If Starmer wants to beat Reform, he'll need more than patriotic renewal' whatever that is | Zoe Williams

"That's when he said he wanted the next election to be an open fight between Labour and Reform. In the speech itself, however, he identified his enemies in the abstract. He was against the politics of predatory grievance, which used the infrastructure of division. He also made a lovely case for London at the start, with its plentiful pubs and pleasant parks, remarking wryly that it was nothing like the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe."

"The problem is he needs to pick a lane. Either he was referring to Donald Trump's comments at the UN earlier this week, when the leader of the free world said Britain's capital had a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it's been changed, it's been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law, in which case Starmer should say so. Or he was attempting to describe the ascendant hard right upturning our politics without identifying or reflecting upon its main mouthpieces, in which case, what the hell is he thinking?"

"One issue is that you very often cannot tell what the prime minister is thinking, so camouflaged is any thought under the buzzwords of the day. Patriotic renewal is today's invention, which could mean anything from bunging some cash to a community centre to becoming a clean-energy superpower. If you ever feel dispirited by this pabulum, just be thankful you weren't in whatever meeting it was probably dreamed up in at the Tony Blair Institute."

Keir Starmer stated a desire for the next election to be a direct contest between Labour and Reform. He showed greater clarity in a post-summit panel than in his prepared remarks. The prepared remarks opposed predatory grievance and the infrastructure of division while celebrating London’s pubs and parks. Ambiguity remained over whether the criticism targeted Donald Trump’s UN remarks or the broader hard right. The phrase 'patriotic renewal' was used without substantive definition. Labour announced mandatory digital ID cards for anyone trying to work in the UK, a policy absent from the 2024 manifesto and potentially contentious.

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