspectors: Labour is expected to raise billions from abolishing the tax reliefs and loopholes that amount to the secret welfare state for the well off. That will be popular.
Is there a theme? Reeves doesn’t quite have a definable -ism. She points to the prize, the vision, the light at the end of the tunnel, with sunlit uplands of green growth and fairer prosperity. She walloped the Tories and promised the possible with a passion utterly unfamiliar to the Treasury these past 14 years. Her rhetoric and reason was greeted with delight: it’s the best chance for recovery in a country battered by atrocious government.
With a precarious victory teetering on a 34% vote, there is much talk of trust. Reeves doesn’t just speak of shovels in the ground and cranes reaching the sky, but of rebuilding fragile trust in politics as a force for good. That has been a goal of Starmer’s Labour from the beginning, but it has become trickier territory after free football and Taylor Swift tickets, hospitality and holidays. People are used to Tory snouts in the trough, and grandees such as David Cameron or Owen Paterson being paid walloping sums by firms while at the same time lobbying their colleagues. Reeves is hotly pursuing the Tories’ disputed £674m in Covid contracts. But higher standards are expected of Labour, with no shock absorbers for any improprieties: as ministers were sent out with toe-curling excuses, calling it “within the rules” only made it plain to most people that the rules are wrong. It was days too late when Starmer pledged they will refuse all gifts in future. He needs to go much further. His deputy, Angela Rayner, hinted at it obliquely to Laura Kuenssberg, mentioning “a national debate about how we fund politics”.
Starmer said as dawn broke on his first morning as prime minister, “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our age.” After last week’s disclosures, Labour will need to try harder to regain the high ground. It must use this moment to clean up politics by purging dark money, ending big donations and the fundraising arms race. Britain sucks up more private political money than similar countries, where public funding is the price for putting democracy above suspicion. Who knows what donors expect in influence or reward? Unaccustomed sums flowed to Labour in the final weeks of the campaign once it was clearly headed for power. Surely sincere well-wishers would have donated when the money was most needed: 90% of people think MPs “very often” or “sometimes” act according to their donors’ wishes. It doesn’t require a mea culpa for Starmer to decide politics needs a total cleansing of cash to regain public trust.
Labour will have regained impetus this week, with that row receding. But it did distract attention from intense fringe discussions of policies in progress. “We’ve been busy,” said Rayner, listing what Labour has set out in its first 80 days: taking rail into public ownership, founding Great British Energy, reviving onshore wind, new trade union and working rights, rights for renters, planning reform to speed housebuilding, a national wealth fund for green investment, more teachers, no one-word Ofsted damnations, and a child poverty review that can only end in more money for children. There’s much more than fits this space, and it’s impressive.
But only bold strokes are visible to most voters. A poll on Tuesday showed Labour hemorrhaging support to Greens and Lib Dems. According to Prof Rob Ford, this is a far greater risk than losses to Farage, who has already taken the relatively few he’s likely to get from Labour. That should urge Reeves to focus on the left flank: abolishing the two-child benefit cap would be a totemic down payment.
The art of politics requires a bit of wizardry and this government has been learning on the job, sometimes the hard way. Many people, say the polls, will give Labour only a year to keep blaming the Tories, so it must act fast – as voters notoriously lack patience. Labour’s “Don’t panic!” Lance Corporal Joneses will have been reassured and enthused by Reeves’s hopeful speech, and more uplift will come on Tuesday from the prime minister. Never mind the polls now: Thatcher tanked in her first years – and it’s a very long time until the next election.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 24 September 2024. An earlier version listed Colchester as a “forever-Tory seat gone Labour”; it had a Liberal Democrat MP from 1997-2015.
