Aides shed tears of relief as Starmer shrugs off glitter protest to deliver ‘speech of his life’ | Beth Rigby
It was a leader’s speech received with such defining and raucous applause that Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria, having exited the stage, came back for an encore.
You probably never thought of Starmer as a rockstar politician, but in that hall this cautious, steady lawyer had undoubtedly electrified his crowd.
It was, shadow cabinet minister Thangam Debbonaire told me as the hall cleared, “the speech of his life” – while one of his core team told me they’d cried after he delivered it.
Read more: Starmer makes direct pitch to Tory voters – latest updates from Labour conference
The anxiety giving way to jubilation and relief – a reflection of how much that speech mattered to the party, and the man who wants to become your next prime minister.
The awful start, where a protester threw glitter over the Labour leader could have thrown him off course.
Instead, he took off his jacket and literally rolled up his sleeves to deliver a speech that both spoke of his values and set up the campaigning messages for those Labour supporters to take to the country.
Protester interrupts the start of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in Liverpool. Pic: Reuters
The beginnings of the Labour election slogans were laid out by Starmer as he sought to answer the question “Why Labour?”
His five missions of government were to get Britain building again, switch on Great British Energy, get our NHS back on its feet, take back our streets and tear down barriers to opportunity.
But in truth this was not a speech packed with policies to win over wavering voters. His main pledge on housing – to build 300,000 new homes a year – mimicked what his Tory counterparts have already promised, while Labour’s pledges on police and the NHS had already been made.
That’s because the real aim of this speech was something different. His task was to appeal directly to voters beyond the hall.
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The protester could be heard shouting ‘true democracy is citizen led’
Sir Keir had come to his conference determined that it was not enough for the Conservatives to lose. He had to give the public a vision for Britain that was enough for Labour to win a mandate for what he describes as a “decade of renewal”.
His message was one of hope as he told his audience: “What is broken can be repaired, what is ruined can be rebuilt. Wounds do heal. And ultimately that project – their project – will crash against the spirit of working people in this country. They are the source of my hope.”
He did not whitewash the scale of the task as he looked back on the challenges for Labour leaders past.
“If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild the crumbling realm. That in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology. In 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice. Then in 2024 it will have to be all three.”
A speech not for the hall, but for the public
The pitch and tone of his speech undoubtedly gave the hall more confidence Sir Keir is determined to replicate the mood of 1996, not 1991 – set to be the heir to Blair, rather than fall short as Neil Kinnock did in 1992 when John Major’s Conservatives narrowly clung on.
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For this was a speech not for the hall, but for the public. And just like Blair in 1996, Starmer used his moment to appeal beyond his room to the undecided and doubters, to convince the public his party had really changed and was a party that instead of holding people back would help them on.
There were echoes of Blair when Sir Keir promised to prioritise economic growth, work with business, champion a competitive tax regime and back enterprise.
He told the audience he had led a “changed Labour party” no longer in the thrall to gesture politics and protest politics. And to “despairing” Conservative voters, he issued a direct appeal: “If you feel our country needs a party that conserves…you can join it. It’s this Labour party.”
This speech was a pitch from Starmer that he really is the heir to Blair.
He was speaking to a crowd that, after nearly 14 years out of power, is united around a singular goal – to win the next general election.
The mood in the conference centre was certainly more confident after this speech that Sir Keir can lock in the win. I suspect after that speech and its reception, he will be too.
Politics
Red Wall MPs should focus on two-child benefit cap rather than winter fuel, Harriet Harman says
Red Wall MPs should push for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted rather than a reversal of the winter fuel payment policy, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Baroness Harman, the former Labour Party chair, told Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this would hand the group a “progressive win” rather than simply “protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer” over winter fuel.
Earlier this week, a number of MPs in the Red Wall – Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north of England – reposted a statement on social media in which they said the leadership’s response to the local elections had “fallen on deaf ears”.
They singled out the cut to the winter fuel allowance as an issue that was raised on the doorstep and urged the government to rethink the policy, arguing doing so “isn’t weak, it takes us to a position of strength”.
Labour’s decision to means test the policy has snatched the benefit away from millions of pensioners.
But Baroness Harman said a better target for the group could be an overhaul of George Osborne’s two-child benefit cap.
The cap, announced in 2015 as part of Lord David Cameron’s austerity measures, means while parents can claim child tax credit or Universal Credit payments for their first and second child, they can’t make claims for any further children they have.
Labour faced pressure to remove the cap in the early months of government, with ministers suggesting in February that they were considering relaxing the limit.
Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby that this could be a sensible pressure point for Red Wall MPs to target.
She said: “It could be that they have a kind of progressive win, and it might not be a bad thing to do in the context of an overall strategy on child poverty.
“Let’s see whether instead of just protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer, they can build a bridge to a new progressive set of policies.”
Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Red Wall group, suggested that her party’s “connection” to a core group of voters “died” with the decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
“We need to reset the government,” she told Electoral Dysfunction. “The biggest way to do that is by tackling issues such as winter fuel payments.
“I think we should raise the thresholds so that people perhaps who are paying a higher level of tax are the only people who are exempt from getting it.”
Pic: AP
A group of MPs in the Red Wall, thought to number about 40, met on Tuesday night following the fallout of local election results in England, which saw Labour lose the Runcorn by-election and control of Doncaster Council to Reform UK.
Following the results, Sir Keir said “we must deliver that change even more quickly – we must go even further”.
Some Labour MPs believe it amounted to ignoring voters’ concerns.
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One of the MPs who was present at the meeting told Sky News there was “lots of anger at the government’s response to the results”.
“People acknowledged the winter fuel allowance was the main issue for us on the doorstep,” they said.
“There is a lack of vision from this government.”
Another added: “Everyone was furious.”
Downing Street has ruled out a U-turn on means testing the winter fuel payment, following newspaper reports earlier this week that one might be on the cards.
A man from the US state of Virginia will spend over three decades behind bars after being convicted of sending crypto to the terrorist organization commonly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Federal Judge David Novak sentenced Mohammed Azharuddin Chhipa to 30 years and four months in prison on May 7 for sending over $185,000 to the Islamic State, the Department of Justice said on May 8.
Prosecutors said that from around October 2019 until October 2022, the 35-year-old Chhipa collected and sent money to female Islamic State members in Syria, which helped them escape prison camps and funded fighting.
The Justice Department said Chhipa would raise funds for the United Nations-designated terror organization through social media — receiving money online, or traveling hundreds of miles to accept donations in person.
He’d convert the money into crypto and send it to Turkey for it to be smuggled to Islamic State members across the border in Syria, prosecutors said.
A federal jury convicted Chhipa in December, finding him guilty on a charge of conspiracy to provide support to a terrorist organization and four charges of providing and attempting to provide support to a terrorist organization.
“This defendant directly financed ISIS in its efforts to commit vile terrorist atrocities against innocent citizens in America and abroad,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “This severe sentence illustrates that if you fund terrorism, we will prosecute you and put you behind bars for decades.”
Chhipa tried to flee US during FBI probe
Prosecutors said that during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into Chhipa, he tried to flee the country to escape prosecution and tried to hide his tracks through a series of actions seemingly aimed at confusing authorities.
According to a motion for detention filed in August, FBI agents searched Chhipa’s house on Aug. 2, 2019, and that night Chhipa drove to a bank, withdrew $1,800 from an ATM, and then went to a Taco Bell, where he paid a stranger for a ride to a relative’s house. The relative then drove him to a grocery store.
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Three days later, prosecutors said Chhipa “purchased a series of bus tickets using variations and/or misspelling of his name and recently created email accounts.”
He then travelled from Virginia to Mexico and onto Guatemala. He then bought tickets to fly from Guatemala to Panama, then onto Germany, and then to Egypt, but an Interpol Blue Notice was issued, and he was returned to the US.
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