What a glittering party… but now the Keir-sized hangover

After the giddy heights of Starmer’s magnificent – as in magnificently dull… – speech, Labour faces a sobering question, writes John Rentoul: where are all the actual policies to pay for all those promises?

Keir Starmer’s sole new announcement was his plan to ‘bulldoze’ the planning system (AFP/Getty)

Labour’s hugely successful conference has closed in Liverpool. During it, I met one furious thirty-something delegate who complained that “you young people are getting giddy, because you can smell it”, meaning the spoils of election victory – and another, only slightly older, who detected an alarming note of “complacency and hubris”.

At the heart of the successful conference was a magnificent leader’s speech. Magnificently dull, that is.

There was absolutely nothing in it apart from some vaguely uplifting waffle – which was just what this moment in history called for.

We shouldn’t make light of a potentially serious security breach. But it says something that even the glitter-based protest was boring. Who could imagine feeling strongly enough about proportional representation to storm the stage of a national political event to demand it?

Keir Starmer managed to avoid the temptation to announce something dramatic in his speech. The last thing he wanted to do was to frighten swing voters with bold, visionary and expensive policies. The only thing that the Labour leader’s spinners tried to sell as new was his plan to “bulldoze” the planning system, which was not really new but sounded dramatic and, just as importantly, does not mean spending public money.

It quickly became clear in the briefing for journalists afterwards, however, that the Labour leader was using the term “bulldoze” in a special sense, perhaps related to other etymologies of the words “bull” and “doze”. What he did not mean was new legislation, or even the repeal of old legislation.

The only difference between the government’s policy and the opposition’s is that Labour would have a “strategic plan”. Labour and the Conservatives both have the same target for building new houses, of 300,000 a year, only the government has abandoned making it compulsory, while Labour say it would achieve it over five years. Starmer said this morning that this would mean “ignoring” the objections to house building from local people, but the mechanism remains unclear.

This is sensible politics, but there are risks. The main one being that, if there is not much in practice to choose between the policies of government and opposition, it could make it easier for voters to shy away from the risks of Labour in power.

Hence the Tory focus on what Labour derides as “imaginary” policies, such as the threat of a meat tax or seven recycling bins. But these are symbolic policies as much as imaginary ones, designed to prompt fears that a Labour government might be prone to costly eco-zealotry, the details of which are not yet acknowledged.

One Labour MP in Liverpool told me privately that every one of Rishi Sunak’s recent announcements were policies that worried him because he thought they appealed to his constituents – postponing the ban on petrol cars, cancelling the rest of HS2 and even the progressive ban on smoking.

Labour’s attempts to sell policies that do not require public spending, on the other hand, seem less likely to shift votes – or, more precisely, to prevent votes shifting back to the Tories. Thus, we are promised more devolution, so that local people can make decisions that affect them – except on planning permission for new houses.

We are promised an even higher minimum wage. It is true that it hasn’t cost jobs since it was cautiously introduced at a low level by the Blair government in 1999; not even when George Osborne increased it sharply, calling it the national living wage equally sharply, in 2016. But the laws of supply and demand require that it must cost jobs at some level, so this may not quite be the cost-free option some in the Labour Party think it is.

Finally, we are promised employment rights from day one. But these were quietly downgraded in the summer to “some more” employment rights from day one, rather than full rights, including protection from dismissal without cause.

Thus, this morning, Starmer sent Bridget Phillipson, his shadow education secretary, and Wes Streeting, his shadow health secretary, metaphorically naked into the conference chamber, promising to rescue education and the NHS from Tory underfunding – with no means to do so beyond VAT on private school fees and abolition of non-dom status. Which raise mere bagatelle, a few billion a year at most.

They know that they need economic growth to produce higher tax revenues to pay for significant improvements in public services. But they also know that there is no shortcut to higher growth. They know what happened to the last prime minister who thought there was such a shortcut: she is writing a book that is not called I Was Right but might as well be.

Starmer needs a faster-growing economy, but he doesn’t have any policies that are different from the Tories to achieve it. I think that is because they don’t exist – most of them have been tried and shown not to work.

Yet he still has to pretend that a Labour government will make a difference to people’s lives. He has to hope that the voters are so fed up with the Tories that his warm bath of rhetoric is enough to persuade them to vote for change.