Keir Starmer says Labour can deliver change and national renewal in conference speech – UK politics live

Libby Brooks

While the Scottish government’s energy secretary, Gillian Martin, welcomed confirmation that GB Energy will be headquartered in Aberdeen, she also urged her UK counterparts to “make sure that this announcement brings real decision making to Aberdeen and adds value to the great work already taking place in the energy transition.”

Martin is thought to have a decent working relationship with her opposite number, Ed Milliband, working well together over the Grangemouth oil refinery transition proposals, but the SNP has been highly critical of Labour energy policy, warning before the election that Starmer risked 10,000 jobs with his windfall tax back in February.

There’s yet to be any confirmation of how many jobs GB Energy – which will also operate sites in Glasgow and Edinburgh – will provide, though it’s the projects it funds that are likely to have the most impact on a sustainable transfer of jobs to renewables.

On a visit to Aberdeen last week, I detected plenty of residual scepticism about the company, with lots of appetite for more certainty about what it will do in practice, in particular from younger people who were concerned that they were entering an industry where they could be facing mass redundancies before they were established.

One of the best passages in Keir Starmer’s speech come when he said politicians must be honest about the trade-offs involved in politics. Here is it in full.

More broadly, I also say this. That as we take on those massive challenges the Tories ignored, the time is long overdue for politicians to level with you about the trade-offs this country faces.

Because if the last few years have shown us anything, it’s that if you bury your head because things are difficult, your country goes backwards.

So if we want justice to be served some communities must live close to new prisons.

If we want to maintain support for the welfare state, then we will legislate to stop benefit fraud. Do everything we can to tackle worklessness.

If we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons overground otherwise the burden on taxpayers is too much.

If we want home ownership to be a credible aspiration for our children, then every community has a duty to contribute to that purpose.

If we want to tackle illegal migration seriously, we can’t pretend there’s a magical process that allows you to return people here unlawfully without accepting that process will also grant some people asylum.

If we want to be serious about levelling-up, then we must be proud to be the party of wealth creation. Unashamed to partner with the private sector.

And perhaps most importantly of all, that just because we all want low taxes and good public services that does not mean that the iron law of properly funding policies can be ignored, because it can’t. We have seen the damage that that does and I will not let that happen again. I will not let Tory economic recklessness hold back the working people of this country.

Severin Carrell

Blair McDougall, a new Scottish Labour MP, has said the party should approach its often hefty election majorities “with trepidation” because they are now much more fragile than in the past.

The ex-chief executive of the Better Together campaign, which won the Scottish independent referendum in 2014, McDougall has since been a political strategist and a consultant to democracy activists in Belarus, Kosovo and Serbia.

He told a Fabian’s event at Labour conference he was delighted to win East Renfrewshire, one of Scotland’s most volatile three-way marginals, for Labour at the general election with the largest increase in the vote share of any UK constituency. He said:

I view that not with a reason for celebration but maybe for trepidation.

An electorate which can take me from 18,000 votes behind to 8,500 votes ahead in an election can just as easily take it away.

This is not just a distinctly Scottish question, even though the very close link between constitutional preferences and party support, which has dominated every election since the referendum, was now broken in Scotland.

If you look at global politics and British politics since then you can see that old tribal loyalties behind parties has largely evaporated. At every election that coalition and that relation with voters needs to be remade and rebuilt.

If we are honest in terms of our result in Scotland, we were able to reframe the conversation away from the constitutional debate because the conversation was largely taking place somewhere else. The conservation was taking place across the UK in a UK context about change.

After 10 years where Labour felt it was their job to defeat the SNP in an argument about independence, “we need to begin to understand that is not the test for the next decade”, McDougall said.

While the yes/no divisions in Scotland may not have changed much since 2014, the constitutional debate “is now in the background of people’s minds”, he argued. He went on:

We don’t keep it there by continuing to want to defeat nationalism as a political project. We need to want to defeat poverty, injustice, poor educational standards, waiting lists, and that is a matter of political leadership but is also a matter of [equipping] our activists with the confidence to step back from that argument [and] remind them the way of winning that argument is by not having it.

In his speech Keir Starmer confirmed that the GB Energy HQ will be based in Aberdeen.

Labour had already said it would be in Scotland and, given Aberdeen is the energy capital of Scotland, it was expected to get the GB Energy head office.

Starmer said:

Today I can confirm that the future of British energy will be powered, as it has been for decades by the talent and skills of the working people in the Granite City with GB Energy based in Aberdeen.

Labour has released more details of the pledge in Keir Starmer’s speech to protect veterans, young care leavers and domestic abuse victims from homelessness. (See 2.33pm and 2.35pm.)

In a news release it says:

Armed Forces veterans, young care leavers and domestic abuse victims will be able to apply for social housing in any local authority in the UK, for life, as part of a push to strengthen support for those who have served, and those most vulnerable – announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer today at the party’s first conference in government in 15 years.

Armed forces personnel often spend years posted across the country or overseas, which can dislocate them from family and friends. Current rules allow veterans an exemption from local connection tests for five years after leaving the armed forces, but over 80% of homeless veterans referred for housing support left the forces more than five years ago. These rules unfairly punish the veterans who have served our country and kept us safe, putting those most in need at risk of homelessness. Domestic abuse victims and care leavers often must leave their local area for their own safety or to receive suitable support and do not have a local connection to the place where they would best be able build a safe and stable life. Labour’s plans will ensure security for veterans, domestic abuse victims and young care leavers is secured for the long term.

Today, the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, has written to local councils telling them to prioritise veterans for life and support vulnerable groups through their social housing allocation. Regulatory changes will be brought forward as a priority when parliamentary time allows. The Labour government has already given councils more flexibility to use their Right to Buy receipts to build and buy more social homes and allocated an additional £450m for councils to secure homes for families at risk of homelessness.

That was a disappointment. In fact, for the first 20 or 30 minutes it was coming across as a flop. There was no structure, no thread, no argument, and at times it was quite hard to work out the thrust of what he was saying. He veered from one topic to another, as if the person drafting the speech had dropped all the paragraphs on the floor and picked them up at random. And that is if you ignore the sausages slip of the tongue, which seems to be the only bit of the speech taking off on social media.

But about half way through, it suddenly improved. That is because Starmer started making hard-headed political arguments. The most interesting was on legal migration, where he made a “taking back control” argument on immigration, appropriating Brexit language but dressing it up as a Labour, anti-capitalist stance. Diane Abbott will hate it (see 2.05pm), but many of the people who voted Labour for the first time in July care about immigration, and believe it is too high, and this suggests Starmer won’t ignore them.

But he was also quite explicit about the fact that processing asylum claims quickly will (and should, he implied) mean quite a lot of people being granted asylum. This might seem obvious, but it was not something Labour figures liked to admit during the election campaign.

And he signalled that ministers are tooling up for a proper fight with nimbies over pylons.

But overall, if this was a speech that was meant to explain why people should look forward to “the light at the end of the tunnel”, it probably did not work. There were too many generalities, and not enough specifics. Even Alastair Campbell thinks Labour is not communicating its mission with enough clarity (see 9.59am) and this did not feel like a speech that will remedy that.

The biggest test of these speeches is what anyone is likely to recall a week or so later. The danger for Starmer is that it will just be the verbal slip.

Starmer says he does not accept that people concerned about immigration are the same as the people who rioted over the summer.

He says the debate about immigration is not about the worth of migrants. It is about control.

It’s about control of migration. It’s always been about control.

That is what people have voted for time and again.

They weren’t just ignored after Brexit.

The Tories gave them the exact opposite, an immigration system deliberately reformed to reduce control.

Because in the end, they are the party of the uncontrolled market.

Now, don’t get me wrong, markets are dynamic.

Competition is a vital life force in our economy.

This is a Labour party proud to say that we work hand in hand with business.

But markets don’t give in control – that’s almost literally their point.

So if you want a country with more control, if you want the great forces that affect your community to be better managed, whether that’s migration, climate change, law and order or security at work, then that does mean more decisive government, and that is a Labour argument.

Taking back control is a Labour argument.

Starmer says he accepts the immigration is too high.

I have always accepted that concerns about immigration are legitimate.

It is – as point of fact – he policy of this government to reduce both net migration and economic dependency upon it.

I have never thought we should be relaxed about some sectors importing labor when there are millions of young people, anxious and highly talented who are desperate to work and contribute to their community.

And trust me, there are plenty of examples of apprenticeship starts going down at the very same time that visa application for the same skills are going up.

So we will get tough on this.

Starmer says Labour also wants to see more homes built, and that dealing with asylum claims will mean accepting that some people have to have their asylum claims granted.

If we want home ownership to be a credible aspiration for our children, then every community has a duty to contribute to that purpose.

If we want to tackle illegal migration seriously, we can’t pretend that there’s a magical process that allows you to return people here unlawfully without accepting that process will also grant some people asylum.