Steering clear of the vital issues with Starmer

Martin Shipton

No one could describe Keir Starmer as a great orator, but if nothing else was going on he could just about have got away with his somewhat pedestrian speech at Welsh Labour’s annual conference.

Naturally enough, he put the most positive gloss conceivable on the money coming Wales’ way, both in terms of the block grant and rail infrastructure.

Others, myself included, have a radically different take on the figures, but playing with numbers is one of the oldest tricks in the political handbook, and I can’t blame Starmer for trying. As he knew they would, his most tribalistic and sycophantic followers – some on the party payroll – applauded his weasel words with exaggerated vigour.

Rallies

It’s long been the case that party conferences have ceased to be vehicles for debate and are rallies where the often dubious talents of leading figures can be showcased. Anyone who wants to take issue with what is seen as the official party line may well find themselves frogmarched out of the venue if they push things too far. Remember Walter Wolfgang, anyone? He was manhandled out of the Labour Party Conference in 2005 at the age of 82 after shouting “nonsense” during Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s speech extolling the virtues of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq.

Today, Mr Wolfgang would probably have been arrested and charged with a terrorism offence if he dared to complain about the UK’s complicity with Israel over its war of genocide in Gaza and aggression elsewhere.

The decision to classify the Palestine Action group as a terrorist organisation in the same category as ISIS and Al-Qaeda wasn’t, of course, mentioned by Starmer during his speech at the conference in Llandudno. That would have been seen as controversial. Labour Party members are supposed to suck up the idea that, regardless of the atrocities they commit, Israel has to be sold weapons, given logistical support and be provided with intelligence briefings that enable them to murder Arabs and Iranians more efficiently. But mentioning such matters in public, especially at a party conference where there may be delegates present who adopt a less accommodating view towards genocide, is seen as inappropriate.

Welfare cuts

Equally it would have been wrong for Starmer to allude to the domestic issue that has led to the largest rebellion among Labour MPs since the party took power at Westminster a year ago. The idea that a Labour conference should discuss concerns about welfare cuts when the party in government is Labour is absurd.

If it’s the Tories imposing the cuts, there should be a debate with every speaker denouncing their cruelty. Labour cuts, however, are virtuous and designed to help those affected, not make their lives a misery.

Yet one might have thought that recent developments, which have seen changes to the original cuts programme we were told was unalterable, would have been worthy of mention to an audience in the country with the highest proportion of claimants. For conference organisers, however – and more pertinently for the party leadership – the issue was seen as too delicate to refer to, let alone debate.

The scramble to get a compromise before next week’s vote on cuts to the disabled has been unseemly. The proposed cuts should never have been mooted in the first place. With some honourable exceptions, Labour MPs were slow in coming forward to object. Many only developed a principled stance after receiving huge numbers of objections from their constituents. Polling that predicted the loss of large numbers of seats to Reform no doubt forced them to review their position too.

But the deal that’s been cobbled together between the rebels and the government can hardly be seen as satisfactory. To devise a policy where those who have a benefit can keep it, but those who in future should qualify for it but are barred from getting it on no other basis than the government’s desire to save money, is surely unjust. It may even be unlawful, and one can well imagine lawyers writing skeleton arguments that set out why the proposed compromise is discriminatory and should be voided. For those attending the Welsh Labour conference, however, such considerations are off the table.

Defence spending

A bigger issue that looms and has barely been discussed anywhere in Britain, let alone at the Welsh Labour conference, is Donald Trump’s demand that defence spending in European countries should rise to 5% of GDP. As is his way, Trump is threatening to impose increased tariffs on countries that don’t comply with his requirement.

This creates a difficult problem for all states that want to maintain a well-financed public realm. After many years of austerity, the UK’s public realm is diminished and fragile. Obliging it to significantly increase defence spending would inevitably put a greater squeeze on public spending, forcing more cuts to services and diminishing the amount available for good social spend.

This is recognised in Spain, which voluntarily adopted the persona of the black sheep of Europe by telling Trump to get lost at the NATO summit. The country’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, said afterwards that Spain would meet the new capabilities targets agreed by NATO members at the summit in The Hague but considered its current defence spending of 2% of GDP as “sufficient, realistic and compatible with the welfare state”.

It’s difficult to imagine Starmer saying anything of the kind. Partly this stems from a tendency to suck up to Trump for what he would see as pragmatic reasons. But it also indicates a lack of commitment to the kind of values traditional Labour Party members take for granted. Accepting the need for more defence spending signals an acceptance that diplomacy has much less currency now than it had at the end of World War Two, when there was an assumption – sometimes not lived up to – that diplomatic efforts would be maximised with the goal of preventing wars.

Donald Trump – an instinctive warmonger who ludicrously craves the Nobel Peace Prize – is seeking to normalise war as part of his authoritarian plan to undermine and hopefully destroy democracy. That necessitates a big increase in military spending at the expense of social programmes.

We mustn’t accept his assumptions or play his game.