Conference is heaving, everything is fine, so what's the but...?
Conference ConfidentialLabour Party leader Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria have breakfast in the Pullman hotel before his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference and I’m reaching the stage where, like a sailor who has been at sea for months, I am beginning to wonder if “home” was ever anything but a distant dream., you can essentially skip this section. The Labour party is high up in the polls, everyone’s very happy, the weather’s good, nothing bad is happening, and so on, and so forth.
A pithy line I did enjoy was from a think tanker, who remarked that conference this year was “a lot of people who are very excited about the possibility of a quango”. Cynics may argue that people who fit that description do in fact go to conference every year, but he had a point. There is a lot of enthusiasm here but, so far, few big flashy policies have been announced, which creates a slightly odd mismatch.
There are some difficult choices New Labour got to opt out of making, but Starmer’s Labour won’t be able to wriggle out of them. This was, as some moles reported, apparent at the business day gathering., where she’d promised, among other things, a higher living wage and a range of new taxes on tech and energy giants.
This should be a lesson for them: some tough decisions will have to be made, especially as the party gets closer to government. You can’t please everyone all the time.Is there such a thing as being too professional? Apparently so. Another grumble that kept coming up yesterday concerned shadow frontbenchers, and their inability to stay still.
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