If last year’s Labour Party Conference was about the fate of an embattled Prime Minister this year’s centred around what his newly minted successor could do to make the political weather. The Leader’s Speech is the most important moment of any party conference, often the only thing about them that even a relatively engaged voter will notice, but the stakes this year were particularly high. But before Andy Burnham spoke on Tuesday afternoon, there were some other speeches with interesting messages for business. Both the Chancellor and the Business Secretary spoke on Monday. With a Budget only a few weeks away neither was ever going to make any significant announcements from the podium but both speeches majored on the theme of reindustrialisation.
Jonny Reynolds is clearly delighted to have ended his stint as Chief Whip, trying to shore up support for Keir Starmer. His return to the Business portfolio that he ran for the first year of the Government, and shadowed for a long time in opposition, has been widely welcomed and his focus on what he called ‘hard infrastructure and physical production’ bodes well for manufacturing. He was keen to stress that he sees reindustrialisation not as a nostalgic project (a trap one or two backbenchers are falling into) but as a modernising one. John Healy took up that theme too, describing, in sepia tones, the historic connection of his family and his area to mining and then taking the story on to laud the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre which sits on the site of one of the collieries he hymned.
The Prime Minister’s speech on Tuesday was one of the most personal ever delivered at a party conference. He wouldn’t like the reference but choosing to deliver it walking around the stage rather than from a lectern was slightly reminiscent of early David Cameron. He talked about his family, especially his father and grandmother to stitch together a narrative about aspiration and social mobility that he hopes will chime with an electorate many of whom believe that the social contract doesn’t work for them anymore. The biggest headlines were the ending of the pensions triple lock, an embrace of electoral reform and a pledge to get closer to the EU. All three are areas fraught with difficulty and opposition. Linking pensions reform to increased funding for social care could thread the eye of that needle but it will be vociferously opposed, plenty of people in the Labour Party are up in arms at the prospect of electoral reform and the coalition politics it is almost certain to usher in, while reopening Brexit promises to remind people of the toxicity and sterility of those ‘debates’.
Burnham’s section on economic policy was less obviously headline grabbing but still interesting. He outlined a theory of growth; fix the fundamentals, devolve power and support business to grow. In fairness he can point to his record in Manchester which has grown faster than the UK average throughout his tenure as Mayor, but some of the fundamentals that need fixing like energy costs feel like they need a more proactive and urgent approach than the review of the electricity market he announced. Much of the speech felt like it was predicated on a two term project which is asking a lot of an impatient electorate, but there was refreshing honesty about some of the trade offs that Government, and the country as a whole, face.
The PM and his team will be pleased with how the speech landed, certainly in the hall where some people were genuinely moved to tears, and in the media where, while it was heavily criticised by all the people one would expect to criticise it, it was generally treated seriously and as a genuine attempt to grapple with the country’s problems. Some enthusiastic briefing after the event about how far the overtures to the EU could go might prove counter productive: it seems to me that it would be impossible to rejoin without a referendum which would be so divisive as to hobble anything else on the agenda, but some of the red lines, freedom of movement and the single market, are now looking very pale pink.
The next red letter date in the PM’s calendar is the budget on 28 October and then presumably a few weeks after that we will see the 10 Year Plan he referred to. With the party picking up a little bit in the polls, Labour left Liverpool with a sense of optimism that it hasn’t felt since the aftermath of the election. If that can be sustained Andy Burnhams speech might be remembered as one of the most consequential of recent years.