The next Labour government will create a Britain that Scottish people “aren’t just part of, but proud of”, Keir Starmer has pledged, as he accused Tories and Scottish Nationalists of being “joined at the hip” in their desire to keep the country “stuck on pause in the politics of 2014 for ever”.
The UK Labour leader charged Boris Johnson with weakening the union “every day that he remains in power”, telling activists gathered at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall: “I refuse to accept that all that matters is where people were in the Scottish referendum, or the Brexit referendum.”
In his first address to a Scottish Labour conference since becoming leader, Starmer was explicit about the need for Scottish support for the party to win in Westminster. “Scottish votes have never carried more weight in a general election,” he said. “Those who pretend that Scotland can’t choose the government it wants are wrong.”.
And to lengthy applause, he warned activists that “running away from the mainstream is running away from voters”.
Continuing his robust approach to leftwing critics within Labour, he said: “We can win and we can make change, or we can pursue apparent political purity inside this party. But please make no mistake, we cannot do both.”
Dismissing the “cynical” and “distracted” Tory government in Westminster – “so disreputable that even the Scottish Tories are actually embarrassed by it” – Starmer told his audience: “I am angry that we have allowed these Tories to beat us.”
In a speech that quoted the late John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he said: “This is on all of us to fix and we can fix it. It is our duty to win. I believe we can. But still our greatest hurdle might not be the Tories, but ourselves.”
Amid optimism that Labour’s surge in popularity at UK level may help revive the fortunes of the Scottish party, which remains the third biggest party in Holyrood, Starmer promised that Brown’s commission on the UK’s future would “create a new blueprint for a new Britain”, and “unleash the power of devolution”.
Slamming the records of both the Tories at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood, he went on: “Beyond being joined at the hip in wanting to turn every election into the same referendum again and again, they have no industrial strategy to meet the challenge of our age. They don’t have the credible policies we need to create and sustain decent jobs.”
“Decades of power between them … neither the Tories nor the SNP has done enough to secure the jobs and industries of the future.”
Early on in the address, Starmer struck a sombre tone, describing Putin’s aggression in Ukraine as “an affront to the values of this country, this party, and the international institutions, which we helped to build”.
Inviting the conference hall to thank the British military and their families “for all they do to keep us safe”, Starmer repeated his demand for “the strongest sanctions” against Putin and promised that the next Labour government would “also rebuild our own defences”.
He concluded by telling activists he would not apologise for the party continuing to change: “Tony Blair said the only Labour tradition he’d wanted to change was losing – too right” and by committing to a “United Kingdom, re-engaged in the world, fierce in our defence of liberty, forever alert, and apologists for no one”.
