10 Oct Labour glitters in sunny Liverpool
Rounding up conference season, David Talbot reports back from the annual gathering of the Labour Party faithful.
An unseasonably warm Liverpool, with the Albert Docks basking in early October sunshine, greeted a buoyant Labour Party for the first time in years. The ACC conference site has a capacity of over 16,000, but it struggled to contain not only the hordes of delegates descending on it for the last conference before the next general election, but also the air of expectation within a party that it is on the cusp of power.
Both the weather and air of anticipation were in marked contrast to previous years, when horizontal rain lashed Labour’s delegates and, following four general election defeats in a row, the sense of defeatism – and notably empty halls and receptions – was marked.
Whilst Labour’s Shadow Cabinet maintained message discipline that ‘nothing will be taken for granted’, the wider party, beguiled by poll leads of up to twenty per cent, is finally beginning to believe that, nearly twenty years since its last general election win, Labour may finally return to government late next year.
For the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, the conference marked the final leg of a 4-year project to transform his party’s fortunes. Ascending to the leadership in the nadir of Labour’s 2019 defeat, Starmer has long made clear that he had a 3-stage plan. As he began his remarks to the party faithful, a protest showered him in glitter. Labour had clearly prepared for protests, as he quickly quipped “protest or power? That is why we’ve changed”.
Indeed, ‘change’ was a central theme for the NHS and UK life sciences sector throughout the conference. The Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, brought a robust message to the party faithful, namely that the deification of the health service must cease if it is to survive. Streeting has a particularly powerful and personally story in that the NHS helped diagnosis and treat his kidney cancer last year. Yes, it is special, he noted, but it also must reform, or it will face an existential crisis.
Switching the health service from a ‘National Sickness Service’ to a preventative, interventionist healthcare system which embraces the power of data, AI and genomics is at the core of Streeting’s vision. The number one ailment for children presenting at A&E today is tooth decay, he highlighted, which is why Labour pledged mandated and supervised toothbrushing for all 3- to 5-year-olds in school. In the wake of the death of Martha Mills, the party would also challenge the ‘Monday to Friday culture’ of the NHS and offer patients a legal right to a second clinical decision.
The current Labour leader revived one of his predecessor’s most famous campaigns, Tony Blair’s ‘24 hours to the save the NHS’ in the run up to the 1997 election, by stating that another Conservative victory will put the health service “in the ground”. But even as a protestor interrupted Starmer’s keynote speech, showering him in glitter, Labour and its leader will leave Liverpool believing it is one step closer to No.10.