It’s autumn, which means the annual party conference season is upon us. In the recent past, this involved the entirety of the politics-adjacent world – journalists, think tanks, charities and lobbyists – upping sticks for a three-week circuit of English seaside towns. These days, both the main parties rotate between the great regional cities: Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.
To what extent do these gatherings of senior politicians and party members – involving set-piece speeches, poorly-attended fringe events and reception after reception with paint-stripper wine – actually matter? For general voters, the answer is, very little: these events will barely pierce the consciousness of most people, apart from a clip or two of a key speech, perhaps. But for the parties themselves, conferences give internal management an important opportunity to inspire election candidates and gee up activists. And for close Westminster-watchers, the mood of a party conference feeds into the bigger narrative about how party leaders are performing relative to each other. That’s particularly true in the run-up to an election, and these are very likely to be the last set of conferences before voters go to the polls at some point next year.
For Labour, this is the first conference since the late 1990s when polls show the party looking almost certain to win the next election – barring any mishap. Cue many people descending on Liverpool for their first conference in well over a decade; at least 300 chief execs and chairs of big companies are reportedly attending, which is more than during Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister.
It promises to be an upbeat, united affair, but there are tensions simmering below the surface about Starmer’s risk-averse approach to winning. Some MPs and activists want him to use this week in Liverpool to set out in more detail what Labour would do in government. But Starmer is treading a cautious line in order to avoid handing the Conservatives ammunition for their attacks – such as that a Labour government will put up taxes or be profligate with public finances. It reflects the fact that he is ultimately a pragmatist, unwilling to commit to anything that could jeopardise Labour’s chance of winning an election.
The safest territory for Starmer is to establish a dividing line from Conservatives over issues that don’t cost money
It may well be the right strategy to maximise the chances of a Labour win. But the issues with it are twofold. First, this approach brings its own electoral risks, in that most analysts think Labour’s huge poll lead is quite “soft” – driven by anti-Tory sentiment rather than by a swell of enthusiasm for the prospect of Starmer as prime minister. Secondly, Labour’s caution in opposition could end up either severely limiting what it can do in government – after thirteen years of austerity, the public realm has perhaps never been so thirsty for investment – or creating a situation where it has to break its unrealistic fiscal commitments on tax and borrowing.
The safest territory for Starmer is to establish a dividing line from Conservatives over issues that don’t cost money. We’ve seen this in recent weeks with Labour’s stance on asylum – pledging to scrap the government’s policy to detain and deport all asylum seekers to a third country like Rwanda. Labour has also made pragmatic noises about seeking a closer relationship with the EU. We can expect more of this in coming months.
Overall, spirits will be high because these are politicians who, whatever they might say about not taking anything for granted, do expect to be in government in a year’s time.
Sunak’s climate sell-out
From the jolly to the gloomy: Rishi Sunak’s strategy for the next election. On the surface, Sunak and Boris Johnson couldn’t appear more different as politicians. But Sunak appears to have taken a leaf out of the Johnson playbook: just replace “Brexit” with “net zero”.
Sunak’s challenge at the Conservative conference in Manchester is that many of his MPs simply don’t believe they can win the next election and have effectively resigned themselves to losing. His solution to this became clear last month when he made an unexpected speech announcing the rollback of several commitments that were part of the government’s road map to get to net zero emissions by 2050.
These included scrapping regulations that would have forced landlords to improve the energy efficiency of their properties and moving back the deadline to phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Not only that, Sunak announced a host of things the government would no longer be doing – meat taxes, compulsory car-sharing and a seven-bin mandate – that had never even come close to being government policy.
Sunak clearly hopes he can open up a new political dividing line on net zero, fishing for votes not just among climate sceptics but also among those who believe protecting the environment is too expensive. The facts don’t stack up, however – several of the policies he announced would leave voters more exposed to high fossil-fuel prices – and the electorate overwhelmingly support net zero and (rightly) don’t believe environmental policies are to blame for the high cost of living.
However, Sunak’s plans to run a populist campaign against the climate “establishment” are unlikely to deliver the same sort of results Johnson reaped by positioning himself against the Brexit-blocking elite in 2019.
Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist
