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Sir Keir Starmer has tried to revive his floundering premiership by urging his flag-waving Labour party to launch a “patriotic” fight against Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and declaring: “I don’t believe Britain is broken.”
The UK prime minister used the threat of Farage as a rallying cry in his speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool, accusing the Reform leader of “stirring the pot of division” and wanting Britain to fail.
Starmer said Farage was “a snake oil salesman” and stepped up his criticism of people seeking to sow “fear and discord across our country”.
The prime minister arrived in Liverpool with widespread discontent over his leadership, speculation that he could face a challenge after a round of elections next May, and a calamitous -54 YouGov approval rating.
In a crucial speech, Starmer pitched his message at his party’s working-class base, promising to cut immigration, feting industry and declaring Labour “the patriotic party” as activists waved flags they had been given.
Reform has surged into a strong opinion poll lead in recent months, with many working-class voters deserting Labour for the rightwing populist party.
Farage hit back at the prime minister immediately after the speech, claiming Starmer was implicitly saying all “Reform supporters, Reform voters, Reform sympathisers are racist too”.
“This language will incite and encourage the radical left,” the Reform leader said, labelling the speech “an absolute disgrace”.
As part of his efforts to counter Farage’s populist platform, Starmer sought to distance his party from New Labour ideals and stepped up the left-leaning rhetoric, extolling the role of the state in the economy.
“We do need a more muscular state,” he said and to cheers from activists, he added: “A more secure labour market with stronger worker rights will be better for productivity.”
“We’ve placed too much faith in globalisation,” Starmer said, announcing he was abandoning Sir Tony Blair’s old ambition for 50 per cent of young people to attend university.
Instead, he announced a target for 66 per cent to attend university or take a “gold standard” apprenticeship, arguing such training was often more useful in the modern economy.
The prime minister stressed his commitment to “non-negotiable” fiscal rules, which he said maintained market confidence and allowed his government to fund vital public services.
Criticism of those who promised unfunded spending were aimed at his potential leadership rival, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who wants to borrow £40bn for new council houses and undertake mass nationalisation.
Lasting about an hour and punctuated by standing ovations, Starmer’s speech was well received by party members who were looking to him to explain his core beliefs and to give them a message to take to the country.
The message was defiantly “Blue Labour” — the creed advocated by Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney — blending patriotism, tough policies to control illegal migration and a celebration of working-class communities.
Like the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey at his own party conference, Starmer used Farage as a bogeyman to galvanise activists.
But while Starmer insisted Britain was not “broken”, he and his ministers have delivered many speeches in recent years giving such an impression.
In 2022, he declared of his Conservative opponents: “Take a look around Britain. They haven’t just failed to fix the roof. They’ve ripped out the foundations, smashed through the windows and blown the doors off.”
His health secretary Wes Streeting also declared after the election that the “NHS is broken”, while Shabana Mahmood, another cabinet minister, had declared the justice system “broken”.
At the Liverpool conference, Starmer referred to “an attempt to turn us into a place where we look at our neighbours, people who may or may not look different to us, and we no longer see them as fellow partners in the project of Britain”.
However, he gave a speech this year warning the country risked turning into “an island of strangers” — a phrase he later admitted he should not have used.
Starmer on Tuesday struck a much more upbeat message about modern Britain — a speech some cabinet ministers had been urging him to make for months — and rejected “the politics of grievance”.
He also admitted Labour had “patronised working people” and that their desire for secure borders was “a reasonable demand”. He said Labour had to address the issues that populists “prey upon”.
Starmer’s big policy announcement was the decision to “scrap” the Blair-era target that 50 per cent of children go to university, saying that it was “not right for our times”.
The government said it would invest an extra £800mn in education for 16-19-year-olds next year, which would support an additional 20,000 students into further education.
The target that Starmer claimed to be “scrapping” had been abandoned by the former Conservative government in 2020.
Labour said about 45 per cent of young adults go to university, while about 5 per cent take apprenticeships or further education, and the ambition was to increase this total to 66 per cent. The party said it had not set a date to achieve that goal.
Blair set the 50 per cent target two years after coming into office in 1997 as part of his pledge to focus on “education, education, education”. It was first met in 2017.
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