Labour’s Existential Crisis, Live From Liverpool

Starmer promises to fight Reform, Reeves promises not to scare the bond markets, Mahmood promises Reform cosplay, and the left flank is left wide open.

So, first things first - please forgive any glaring typos, dodgy punctuation or any points where I may not be making much sense - the analysis below was written on the sofa after a 12-hour day of utter chaos and late into the evening while watching Below Deck with one eye because I’ll be spending all of today in interviews and won’t be able to write anything at all.

Joy.

Second thing - I have tried to be as fair to the government as possible, but, it is a bit… hard.

Because, I’ll be very honest, the first day of the Labour Conference for 2025 unfolded somewhat less than a celebration of power and more like a wake with better lighting and sound.

The party that swept into power just a little bit over fifteen months ago suddenly looks tired. It has the feel of a party that’s been in power for twenty years already and feels far from its roots, goals and base.

Instead of what should have been a victory lap after a successful first year in office after fourteen years out turned out to be what felt like a group therapy session mixed with a hostage situation - and the hostage takers are Reform, Nigel Farage is making the ransom demands and Labour has come down with a bad case of the Stockholm Syndrome while at the same time, for some reason, shooting themselves in the foot, reloading, and shooting again for good measure.

For a bit of context to the panic, it’s all down to polling.

Not for the local elections next year may, but for who would win were there to be a general election tomorrow. The issue with this, of course, is that the next GE is a good three, three and a half years away. Yes, they’re currently polling at 34% and Labour at 22%, and yes, More in Common’s polling is showing that Reform would have a whopping big majority with Labour down to 90 seats (which is not so much opposition as it is a medium-sized book club). Yes, it looks grim, but keeping in mind, and I can’t repeat this enough:

There is no general election anytime soon.

That doesn’t seem to matter though, and to no one more so than the Labour crowd, and it came through in spades in the mood in Liverpool which can only be described as: grim, slightly defiant in patches, but for the most part, just pure panicked.

Keir Starmer, to his credit, finally tried to summon a bit of fight - he dusted off his most stern face, went full courtroom barrister and declared Reform’s immigration policies to be “racist¹” and “immoral.”

All I can say is - fucking finally!

Starmer’s Stern Face.

He, very gravely, told the delegates present that:

“This isn’t about an election. They want to use the politics of division to undermine our very way of life”

He called the battle with Reform, probably quite accurately “the fight of our lives.” In theory, it should have been terribly stirring - the issue being that Starmer’s delivery was less Henry V at Agincourt, and more exhausted headmaster desperately trying to stop the Year 11s from setting fire to the library again.

The applause was there, politely so, but you could smell the nervous flopsweat permeating the air². The problem is mainly that when your central campaign message is “please don’t let Nigel Farage eat us alive”, it doesn’t really inspire massive amounts of confidence.

The biggest issue though? While calling Reform racist is fine (and well overdue), it’s somewhat undermined when your own Home Secretary is busy unveiling policies that give off the appearance of having been workshopped with some blokes found hanging flags off lampposts.

But we’ll get to Priti Patel Shabana Mahmood in a minute. First let’s talk about Rachel Reeves.

Reeves’s speech and show was as polished, professional and delivered with the level of confidence you could expect from someone who rehearsed it in front of every single mirror in Liverpool.

I can tell you now who’s going to carry the consequences of Reeve’s “hard choices” - and it’s definitely not people with yachts.

She opened with a worrying piece of defiance:

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that there is no difference between a Labour government and a Conservative government.”

She was emphatic about this point - so much so that she was just about able to distract from the rather fetching pearl necklace she definitely wasn’t wearing. The problem with that sort of hefty reassurance is that it’s not, well… reassuring. Not when all I can sense on the horizon are more cuts and more ambivalence towards raising taxes.

And this is a problem that I have with Reeves - she’s a politician that I find technically excellent, undeniably competent but politically… hollow and filled with echoes from a rather neoliberal past.

The headline announcement was the Youth Guarantee - every young person on UC for 18 months will be required to accept a job or training place, or face sanctions. This was framed by Reeves as bold, fair and ambitious.

In reality, it sounded suspiciously Blair-era adjacent welfare reform reheated with a not so subtle garnish of “tough love”.

Yes, abolishing long-term youth unemployment is noble.

Yes, helping people into work is good.

But sanctions? After we’ve lived through umpteen cost of living crises, a whole damned global pandemic and fourteen years of every single safety net being shredded into non-existence?

For a party that in just one year already has a bit of a habit of being somewhat punitive towards the vulnerable, this was not a good look.

There was also a promise of putting a library in every primary school by the end of the parliament, which was… lovely. Who could argue with something like that? But it had the faint scent of a policy scavenger hunt, because Reeves has a bit of a knack for offering things that look great in a bullet point but don’t actually add up very much of a vision.

A “hit squad” for COVID Fraudsters? Definitely had my ears piqued, and is long overdue, but I wouldn’t say it was massively world changing.

I want to remind you again of the context that this was happening - the Conference of Doooom - and we had a Chancellor that, instead of electrifying the base with a plan to turn the country around instead gave us some sanctions, a few libraries. It was all terribly beige.

And I have to say, Reeves’s fiscal responsibility shtick is starting to wear just a bit thin.

“I will take no risks with the trust placed in us by the British people,” she intoned.

Translation: don’t expect much spending, don’t expect any ambition and definitely don’t expect anything that risks the bond markets making frowny faces at me. The subtext in that bit - that Andy Burnham and the left of the party calling for looser fiscal policy are reckless dreamers - wasn’t particularly well hidden.

Except when you’re polling at 22% and Reform is nipping at your ankles, isn’t this precisely the time a little ambition wouldn’t go amiss? Has anyone told Reeves that you can’t necessarily spreadsheet your way out of a populist insurgency?

Maybe not. Maybe someone should.

That someone definitely shouldn’t be 2010s Teresa May Shabana Mahmood - because oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

While Starmer did his best to sound like the reasonable defender of Democracy against Farage’s populist extremisim, Mahmood seemed determined to audition to be Nigel’s understudy. “I will do whatever it takes to secure our borders,” she very forcefully and not at all aggressively declared, as though she’d accidentally wandered onto a GB News set.

She crooned about doubling the qualifying period for ILR from the current five years to ten. She promised to tether any sort of settlement in this country to spotless criminal records (fine), National Insurance Contributions (easy, since you have to meet min salary thresholds to be here), proof you haven’t claimed benefits (again easy, because “no recourse to public funds”) and, the piece de resistance - community service or volunteering in your community to really “prove your worth” to this country.

She called it fairness. I call it Reform fuckery of the highest order.

What Mahmood did was push that ceaseless concept of “valid concern” straight into an area that is very much Reform adjacent. And it chills me, because it’s been a slippery slope for years now. At first people only had problems with illegal migrants. Then it was uncontrolled migration. Then it was benefits being claimed by people “born abroad” (regardless of citizenship or settlement). Then it was different cultures diluting our values and turning us into an “Island of Strangers”. Now it’s migrants who, apparently, aren’t volunteering or contributing enough to their communities.

Mahmood is desperate for this to be seen as “tough but fair”, but all it is is pandering desperately to Farage’s framing of the Debate - a Labour Home Secretary standing at her own party conference saying: If you can’t beat Farage, you might as well join him.

I’m going to veer a bit into the personal here - I am, by all accounts, the so-called “perfect migrant.” High earning. Speaks English fluently. White. Never touched a benefit. Trained abroad, came here, paid (a fuck tonne of) taxes and became a citizen. The kind of migrant that politicians love to wheel out when they want to prove they’re not xenophobic - and yet, I found myself listening to Mahmood’s speech and thinking: how long until even that isn’t enough? Because with the trajectory this rhetoric is heading in, eventually I will also fall short.

It’s morally bankrupt politics. Starmer may have grown a pair and called Reform racist, but does that really mean anything when your own government is still trafficking in their approved rhetoric? That’s not drawing a line in the sand - that’s moving the line to as close as you can possibly get to where Reform is grandstanding.

While all this was happening inside the secure zone of the conference centre, outside things were arguably far worse with sixty-six people getting arrested for supporting Palestine Action.

Quick Caveat: I don’t support Palestine Action. I don’t support their methods. I don’t condone their tactics.

With that out of the way though, the idea that in the United Kingdom in 2025 people can be arrested under terrorism laws simply for demonstrating peacefully outside a political party conference should chill anyone who claims to believe in democracy. The protestors were aged between 21 and 83 (eighty-bloody-three!?). Pensioners chucked in handcuffs for waving damned flags and shakily holding up placards. Students bundled into police vans for the temerity of shouting slogans.

If this had happened at a Reform conference, Labour would (rightly) be calling it authoritarian - but because it happened outside of their own conference, the silence from the leadership has been thunderously deafening.

You cannot claim in a speech inside that you’re defending British Democracy from the likes of Farage while simultaneously criminalising protest on your own doorstep. It’s nothing more than the worst kind of hypocrisy.

Deep breath, and back to the speeches.

David Lammy valiantly tried to inject some moral clarity into the day - he praised Angela Rayner as a “real working class hero³”, he celebrated Labour’s recognition of Palestine as a state (something I am quite pleased by myself, even if it feels very, very little, very, very late) and dismissed Farage’s nationalism as “pound-shop patriotism.” It was fiery and punchy as only Lammy can be and it was one of the few moments that actually felt heartfelt. But even Lammy, a politician that I do admire for all his faults, couldn’t paper over the cracks in the foundation. Recognition of Palestine may have been intended as a sop to critics, but it just doesn’t undo the damage of seeing protestors being dragged away by police who are passionate about the subject at hand.

And the thing looming over the conference right alongside the nasty Nigel spectre? Andy Burnham. He didn’t have an official speaking slot, but he definitely didn’t need one. His comments were ricocheting through the conference halls:

“Business as usual ain’t gonna do it. The plan has to change quite radically.”

“How can you have an open debate if there’s too much of a climate of fear in the the party is being run?”

He insisted, oh so very earnestly, that he was definitely not mounting a leadership challenge, but come on. The groundwork is being laid, and I’ll be honest, I like the look of that foundation. Starmer’s dismissive “bread and butter” comment about leadership speculation looked positively tin-eared against Burnham’s steady, punctuating drumbeat of criticism.

That’s the thing that came out most clearly about this conference to me - the contradiction after contradiction. Starmer denouncing racism and division while Mahmood sounding like she would love nothing more. Reeves promising ambition, but delivering nothing more than sanctions and spreadsheets. Lammy trying to give moral clarity at the same time police cart off protesting pensioners outside. Burnham insisting he’s not eyeing the leadership while very obviously… eyeing the leadership.

The question now is - where does this leave Labour?

And the only answer I can reasonably come up with is a party that doesn’t really know who it is anymore - a party that talks about fighting division, while becoming more divisive itself by the day. A party with its left flank wide open, actively alienating and sidelining the people who put it in government in the first place.

The first day of the conference should have been a reminder to us as voters and the country that Labour actually exists - that they have balls, ambition and gusto for the fight. Instead it was about reminding themselves that they exist at all. They looked less like a party of government, in command and pushing forward an agenda and more like a party having a mass existential crisis.

Starmer said this is the fight of their lives - and he’s right. The question is whether the Labour Party has the faintest idea how to fight it - or if they’ve already started losing by fighting on Reform’s turf.

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1. I assume this was followed with the cesspit that is Twitter exploding into loud wails of “KEIR STARMER THINKS YOU ARE RACIST!!!” and a capitalisation of note by Farage and Co on this fact, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t live there anymore.

2. I’m guessing here, I wasn’t there, I was on a bus at the time of his speech, but I’m assuming it was a similar vibe.

3. Not much help to her sitting on the outside, but that’s another day’s story.