Keir starmer

The real issue facing trans people isn’t pronouns

It’s a strange reflection of our times that with so much else at stake, the leaders of both main parties have been asked, at their party conferences, whether they think that only women have cervixes. Both men prevaricated. Sir Keir Starmer declared this is ‘something that shouldn’t be said’. Boris Johnson avoided the question altogether. It is a straightforward biological fact that only women have cervixes, but simply stating it was more than the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition were prepared to do. Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, faced such a ferocious backlash after making this statement that she felt she could not safely go to the

Will Starmer move against the Socialist Campaign Group?

The Conservative party conference begins tomorrow in Manchester. Coming at a time of fuel shortages, tax rises and post-Covid drift, many disgruntled activists will be hoping to see some sign of dissent from backbenchers uncomfortable at the government’s direction of travel. Yet however bad those divides are, they’re surely nothing compared to those on show at Labour’s conference in Brighton just a few days ago. Nowhere was that better evidenced than at The World Transformed (TWT) festival, the socialist shindig to rival Labour’s ‘official’ event, held just a stone’s throw away from the main hall. It was here that members of the Socialist Campaign Group – the 35 most left-wing MPs in the

Its own opposition: Labour’s conference was all about in-fighting

As the Tories faced multiple crises this week, Keir Starmer’s party was busy in Brighton doing what it does best: arguing with itself. The Labour conference has been dominated by internal rows about rule changes, a shadow cabinet resignation and whether or not Tories can be called ‘scum’. Labour’s failure to focus on the chaos at petrol stations or chastise the Tories for incompetence was enough to baffle international visitors. ‘Why didn’t Starmer start conference at a petrol station in Brighton trying to fill people’s cars?’ one experienced diplomat asked me. ‘It would have been everywhere.’ Starmer had hoped to use the conference to end his party’s navel-gazing and outline

Starmer’s speech will go down as a success

Keir Starmer gave a very long speech on the final day of Labour conference. It lasted an hour and a half, and had 17 standing ovations. But it will largely be remembered as the speech in which the Labour leader was repeatedly heckled by the hard left. These heckles worked hugely in his favour and made the speech all the better. Those shouting from the conference floor largely chose to do so at very inappropriate moments, including when he was talking about his mother being seriously ill in intensive care.  The heckles worked hugely in his favour and made the speech all the better Many other delegates turned on the woman

Isabel Hardman

How will Keir Starmer deal with hecklers during his big speech?

What does Keir Starmer have planned for his conference speech, due to begin shortly? Not so much the words in his script, but what he plans to say if – when – he’s heckled.  Starmer has been taking quite a Neil Kinnock stance over the past few days, antagonising the hard left with his rule changes for leadership elections and refusal to back a £15-an-hour minimum wage. And you can’t channel Kinnock without expecting a few heckles in your conference speech. Those around the leader see this conference as being the last hurrah of the left LabourList‘s Sienna Rodgers reports that Momentum has instructed its delegates to heckle about the wage

Alex Massie

Labour’s Scottish problem isn’t going away

Certain questions are eternal and many of them are correspondingly dreary too. ‘How should Labour deal with the SNP?’ and ‘What can Labour offer the nationalists?’ are two of them. Since Labour requires a swing of heroic – or 1997 – proportions to win even a bare majority at the next election, you can understand why these questions will not disappear. Equally, if Labour cannot win a majority, it must dance with the parliament likely to be returned, not the parliament of its dreams. There is a problem here. What appears to make abundant sense viewed from London makes little sense viewed from Scotland. And vice versa. Any arrangement with

Isabel Hardman

Starmer prepares to make his pitch

Keir Starmer is giving his big speech at noon today, the first one he’s been able to give to a packed conference hall since becoming leader. He seems to think that this means he needs to reintroduce himself to his own party and the electorate, and to that end we’ve been promised more detail on his backstory. But the Labour leader’s problem is not so much that people don’t know who he is as that they don’t really know what he stands for. Starmer is expected to take Labour away from the Corbyn era To that end, Starmer does plan to make a sweep of policy announcements, only a handful

Starmer tries to show his winning streak

It’s been a bruising few days for Keir Starmer at Labour conference. The Labour leader has had to deal with internal warfare and in the process lost a member of his shadow cabinet. Tomorrow, Starmer will attempt to move past the turbulence of the last 48 hours and set out his vision to the public. Given that this will be Starmer’s first conference speech in front of the membership (the last conference was remote due to Covid restrictions), it is a test for his authority and his ability to connect both with his party and the public. Starmer’s team are in an upbeat mood – they believe they have won

Brendan O’Neill

The trouble with ‘Angiemania’

The most annoying thing about Angela Rayner’s branding of the Tories as ‘scum’ was not that it offended some Tories, though no doubt it did. It wasn’t even the sad story it told us about the calibre of left-wing politicians in the 21st century, who seem more adept at reaching for playground insults than at making a cool, rational case against their opponents. No, it was the implication made by some that Rayner speaks like this because she is working class. That’s what working-class people do, right? They bark the word ‘scum’ at everyone. Such larks! When they aren’t gathered around a piano belting out hilarious songs they’re hanging around

Isabel Hardman

Starmer is missing a major trick

Labour’s party conference slogan is ‘stronger future together’. It’s sufficiently anodyne that despite it being emblazoned all over a massive set in the hall, no one mentions it at all. Instead, the slogan the party’s senior figures seem to have adopted is ‘why didn’t the government have a plan for this?’ Call for parliament to be recalled: something the government would struggle to do, thereby making Boris Johnson look weak It’s the refrain you hear over and over again on everything, from Covid cases to school exams to the current fuel crisis. In fact, on that last one, it’s really the only thing you will have heard at all from

Labour’s mask hypocrisy

It’s day three of Labour conference and proceedings are in full swing. Whether it’s one of Andy Burnham’s 11 fringe events or yet another interminable motion in the conference hall, the rooms of Brighton have been packed to the rafters with Labour’s long-suffering members.  Clearly Covid spreads in teaching settings but has the grace to stop at the doors of conference jollies Yet walking around various venues Mr S was surprised to see just how few attendees were wearing their masks in poorly ventilated rooms, with no windows or open doors. With Covid cases still low, normally such a state of affairs would pass without comment. But Labour has made

Katy Balls

What is Andy Burnham up to?

Who is the busiest politician at Labour conference? One could be forgiven for assuming it would be Keir Starmer. But Andy Burnham is giving the Labour leader a run for his money.  The mayor for Greater Manchester is down to speak at 11 fringe events in total – after missing out on a slot on the main stage. On Sunday, he kicked off his busy conference schedule with a BBC interview in which he said it was the wrong time for Starmer to try to change party rules. Burnham urged the Labour leadership to finally set out a compelling vision to the public. Burnham hasn’t denied still harbouring leadership ambitions This morning,

Isabel Hardman

What does Starmer’s Labour actually stand for?

What does the Labour party stand for? That’s the big question that Keir Starmer needs to answer this week, and so far it’s proving rather more difficult to answer than you might imagine. Its frontbenchers are mostly working on policies that won’t be announced this week, so they are resorting to talking about the party’s heritage and listing the increasing number of elections the party has lost. A line that I’ve heard from a number of shadow ministers on the fringe over the past few days is ‘we need to learn from the losses of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019’. I’ve heard rather fewer assertions about winning the next election,

No, Keir, trans women like me do not have cervixes

Andrew Marr’s question was simple and straightforward, ‘[Is] someone who thinks that only women have a cervix welcome in the Labour party?’ As a party member who still clings to science and reason, I willed Keir Starmer to give a simple and straightforward answer. Instead, he blustered: Well, Andrew, we need to have a mature, respectful debate about trans rights and we need to, I think, bear in mind that the trans community are amongst the most marginalised and abused communities. It’s not true, Keir. Some of us in the trans community are doing rather well for ourselves, certainly in the UK. We have robust legal protections — we even

Starmer secures a narrow victory against the left

Keir Starmer this evening managed to scrape through his reforms to how Labour elects its leader. The victory follows a very passionate debate at the party’s conference over the policy, which will raise the qualifying threshold of support from MPs in leadership elections from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. It also drops registered supporters, who could join by paying just £3, from being able to vote in leadership elections and introduces a cut-off date for membership when a contest begins. The idea is that when there is a new leadership contest after Starmer, Labour won’t end up electing a fringe candidate. In other words, it is designed to stop

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer’s brains trust

Who are Keir Starmer’s big thinkers? Every political leader has them: folk who provoke them and offer a type of politics and policy that they can pick and choose from. Ed Miliband had ‘salons’ with key thinkers who he respected, David Cameron had Steve Hilton, and Tony Blair had a whole suite of colleagues working on his project in opposition. Starmer hasn’t been in politics for very long, which is one of the reasons he felt the need to write such a long essay setting out what he thinks: he doesn’t have the back catalogue of speeches and pamphlets that many other senior politicians do. He’s not really a ‘salon’

Starmer is playing a risky game with the Labour left

Keir Starmer is a keen amateur footballer. It’s one of the few facts anyone knows about the Labour leader. He enjoys a game on his spare time, and on the campaign trail too. One person who played with him recently told me: ‘You can tell he plays a lot and takes it very seriously.’ What they couldn’t say was that he was very good at it. Starmer is currently trying to play a political game by changing the rules for Labour’s leadership elections. It’s a big and serious move as it would make it harder for the party to go left when it picks his successor. It is therefore a

Keir Starmer’s essay is a cliché-ridden disaster

Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end. About halfway through reading Keir Starmer’s new pamphlet for the Fabian

Keir Starmer: my vision for the future of the Labour party

Below is the full text of Keir Starmer’s essay, published by the Fabian Society, on his vision for the Labour party, ahead of his conference speech next week. The pandemic has shown that the British people are still just as resilient and compassionate as we ever were. It has also shown us what matters most – our health, the places around us and the people we love. The next Labour government will place all these things at the heart of our ambitious plans to remake Britain. But Covid-19 has also exposed the many fragilities in the ways we live, work and are governed. Inequality of opportunity and a lack of

Isabel Hardman

Does Keir Starmer have the guts to put his essay into practice?

Keir Starmer’s long-awaited and lengthy essay on what he thinks the Labour party should be doing and saying has finally landed. It’s part of the Labour leader’s attempt to define himself this conference season, and sits alongside the noisy fight he’s picked with the left of the party and some of the trade unions over voting reform in leadership contests and policymaking. It’s just under 12,000 words, so it’s not an election pledge card or really aimed at voters at all. Perhaps that’s why it is largely painted in watercolour, rather than the primary colours Starmer will need to get the attention of the electorate. But that’s not to say