Good morning. Are you feeling the Blitz spirit?
The defining message of Keir Starmer’s conference speech pitches Labour at war for the soul of the country, engaged in a battle every bit as momentous as rebuilding Britain after the second world war. The assembled Labour ministers, staff and paid-up members of the public alternately clapped and waved their union jacks.
It followed a week of rallying cries to the Labour base, in which Starmer decried the “division and decline” under the “snake oil merchant” Nigel Farage.
Yet earlier this week, as I walked around Liverpool’s Albert Docks the atmosphere at Labour’s 2025 conference felt subdued. Despite the prime minister’s bombastic call to arms, there was a striking absence of energy among conference attendees, few of whom even appeared to be grassroot activists at all, so dominant were the lobbyists, parliamentary apparatchiks and thinktankers.
I spent the conference speaking with the members who remain. Some were energised by Starmer’s message; others sounded disillusioned or exhausted. But can Labour really win again without them? We’ll explore that in today’s newsletter, after the headlines.
Five big stories
Gaza | Donald Trump has given Hamas an ultimatum of “three or four days” to respond to his proposed peace and reconstruction plan in Gaza, warning the militant group would “pay in hell” if it rejects the deal, as the Israeli offensive continued, inflicting further civilian casualties.
US politics | The US government shut down on Wednesday, after congressional Democrats refused to support a Republican plan to extend funding for federal departments unless they won a series of concessions centered on healthcare.
Afghanistan | Afghans are living under a near-complete communications blackout after Taliban authorities cut internet and mobile phone services for a second day as part of an unprecedented country-wide crackdown. The administration offered no immediate explanation for the blackout, although in recent weeks it has voiced concern about pornography online.
UK news | Police have responded to online speculation after a gang-rape in Banbury by saying that there is no evidence linking the crime to migrant accommodation. The force said that “any assumptions being made are unfounded and unhelpful”.
Inequality | Scientists have linked the impact of living in an unequal society to structural changes in the brains of children – regardless of individual wealth – for the first time. The findings suggest “inequality creates a toxic social environment” that “literally shapes how young minds develop”, researchers said.
In depth: ‘We will fight you with everything we have’
During his conference speech, Starmer sounded most passionate – almost inspiring, if you can believe it – when defending the country’s diversity. “If you incite racist violence and hatred, that is not expressing concern: it’s criminal. This party is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted alongside graffiti, telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’, that’s not pride; that’s racism,” he told activists, to loud applause.
“If you say or imply that people cannot be British because of the colour of their skin, if you say they should be deported … mark my words we will fight you with everything we have,” he added. It was a message many in Liverpool have longed to hear from their leader.
The speech was, overall, a success, according to the Guardian’s snap analysis by Andrew Sparrow. Later, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar noted that Starmer’s steeliness and determination will give him much-needed breathing room. The BBC and The Times struck a similar note.
Thinktanks on the left joined in on the applause. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said Starmer “set out the start of a big progressive vision”. British Future, which is focusing on community cohesion, praised the speech for “defending the principle of asylum as well as secure borders, challenging racism while addressing”. The New Economics Foundation, a leftwing thinktank, welcomed the prime minister’s focus on the “importance of a ‘muscular state’ with adequate public investment”.
Starmer, it seems, has finally found his voice. But will enough people rally to his battle cry?
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The architect of Valhalla
Before we dive too deeply into what went down at conference, let’s first lay out just how bad things are for Labour. On Monday morning, legendary pollster John Curtice delivered a sobering presentation at an event on Labour’s current polling predicament. The room watched in silence as he laid out the scale of the crisis: Labour has suffered the sharpest fall in support for a newly elected government in history. A poll released that morning found Keir Starmer to be the least popular prime minister in the history of their polling. It was pretty grim stuff.
So what should Labour do? Curtice’s big warning was that “you can’t just focus on Reform if you’re going to recover from the situation that you’re in”. Labour, he stressed, was bleeding votes not only to Reform, but also to the Liberal Democrats and to the Greens, now led by eco-populist Zack Polanski.
The real drivers of discontent, Curtice said, were not immigration but frustration with the economy and the NHS, the very issues that had brought Labour into power in 2024. And most crucially, he argued that the government needed a powerful, unifying vision.
“What Keir Starmer did last year was say, ‘Hello, I am your nice, friendly local plumber. I believe you’ve got quite a lot of leaks in your policy pipes. So I’m going to come along and bung it up for you,’” Curtice said. “[But] the public aren’t looking to politicians to be their local friendly plumber – they’re looking to their politicians to be the architect of Valhalla. They want a new house, not the old house repaired, and it’s the sense of: what does the new house that this country would occupy look like?”
Earlier, when Curtice was asked if there was any glimmer of hope in the data, he was silent, sparking nervous laughter across the room. “The honest answer to that is no.”
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What do members want to hear?
My gut feeling, that true members were hard to find, is borne out by the data. Labour has lost almost 200,000 members in the past five years, according to the party’s latest annual accounts. Membership now stands at about 309,000, down from a peak of more than half a million.
This decline matters because the fight against Reform cannot be won through rhetoric alone. It requires people willing to take the argument into their local communities: to deliver leaflets, knock on doors and persuade neighbours of Labour’s vision for the country.
As I wandered through the conference halls on Sunday and Monday, speaking to those activists present to get a sense of what they hoped to hear in Keir Starmer’s big speech, the same topics came up again and again: the removal of the two-child benefit cap, tougher sanctions on Israel, and greater investment in local communities.
Those demands were largely unanswered in Starmer’s speech, though the Guardian’s reporting suggests the government is looking into removing the two-child benefit cap and exploring options of a new tapered system.
Still, members and local councillors welcomed the direct attack the prime minister launched against Reform. For many, clearly stating what Labour is opposed to felt like the first step toward defining what it actually stands for.
Tansaim Hussain-Gul, a Labour party member and trade union activist, knows Labour has a big battle ahead of it in Wales, where she’s based. Polls currently show Reform as set to off-set Welsh Labour at next May’s local elections.
“I am glad they’re on the attack because it means we can give back as good as we can get,” Hussain-Gul said. “We know we’ve got a fight, we’ve got a threat there, but the best way forward is making sure we show the positives, the changes that we have done as a Labour government over the last couple of years in Wales and show our members what the consequences will be if Reform do get in.”
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Where are the young people?
The lack of younger activists this year was also notable. The data shows youth membership has plummeted from 100,000 to 30,000.
Starmer’s speech attempted to send a strong message to those who can’t remember a world without social media, promising to scrap Tony Blair’s aim to get 50% of young people in university, replacing it with a new mission where two-thirds of children get a degree or gold-standard apprenticeship.
Again, he sounded more heartfelt when discussing how he was put on a pedestal for attending university, while his siblings were looked down on for taking a professional trade. But it is unclear whether the promise of more apprenticeships will be enough to mobilise young people.
Before the speech, I spoke to 25-year-old Jack Ballingham, who was slumped on the floor alongside others taking a break. He talked to me about the impact of losing so many young members. “You need fresh perspectives in the movement because if you don’t have that, you get stuck in the same old ideas. I think young people are really at the sharp end of a lot of problems in society and know what the solution should be, but they’re not really being listened to.”
When I asked if he felt reinvigorated by being at conference, he said: “This year the conference has been,” he paused. “It feels quite unusual. There’s not as many people, and the people that are here seem to be more obvious corporate types rather than activist members and delegates. It’s supposed to be a big democratic exercise for the party, but it feels a bit more like a policy convention for policymakers who want to try and get a bit of influence.”
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What lessons can Labour learn from defeating the BNP?
Reform is not the first populist right insurgency Labour has had to deal with. In 2010, the British National Party posed a serious challenge to formerly staunch Labour constituencies such as Barking, where its leader, Nick Griffin, stood for parliament.
Labour lost nationally, but in Barking it held the seat with an increased majority and wiped the BNP off the local council altogether. The story of how Labour saw off the far right has since hardened into folklore; one that, amusingly, many now claim to have witnessed first-hand.
Margaret Hodge is rightly at the centre of this tale, as the MP who beat Griffin. In a recent post on Substack, Fraser Nelson, the former editor of the Spectator, noted her warning that labelling Reform “racist” could push disillusioned voters closer to Nigel Farage, and that engaging with their concerns was essential. Others, like Morgan McSweeney, are cast as masterminds, credited with ensuring the council delivered on basic service; and doing very simply what a council should do as key to fighting off the far right.
As someone who grew up in Barking, a former child refugee who gained citizenship and turned 18 the month before casting my first vote in 2010, some of this myth-making makes me chuckle. It is true that Hodge threw herself into conversations her peers had once avoided. But what often gets forgotten is the sheer scale of mobilisation it took to oppose the BNP: there were 150,000 letters sent, 22,000 doors knocked, 9,000 voter contacts, 20,000 questionnaires delivered.
And beyond Labour, up to 1,000 anti-fascist activists campaigned relentlessly. The Hope Not Hate campaign temporarily moved its base of operations to a warehouse in neighbouring Dagenham. Other organisations such as Love Music, Hate Racism would come to our schools and offer a vision of Britain worth dancing and fighting for.
It was a deeply politicising moment. We felt our home was under threat and rallied to defend it. It is that same fighting spirit that the Labour leadership has adopted at this conference, but I did not see that same energy among the base. If Labour is serious about meeting the threat from Reform, it will not only need a vision worth fighting for, but also a core of diverse people of all ages, races and religions who passionately want to be part of that fight.
What else we’ve been reading
Yesterday, Jared Kushner completed a leveraged buyout of video games behemoth Electronic Arts and heard his father-in-law praise the Gaza “peace plan” he has allegedly worked on with Tony Blair. Marina Hyde says maybe we’ve misjudged this guy. No, just kidding. Archie
The world’s biggest sporting event arrives in LA in 2028, under the shadow of a turbulent second Trump presidency. Our US colleagues spell out what’s at stake, and why, for Trump and city politicians alike, the Olympics’ success or failure could mean mutually assured destruction. Aamna
Pjotr Sauer has a good piece about the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, and his tentative attempts to mend fences with the west – without blowing his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Archie
Putting on a convincing Irish accent is an art. As Helen Mirren recently learned, getting it wrong can spark virality for all the wrong reasons, and invite brutal criticism. Aamna
My own objection to the dystopian creation of Tilly Norwood, the nonexistent AI “actor” allegedly being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, is what a pathetic white bread name they picked. “She” is also, Stuart Heritage points out, the average movie executive’s “platonic ideal of what an actor should be”. Archie
Sport
Football | Victor Osimhen’s first-half penalty sent Galatasaray on their way to a 1-0 Champions League win at home after a limp performance from Liverpool. Separately José Mourinho’s return to Stamford Bridge ended in defeat as an own goal gave Chelsea a 1-0 win against Benfica in the Champions League.
Athletics | The coach who guided Laura Muir to Olympic and world championship medals has been banned for three years for serious misconduct, which included driving at speed with an athlete in his car following a disagreement before abandoning them at the roadside.
Tennis | Carlos Alcaraz won his seventh title from nine consecutive finals at the Tokyo Open, beating Taylor Fritz 6-4, 6-4. His 92% win rate this year is among the strongest of the last decade.
The front pages
“‘Decency or division’: Britain faces an era-defining choice, says PM,” is the splash on the Guardian on Wednesday.
“The day Labour dragged politics into the gutter,” says the Daily Mail. “I can clean up the almighty mess as next PM,” writes the Express. “Starmer musters flag-waving Labour for ‘patriotic’ battle against Reform,” is the lead story at the FT, while the Metro has “PM: ‘Snake oil’ Farage wants Britain to fail,” and the Mirror: “Pride over prejudice.”
“‘I won’t surrender our flag’” says the Telegraph, as the i opts for: “Two-child benefit cap will be lifted in Reeves Budget,” and the Star: “Keir’s snakes and leaders.”
Finally, the Sun with “Nicole files for divorce after ‘3yrs apart’”.
Today in Focus
Starmer takes aim at Farage
The Labour leader entered conference with the polls against him and Reform UK snapping at his heels. He came out fighting – but was it enough to change his critics’ minds? Peter Walker discusses with Helen Pidd whether it was enough to change the minds of Starmer’s critics.
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
At some point in their career everyone experiences feeling unfulfilled at work. But with confidence in the UK job market weakening, and competition for roles increasing, more people than ever are clinging to positions they would rather leave.
But, career coaches, workplace psychologists and Guardian readers tell Ammar Kalia, it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re working at home, you could house-sit to change things up, says career coach Dina Grishin. Alison Gibbs, a business psychologist at Work Psychology Group, says that if you don’t get to spend much of your time on the bits of your role you do like, you could start “jobcrafting”, or persuading your superiors to direct your talents more in your preferred direction.
Don’t forget to treat yourself, too. “When you’ve finished a task you didn’t want to do, get up and do something you like,” career coach Jo Maughan says. “It could be making a cup of tea or chatting to a colleague, but it’s taking time to give yourself a reward that’s important.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
