What next for Labour?

Now that delegates have sung reedily along to the 'Red Flag' and 'Jerusalem', Labour is going home from its annual conference feeling pretty pleased with itself. Keir Starmer's speech went very well, members were in an excited mood, and frontbenchers sounded serious and sober. 

But it's not as though any of this has actually sealed a Labour election victory, even with the current bin fire in the Tory party. Here are the key challenges for Labour now:

What does Starmerism actually mean?

The purpose of this conference has been to show the country that Labour is now a sober, serious party that's ready to govern. It was about showing that Labour knows what to do in order to win and, as Starmer said, to say what Britain needs in order to win too.

The tone has been a big part of that, but there have also been plenty of policy announcements. The biggest ones have been renationalising the railways and creating a publicly-owned Great British Energy company. The state has an active role. As I blogged earlier, this doesn't just take the form of lots more money for public services: frontbenchers have made clear there is a need to modernise and reform. But these are just the edges, the crusts, of the Starmer offer. What will the full dish be? 

His vision of success included lines like 'the clouds of anxiety have lifted' and 'people are starting to lift their sights'. The more tangible bits were about the health service being on a secure footing again. Is the next Labour government just going to focus on bringing things back to normal, or making Britain brilliant in some way? 

The fluffy hopey-changey stuff is partly because Starmer knows he needs to bring optimism rather than doom and gloom back into the Labour offer. He plans to expand the optimism stuff in coming months, but as part of that he needs to flesh out more of what he stands for.

Ignoring the Ed in the room

One of the questions that's worrying a lot of people in Labour is whether Starmerism is in fact a more respectable form of Milibandism. There are plenty of reasons they're asking this: even though Ed Miliband appeared to have been moved sideways to doing just the climate change brief in the most recent reshuffle, he remains a major influence on the Labour leader and other senior figures on his front bench, including shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. 

Starmer's own team seems to be split between those who love Miliband and think he's a nice person to have around while treating his ideas with a great deal of suspicion, and those who love Miliband and actively want to hear his ideas. 'It's alarming the degree to which he holds sway,' warns one party figure. Another complains that Miliband has become too confident and that the applause for his speech this week won't have helped with that.

Is it a problem that Miliband is such an influence? His offer was comprehensively rejected by the electorate in 2015, so discovering that what Starmer is serving up is in fact a Miliband sandwich might not be very encouraging for voters. Then again, the electorate has changed partly as a result of Covid: the Tories have found that voters and even their own MPs now expect the state to step in whenever there is a problem.

The credibility gap

Ed Miliband's haunting of the leader's office isn't the only potential credibility problem. Starmer spent a lot of his morning broadcast round answering increasingly detailed questions about borrowing. He still needs to work on a strategy for ensuring that Labour has fiscal credibility, criticising the Truss government's attitude to borrowing, and not ending up hamstrung on questions about how he would fund policies to the extent he stops announcing any.

Is anyone paying attention?

The record-breaking 17-point poll lead over the Tories has understandably excited Labourites. But the risk is that they confuse the electorate's despair at the early days of the Truss government with a genuine move toward listening to Labour. 

Starmer this morning mentioned that journalists were now writing that Labour is serious and ready to govern. Many of us are, but that doesn't really mean the rest of the country is listening: we have to pay attention because we are trapped with Starmer and his party within a ring of steel for the best part of a week. The electorate has made other life choices and won't have been captivated by the atmosphere at the conference (which was upbeat, but also benefitted a lot from not being febrile or from Jewish MPs not needing police escorts).

Even the conference itself started to pay far more attention to the chaos in the markets today, and tonight's news bulletins and tomorrow's papers will be all about economic meltdown. It would be very tempting for Labour folk to think they've done their job and now just need to relax and watch the Tories set fire to each other's hair over the next few days. Clearing up the mess isn't going to be easy. But getting the chance to do it in the first place is going to be even harder.