It’s a bit like one of the titles for those essays you had to write at school – ‘compositions’ they used to call them. ‘Compare and contrast…’, they started.
So, compare and contrast the Labour and Conservative conferences.
True, the Conservative conference isn’t over yet, far from it, but in reality there’s no comparison. The Labour conference was awful in so many ways while the Conservative conference is jubilant, triumphalist, bombastic, full of fraud and deceit. It’s a category error to see the two as comparable. They have different purposes.
However, they do have something in common, albeit negative. Neither offers anything for northern nationalists. For the last decade Conservative governments have been unashamedly partial and partisan on behalf of unionists, first playing footsie with them, then after Theresa May’s election fiasco, getting into bed with them. You could say it all ended in tears: you could, but it hasn’t ended yet. The Conservatives still have uses for unionists in their ongoing battle against the EU enemy, that contrived bogeyman guaranteed to unite the most gullible xenophobic sections of the British public and the poisonous British tabloids behind them.
Of course unionists, as always, will allow themselves to be instrumentalised as levers in the Conservative party’s relentless drive to retain power. They’ll be tossed aside again but crawl back for more.
Nationalists have correctly never expected anything from Conservatives, looking rather to Labour to behave decently, which for the most part they didn’t; Blair being the exception to that rule. As for the current Labour crop, there’s no point in placing any hope in them. For a start, you’re looking at another decade of Conservative government. Starmer is never going to be prime minister. Indeed without a revolution in British political structures it’s difficult to see how any Labour leader will make it to Downing Street again. Labour has lost Scotland where they used to be guaranteed nearly sixty seats; now they have one. It would be unprecedented to overturn Johnson’s 80-seat majority in one election; impossible without the Scottish seats.
Mainly however, it’s pointless looking to Labour because Starmer is tone deaf about this place. He thinks bi-partisan means agreeing with the Conservatives about Ireland. His first visit here as Labour leader was an unqualified slap down for nationalists and what is laughably known as his ‘sister party’, the SDLP. He announced, lest you forget, that he “believes in the United Kingdom” and worse, that in a referendum on Irish unity he would campaign to stay in the UK. Imagine a man with Starmer’s brains not even taking the time to read the Good Friday Agreement which states that it is for Irish people alone to decide “without external impediment”. A British government bowls the ball and steps back. At least he didn’t mention the north in his long, long, robotic conference lecture; hardly a speech.
His shadow proconsul – know the name by any chance? – has no idea how to play the present protocol imbroglio. She says Labour will be an ‘honest broker’: meaningless claptrap. What’s their position on the Irish protocol? What’s their position on completing the provisions of the GFA? Does Labour support planning for a border poll? No idea. Under Starmer the Labour party position on anything is always merely a paler shade of the Conservative position because he doesn’t want to offend former Labour voters who now vote Conservative. No one knows what Labour stands for and certainly no one has any notion what Starmer stands for. Indeed he seems like what people used to say about the Liberals in the Cameron-Clegg coalition. What do Liberals stand for? Answer: anything.
In the meantime Starmer has concentrated all his efforts on getting control of the Labour party, but to what end? He’ll lose the next election and then the party will get rid of him. He’s a stopgap until they choose someone with a personality. Starmer is a dud.
