Keir Starmer promises ‘national renewal’ in appeal to UK voters

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Sir Keir Starmer made a pitch for the votes of disillusioned former Conservative supporters on Tuesday as he used his party conference speech to insist that Labour is a “party that conserves”.

But the Labour leader also offered to take radical action to accelerate homebuilding in Britain to solve the country’s housing shortage and to “speed ahead” on the transition to net zero and a low-carbon economy.

Speaking for an hour, Starmer criticised what he called the political and economic chaos of the past few years under multiple shortlived Tory administrations, insisting that his party would offer a return to stability. 

He claimed there was little to show for 13 years of Conservative government in contrast to the achievements of the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010.

If Labour won the next general election expected next year, Starmer said the party would oversee a “decade of national renewal”.

“What is broken can be repaired, what is ruined can be rebuilt,” he told Labour activists gathered at a conference centre in Liverpool’s docklands. 

Starmer pledged that a Labour government would bring about higher economic growth, safer streets, and cheaper homegrown power through a state-owned company called GB Energy.

He said Labour would get the NHS “off its knees” and promised “a Britain with its future back”.

The Labour leader took aim at the “chaos and crisis” there had been under five Conservative prime ministers in seven years, noting the country was now gripped by a cost of living crisis,

“If you are a Conservative who despairs of this, if you look in horror at the descent of your party into the murky waters of populism and conspiracy, with no argument for economic change, if you feel our country needs a party that conserves, fights for the union, our environment, the rule of law, family life . . . Britain already has one . . . and it’s this Labour party,” he said. 

With a general election expected next year, Labour is an average of 16 points ahead of Rishi Sunak’s ruling Conservative party in the polls.

The Labour leader’s speech was disrupted as it began by a protester who ran up to him on stage and sprinkled glitter on his shoulder.

Starmer responded by removing his jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeves, adding that anyone who thought he would be unnerved by the protest did not know him. “Protest or power? That’s why we changed our party,” he said.

He warned that the country faced a “hard” journey ahead but insisted that the party had a vision for a “decade of national renewal”.

Delivered against a backdrop of the British flag, Starmer’s speech was an attempt to reassure the country that it could safely vote for change with Labour.

He said he wanted to fight the next election on economic growth, criticising Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of the HS2 high-speed railway as an example of the government’s failures.

Starmer’s housebuilding package features rapid planning reforms, a generation of “new towns”, the creation of a “planning passport” to fast-track brownfield schemes and a policy of allowing first-time buyers “first dibs” on buying new-build developments.

Labour has set a target to oversee the building of 1.5mn homes during a five-year Parliament, equivalent to 300,000 a year. That was until recently the Conservative government’s target but ministers have recently watered it down.

“People are looking to us because they want us to build a new Britain and we are the builders,” he declared. The phrase “we are the builders” was first used by Labour’s Nye Bevan and more recently copied in 2015 by then-Conservative chancellor George Osborne. 

Starmer said that unlike the Tory government, which has rowed back on some of its net zero policies, the Labour party would “speed ahead” in Britain’s journey towards a low-carbon economy.

He also criticised his own party for veering sharply to the left for several years under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, saying that under his leadership Labour is “no longer a party of protest”. 

The Labour leader said that he utterly condemned the “senseless murder” of men, women and children in Israel by “the terrorists of Hamas”. 

He said he believed in a two-state solution but said Hamas’s action had done nothing to help Palestinians. “Israel must always have the right to defend her people,” he said to a standing ovation.