Starmer takes aim at Farage

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:10Today, could this be Keir Starmer's last Labour conference as Prime Minister?

0:22A quick warning before we start, this episode contains a racist slur. So we're outside a German-themed pub in central Liverpool, eagerly awaiting the start of the Labour list karaoke night, which is apparently one of the highlights of every Labour conference. I've never made it before. I've heard wild stories from the past of cabinet ministers disgracing themselves or proving themselves to be surprisingly good.

0:53Helen Pidd:It's not karaoke until we have technical issues. After a few false starts, things finally get underway. The first cabinet minister steps up to the mic. OK, our next singer is Heidi Alexander. Come on now. Transport secretary Heidi Alexander. I hope she does a transport-themed song. But instead of belting out Bicycle by Queen or Gary Newman's Cars, she opts for a bit of Britpop nostalgia. Right, Labour list, you guys, get up and help me sing a little bit of home. You learn new things about MPs at conference, like the fact that Alex Davies-Jones, the Justice Minister and the MP for Pontypreeth, used to be a Celine Dion impersonator touring working men's clubs in South Wales.

1:48But not everyone has the pipes for such vocal gymnastics, and many opt for crowd-pleasing sing-alongs instead.

2:01You can see why Labour MPs might prefer karaoke to reality right now. Fifteen months into the current Labour government, things could barely be worse.

2:13Keir Starmer arrived in Liverpool with the lowest approval ratings for any Prime Minister ever. In the space of a month, he's lost his Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, his US ambassador, his head of political strategy and his communications chief. And then there are the polls, with one saying that Labour members would much prefer Andy Burnham as leader and another suggesting Nigel Farage is heading for Downing Street.

2:42So when he stepped on stage at conference yesterday, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. I'd like to introduce you to your Prime Minister, Mr Keir Starmer.

2:57Starmer came out swinging, saying he was the true patriot and not Farage, promising to defeat reform and see off the far right. If you say or imply that people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin, the mixed-territage families owe you an explanation, the people who've lived here for generations, raised their children here, built their lives here, working in our schools, our hospitals, running businesses, our neighbours. If you say they should now be deported, then mark my words, we will fight you with everything we have because you are the enemy of national renewal.

3:39From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, Starmer fights back. But is it enough?

3:54It's a sunny day by the Albert Docks in Liverpool, and I'm sat outside a pub with Richard Bergen, the Labour MP for Leeds East, or should I say the re-anointed Labour MP. He spent more than half of Labour's first 15 months in power on the naughty step, after Keir Starmer suspended him following his rebellion over the two-child limit on welfare.

4:15Helen Pidd:I think it was outrageous that any of us were suspended for voting with our consciences. That's not leadership where rather than listening you punish backbenchers. And actually backbenchers can help the government to get it right. And if they'd listened more I don't think we'd be in the mess we're in now. And how happy are you with the current direction of the Labour Party? I'm very worried because all the opinion polls are showing if there was an election tomorrow we'd end up with the far right government for the first time in our country's history. And so the question people are asking at this conference is is the Prime Minister up for and capable of doing the job of stopping that happening?

4:50Helen Pidd:And the big test is really going to be next May. And then you've got the elections in the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Shennet, and the elections in the councils right across the country. And do you think he's up to the job? We're in a mess of his making, in my view. I think to survive beyond next May, the Prime Minister's got to ditch the failed approach and have a radical change in direction and realise that the main issue facing most people and the issue that people prioritise is a cost of living crisis. And I do think he's been trying to ape reform. And all that means is we lose votes to the left, seats to the right.

5:22Helen Pidd:I think he needs a return to real Labour values. That's the only way forward to kind of reassemble our voter coalition. Because when you look at it, it's horrific how the opinion polls have changed since just 14 months ago. The majority of people who voted Labour at the last election are now saying they won't vote Labour. And most of those people aren't going to reform. Most of them are going to left of centre parties or saying that they won't vote. And so I think the task's clear for Keir, but he seems very resistant to it. And that needs to change. And you are backing the party now. Is he listening to you?

5:56Does he want to know what you think?

5:57Helen Pidd:I think we'll see in his speech, if he's trotting out the same old lines, then I think we'll draw our own conclusions.

6:06I've been to loads of Labour conferences over the years, and this one feels muted. It definitely doesn't feel like a celebration of the party's first full year in power since the noughties. Even the ordinary members who come to conference, the people who take time off work and stump up for outrageously priced hotel rooms to be here, seem to be struggling to stay positive. Many are working really hard to keep the faith, reeling off lists of Labour's achievements, free school meals, extra NHS appointments, the return of maintenance grants for some of the poorest students. But time and time again, people come back to one point.

6:42Labour or the media isn't telling that story well enough.

6:46Helen Pidd:Yeah, I think the sort of primary failure, so to speak, of the government is not necessarily in policy, it is more just in the media, how you sell it to voters, how you let them know of the good things happening. Because a lot of what we hear is, you know, it's about Farage, it's about what he's saying and all his lies and such. And it's not, you know, about wages rising for workers, all the new GPs being hired, all the Labour rights reform. or these objectively good policies, but they're just overshadowed by the hate and the negativity we see from the far right. But two things can simultaneously be true, that the media is doing far much to embolden Farage and his negative brand of politics.

7:26But a party with 400 MPs shouldn't have the message dictated to it by a party with four MPs, five MPs, four MPs again. Will this conference change things? The main hall is half empty during many of the Cabinet Minister's speeches, while some of the busiest fringe events are setting out just how bad things are looking. Is there any glimmer of hope? Like, over the last year, has anything worked for Labour? Um, not obvious, is it? This is the elections guru, Sir John Curtis. It's so busy at his breakfast event analysing Labour's first year in government that I end up sitting on the floor by a table piled high with bacon butties.

8:08Here's one particular piece of advice for Keir Starmer. Don't repeat the Tories' mistake and focus on an issue where at the end of the day you don't have complete control. Until the world is a much safer place in more countries, we are still going to find people trying to cross the channel. Yes, of course, we find it easier to make it easier to entertain asylum before they get here. But are Labour listening? Across the conference centre, buzz begins to pick up as Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, prepares to take to the stage. So far, immigration is the issue that has been dominating front pages, social media and even the sidelines of Labour's conference.

8:52On my way in, I meet Faith. She's a Labour member who migrated to the UK, to Huddersfield, from Nigeria. I ask her how she feels about Labour's approach to migration and their plans to make it harder for people coming to the country to be given indefinitely to remain.

9:08Helen Pidd:So I have come here to find a better life. If anyone from outside the country come here to find a better life, they shouldn't deprive them. That's their privilege or their rights. And do you think that Labour values immigrants? I can say before they value immigrants, but now they are not valuing it. Really? How does that make you feel? I feel bad. So if you were having a message for Keir Starmer, for Shibana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, about immigration, what would you want them to hear from you? I want them to leave the immigrants. They are the ones who are doing most of the hard jobs in this country, taking care of the old people.

9:49Helen Pidd:They go for the warehouse job. They go for the cleaning, making sure everywhere is clean. So you want them to leave. And then who do you want to be doing those jobs again?

10:04Helen Pidd:I've participated in that incredibly important debate. I know that there are a lot of delegates who wish to speak. Shabana Mahmood arrives on the main stage. Conference, please welcome as our next speaker to the stage our fantastic new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. On the way in, a press officer tells us to expect some punchy language. And I soon get what he means when Mahmood starts talking about Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom rally. It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing but an angry minority, heirs to the skillheads and the pachy-bashers of old. And make no mistake, some were. But to dismiss what happened that day would be to ignore something bigger, something broader that is happening across this country.

10:52The story of who we are in Britain is contested, she says. Patriotism, a force for good, is turning into something smaller, something more like ethno-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me and has a faith like mine can truly be English or British. Delegates listen in silence as she outlines plans to make it harder for immigrants to settle permanently in the UK. If we are to preserve our openness to migrants like my parents, then we need a system that is fair to those who are already here. The government has already announced plans to double the length of time that immigrants must wait to be granted leave to remain, from five to ten years.

11:38But Mahmood wants to go much further. I will be proposing a series of new tests, such as being in work, making national insurance contributions, not taking a penny in benefits, learning English to a high standard, having no criminal record and finally that you have truly given back to your community such as by volunteering your time to a local cause. It's part of Labour's approach to win back votes from reform and farage but MPs from across the party like Kim Johnson, the MP for Liverpool Riverside, are feeling uneasy about what they see as the party's hardening attitude towards migration. Trying to mimic reform is not going to win back voters.

12:27And those type of narrative and rhetoric, you know, for me is not helpful because it just sounds like reform and the far right, making and scapegoating refugees, migrants and asylum seekers as being the cause of the problems in this country. And we have to recognise that as a country we take in far fewer refugees than other European countries. So this whole myth about this country is overwhelmed is a myth. And those kinds of things need to be challenged. You don't think it would go down well in your constituents? And then you don't think people would think, yeah, I'd like people to speak better English.

13:04And why should they claim benefits? I would say Liverpool is a city of sanctuary. We're a port city. Our city is a very diverse city. a unique city with a unique history. You know, I am the granddaughter of immigrants, African and Irish. Our city is built on that. So I think that a majority of people in the city would not support it. They're not providing hope and change for those people who are feeling disaffected. And they want to blame someone. That's an easy target. You know, Enoch Powell did it. You know, now we're seeing it from reform and sadly seeing it from members of my own party. And how are you feeling right now?

13:42about the direction of the Labour Party? I'm feeling rather frustrated, to say the least, and that might be a bit of an understatement. You know, we won last year with a massive majority on a campaign of change and hope, and sadly, that hasn't been very forthcoming. And Liverpool is famously, well, in recent decades anyway, pretty loyal to Labour. Does it feel like that's really at risk of reform? I have to be honest, and yes, you know, because you'd have to be on an alternative universe, not to recognise the challenge of reform. I think for too long they've allowed to be getting away with things.

14:18I raised the issue directly with Max Weaney in Downing Street last year after the election to say it was a threat and what we were doing. So it's been too little too late, if I'm honest with you. And it's not just reform. We have to look at Greens and the Lib Dems because people are feeling really dissatisfied with Labour at the moment. We've moved away from our labour values and our labour ethos, and we're moving far to the right than people expect us to do. Kim clearly thinks Starmer is not long for this world, but he has one fewer challenger to worry about. After Andy Burnham uses a fringe event, a Q &A with the Guardian's Pippa Creera and Kieran Stacey, no less, to insist he is not, in fact, on manoeuvres.

15:07Now, Burnham arrived in Liverpool, suggesting he'd been inundated with pleas from MPs to challenge Starmer for the top job. But he seems to have accepted that there's no path to power for him, at least for now. I'm curious to hear what a Starmer loyalist thinks of conference so far. Grab a chat with Josh Simons, MP for Makerfield in Wiggo. And we first met last year when we were trying to find the joy in Labour Party conference. I don't know if you remember, we felt like, come on guys, you've just won a landslide, why are you all so gloomy? And then a year on, we're in a position where you've come into this conference with a prime minister with the lowest approval rating of any prime minister ever.

15:46What's gone wrong? Well, what I said back then is that we've got to be careful about being joyful when the country isn't joyful. And I remember the look on your face, just kind of like, hmm, that's a bit gloomy. But the country remains as angry and frustrated with the pace of change as it was then. And one of the things I've learned, I've been in my job in the cabinet office two weeks now. and I've been an MP in Makerfield in Wigan for a year. Disruption is a massive part of what we have to do and I think all of us as politicians, I mean newly elected MPs have sort of quite fast realised that things aren't working inside the state, inside our political system and therefore we've got to disrupt.

16:26And channelling that disruption, not just trying to sort of change objective policy outcomes like make the NHS better or whatever, but showing what it is we're doing to fight for people. We can't just go down to Westminster, try and make things better, come back and expect to be rewarded for it. People need to see what fights we're having, what barriers we're smashing through and how that's going to change their lives. Yeah, I mean the things that people remember are that you took the universal winter fuel payment off all but the very, very poorest pensioners. They know that you tried to cut the benefits off from disabled people, some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

17:01Those are the things that have stuck. not these other fights that you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I said at the time, we've got to make principled arguments for the choices we make, and particularly if they're hard choices. This country is ageing rapidly. The amount that the state spends is going through the roof. The amount the state raises is going down. We are going to have to make some really difficult choices about things. But when we do that, we have got to be guided by our principles, by fairness, by justice, by respect. The big speech of conference has arguably been Shabana Mahmood's speech.

17:31her first speech as Home Secretary, in which she talks about how she felt that some people's patriotism was turning into ethno-nationalism. And the sort of big headline thing was her saying that there's got to be more conditions on being allowed to stay indefinitely in Britain. How did it go down with you? Well, part of what Shabana was talking about today is that in order to make the case for migration, to what it is that migrants contribute to our country, which is an immense amount, in fact, in my view, to go back to the conversation we were just having, as our dependency ratio gets worse and there are fewer people paying tax and more people who require some public services and public spending migration is going to be a really important part of how we solve that problem we are going to need migration in this country and we have to argue for it and argue for its benefits but in order to do that we have to demonstrate that we have got control and that the system by which we decide who comes in and out is above all driven by the national interest and not something else and is labour going to put in for example with language learning I'm sure you know that actually lots of people who come to school, they want to learn English because your life gets a lot easier, right, if you can understand what's going on.

18:37And yet the funding's been massively cut for English lessons. It's not just about cutting funding. That is part of what we need to do is make it easier to access those English lessons. But it's also about the incentives. I was knocking a street in my constituency in Abram. Three houses in that street were HMOs. One house, the people in it, they spoke English. We chatted about their story, how they came here and what they were going to do. Two of the houses had people in them who didn't speak a word of English. And so it was really hard for me as their representative to communicate with them about how I could help them.

19:11That doesn't mean that it's their fault that they're not learning English, but it does mean that there's nothing wrong with saying to that community, we expect the language that we share to be part of the basic agreement that underpins our migration system. And what about this idea that you've got to volunteer in your community? the UK would be a better place if all of us volunteered in our community why should we set higher bars for immigrants to be good citizens and the rest of us just sitting in watching Netflix or whatever well I've not seen the detail of that policy so I don't know exactly what it's going to mean in practice but you know the one I mean, she said that volunteering would be part of the deal yeah, I mean the argument that I know that it's part of is that contribution is a key part of what should underpin our system and there's different ways to contribute and the way that you do that contribution I think can vary and I don't know exactly whether you're like have to do some kind of volunteering otherwise there's a problem but the basic idea again that if you are going to be a part of this country then you're going to be a part of the collective you're going to be a part of the society that we all have they are principles of fairness of justice of contribution of togetherness and they are progressive things they're things that I care about as a Labour MP just as much as any right-wing politician does last couple things about Keir Starmer ahead of his speech tomorrow why is he so unpopular he is at the moment going through a process of really articulating what it is that he cares about and most people don't know polling says they don't know what he stands for yeah and that is it's very very difficult in this day and age to clearly articulate what it is that you in in a world of uncertainty when there's so much going on when there's you know massive insecurity that people feel every day people are really impatient to see things change around them narrating the process of change you're saying this is like i still don't know, like, what?

20:51When I think of Tony Blair, education, education, education. Reform. Stop the boats. Keir Starmer. I don't know. Patriotic renewal. Oh, okay. Whatever that is. Got it. Coming up, Starmer takes to the main stage. Thank you. Can he win back the faith of the public and his party? Thank you, conference.

21:42Thank you.