Keir Starmer’s first leader’s speech has provoked a predictable range of reactions, on social media, from professional commentators, and across the political spectrum.
Leaders’ speeches are an entire field of scholarly erudition in their own right, and deservedly so. They remain pivotal to the processes by which political parties define their collective identities and their responses to the historic moments in which they find themselves. They help define the perceptions that voters have of the leader. They also allow the leader to signal to various elements of wider society just whose side they are going to be on in which battles to come.
If Starmer’s speech is to be remembered for anything much, it won’t be for the content. A new party leader, after an unsuccessful election, insisting on the novelty of their approach – and also on their status as all things to all people – is hardly news at all. And I think it should be understood that this was the real thrust of the speech. A great deal of attention has been focussed on the sections where Starmer appealed to ‘values’ which Jeremy Corbyn would not have evoked in such terms: ‘Decency, fairness, opportunity, compassion and security’. But Starmer also explicitly rejected a simplistic ‘Blue Labour’ agenda, that would appeal to out-and-out social conservatism, with his evocation of the radical modernity of all three of Labour’s post-war election-winning prime-ministers (a valid point that has been made many times before). He also rhetorically distanced himself from banal centrist versions of anti-racism, with his welcome and unambiguous statement of opposition to ‘structural racism’.
