The questions for the British Defense Secretary, on a visit during Labour Party conference which began yesterday just across the Mersey, ranged from “What will this mean for local jobs?” to “Is Russia about to attack?” This just about sums up the dilemma facing UK defense policy: are we in a period of incrementally raised threat, demanding incrementally higher defense spending; or should the severity of the global situation demand the urgent expansion of investment into Britain’s historic military hardware production sites, to the necessary detriment of spending on everything else?

Amid its polling slump, Labour is desperate to demonstrate delivery on its domestic agenda, and is conscious that no matter how statesman-like Keir Starmer and Healey look on global stage, there are — as yet — few votes in national security and defense. But the prospect of conflict with Russia, given the recent doubling of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, rightly haunts the British government. If the worst happened, according to one senior military officer I spoke to, here’s what it would look like. In Phase One, all the expensive kit is destroyed, the stockpiles of complex weapons are expended; the long-practiced maneuvers end in stalemate; and trench warfare begins.

In Phase Two, both sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other’s industrial base. Their armed forces consist mainly of raw recruits, and their cities look like London during the Blitz. In Phase Three, one side’s scientific and technological base begins to innovate faster, using AI, robotics, space and lasers to make itself unbeatable, and their opponent loses the will and the means to fight.

Any of these phases can be circumvented either by a strategic nuclear attack or a devastating act of economic warfare. And the preparatory phase looks much like the present: unexplained cyberattacks on major infrastructure, “protest” movements driven by disinformation and — as is currently happening in Moldova — outright interference against elected governments.

Nobody in their right mind would want to begin such a conflict. But the fragmented state of the Western alliance, and the irrationalism of the man in the Kremlin, mean that our surest way of avoiding it is deterrence — nuclear, conventional and economic — and by strengthening our alliances. If you want to understand how pivotal those alliances are, look at this map, produced by my colleagues at the Council on Geostrategy. It shows that, though Nato’s frontline with Russia is on land, stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, the alliance itself is essentially maritime. Its flanks are seas; its supply lines are oceans; its communication networks rest on seabeds.

Though few British citizens are prepared to accept it, and few politicians are prepared to lay it on the line in these terms, that is the stark background to Britain’s rearmament program. Since February this year, when US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth told his counterparts that the USA was handing the conventional defense of Europe to European states themselves, the British government has scheduled a hike in defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, promised 3% in the next Parliament and signed up to the new Nato target of 5% in 10 years’ time.

In UK defense circles, the concept of “fight tonight” has evolved from an edgy thought experiment to a concrete criterion for readiness. Britain has committed, in short order and without any debate in Parliament, to fielding a “sub-strategic” — tactical — nuclear weapon, to be carried on F-35A combat aircraft and deployed under Nato command.

In the new National Security Strategy, the UK has also pledged to embrace higher risks when it takes action and accepted that, in pursuit of enhanced security, its “interests” may have to override its “values”. And, in the upcoming Defense Investment Plan, the Ministry of Defense will decide how to match its weapons systems, forces and deployments to the threat, given the size of its budget.

The outstanding problems are: how to pay for rearmament; how to secure consent for it, from a civil society that is atomized and fractured by disputes over identity; and how to ready political and military leaderships for the possibility of having to manage Russian escalation.

The money problem is acute. In the Thirties, once it accepted the possibility of war within a decade, the Treasury understood it would have to be financed by borrowing. Though it rationed the spending increase, and forced hard choices on the military — prioritizing the RAF over both other services — between 1932 and 1939 the Treasury raised defense spending from 2.3% to 9% of GDP.

That would be hard to repeat today. First, because the UK’s public debt is 96% of GDP. Though that is lower than it was at the start of rearmament, today the government borrows from investors free to move their money across borders, not from a middle class whose savings are constrained by capital controls as in the Thirties. Second, because of the welfare state. On the eve of rearmament, when defense spending stood at 2.5% of GDP, the rest of the public sector accounted for just 17%. During wartime, when defense spending ballooned to 50% of GDP, state spending on civilian services shrank below 7%. Today the non-military public spending accounts for around 42% of GDP, much of which is unshrinkable.

“Total war”, of the kind we fought twice in the 20th century, is unthinkable for states with public health, welfare and pension commitments. As a result, the fiscal debates and the rearmament debate in British politics are misaligned: the 5% Nato commitment remains aspirational, while the Treasury and the OBR have yet to agree a methodology that could measure the upsides of this investment in terms of growth.

The British government is engaged in discussions over a proposal to put cash into a multilateral fund, with allies who have better credit ratings, and to borrow against it on the capital markets. That could delay the cost of some defense spending, effectively moving it off balance sheet for the medium term. But the UK has distanced itself from a City-led project to finance such borrowing, known as the Defense Security and Resilience Bank, and is making slow progress in its own negotiations.

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In the meantime, selling rearmament to the electorate has barely begun. Keir Starmer was warmly received when he told the London Defense Conference that security and defense were no longer “one priority amongst many others” but “the central organizing principle of government; the first thought in the morning — the last at night.” But that is not yet a priority shared by the electorate, nor even most MPs. When the first thought in the morning for millions of people is how are they going to meet their food and energy bills, rearmament is a hard sell.

Labour got a taste of just how hard last month when, by a narrow margin, the TUC Congress voted to stop supporting increased defense spending. Despite pleas from the two big Labour-affiliated manufacturing unions — GMB and Unite — white-collar workers from the teachers, lecturers and health unions voted for “welfare not warfare”.

So those of us who want to make the case for defense spending need to do so in a much more convincing way. “Welfare not warfare” is a compelling slogan only if you believe warfare can be avoided through disarmament and multilateralism. Ukraine found out the hard way that, when dealing with an insane ethnonationalism, these don’t work.

One of our strongest arguments is the economic multiplier effect of defense investment. The economy of Barrow-in-Furness, whose submarine order books are guaranteed for decades, is now booming to the point of overheating. With the government committed to building similar clusters, in Plymouth, Clydeside and Belfast for example, new defense manufacturing jobs should become available, each paying 40% above the average factory wage.

But at some point, the national conversation has to move from the opportunity to the threat. My father’s generation of Labour-voting miners didn’t switch from pacifism to rearmament simply because they thought it would raise wages; they did so because they didn’t want to live in the Third Reich.

Today, many young people are rightly appalled by the wars going on — in Gaza and in Ukraine — but their attention seems fixed on the injustices only of the former. It does not seem to occur to the British public that, when Russian-paid saboteurs torch warehouses in London, or take down airports and hospitals in cyber attacks, that might be in preparation for something worse.

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Yet those who study the Russian state media know that the UK is constantly portrayed as the main enemy, and the fantasy peddled is that Putin will one day drown Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast with a giant nuclear-detonated tidal wave, followed by our abject surrender.

The key to change lies beyond the confines of electoral politics. There is, in Britain, a military-industrial-academic “complex” that has become used to conducting its business in conditions of quiet and opacity. The armed forces don’t look or sound like the country they are defending. Our defense giants tiptoe around the issue of their presence on campuses.

Banks hike lending costs to defense SMEs over “reputational risks”. Our two major Christian churches refuse to let their trustees invest in defense. Students pursuing careers in defense related science and technology face peer pressure to opt for something softer — and, for the most talented, that is often a more lucrative job in finance.

Yet China has seven of its elite universities signed up to top-secret military research, and leads the USA in 57 out of 64 defense-related categories of science, while the whole of Russian society is geared for war. So before the population moves, it is this ill-defined but critical community of bankers, vice-chancellors, civil servants, religious leaders and opinion formers who will have to move first.

Their assumptions accumulated since 1991 — towards reliance on international law and institutions, towards improvisation in a crisis, and towards incremental change — will need to be abandoned. So will the tradition of conducting all discussions about threat, strategy and deterrence out of earshot of the public. So will pension funds’ reluctance to invest in defense, and universities’ reluctance to shout about the defense-related research they do.

In the Thrties, the air of unreality lasted from Hitler’s march to power right through to the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, when — mobilized by the Communist Party — the first British and Irish troops went into action against a fascist army in Spain. After that, something snapped in the British psyche. Labour, which had voted against every defense budget since 1919, became the most ardent supporter of rearmament.

Today, though politicians like Starmer and Healey are already there, the wider electorate — both Left and Right — has yet to make the leap. When they look at the half-finished ships in places like Birkenhead, and its sister yards in Govan and Rosyth, the public sees, if anything, jobs and apprenticeships. When military planners look at these same chunks of metal, they see vital deterrent weapons systems whose deployment cannot come soon enough.

For there is little that Downing Street’s chief of staff seems to enjoy more than “hippy-punching”. The irreconcilables on the party’s Left have been sidelined or exorcised through a combination of forcible banishment and self-exile. Party discipline has been enforced more rigidly than ever before. But, at some point, you have to identify yourself positively, with what you are for, rather than simply buckling down for permanent counter-insurgency, identifying yourself negatively, with what you’re against. On Friday afternoon, Starmer said that Labour faces “a battle for the soul of this country”, offering “patriotic national renewal”. But what kind of patriotism is he offering, and what kind of renewal, and to what kind of nation?

These are the questions that might normally be answered with the help of McSweeney. But McSweeney is in trouble. Revelations about £700,000 in undeclared donations to Labour Together, a think tank that he led during the Corbyn years, have recently resurfaced. Leaked emails reveal that lawyers advised that there was “no easy way to explain” the supposed oversight, telling the Starmerite outfit to blame “admin error” since they could not deal with the discrepancies “substantively”. Labour Together has already been fined, way back in 2021. But the story rumbles on. Perhaps more importantly than the low-level pecuniary scandal, McSweeney has become a lightning rod for everything that has afflicted a spluttering Starmerism in recent weeks.

The British press delight in creating a Machiavellian puppetmaster: the power, the anchor behind an otherwise ideologically unmoored throne. But unlike Boris Johnson’s equivalent Rasputin figure, Dominic Cummings, with whom he is often compared and is rumoured to have met on several occasions, McSweeney has not produced hundreds of thousands of words of esoteric, polemical invective via his personal blog before ascending to the apex of the British political system. There are no McSweeney lectures on YouTube, explaining his role in organizing against the BNP in Dagenham, where by most accounts he played a crucial role cleaning up fly-tipping zones and fixing up dilapidated housing to counter an incipient far-Right threat.

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But this kind of “pavement politics”, redolent of a well-worn hyper-localism long practiced by the Lib Dems, is no substitute for a coherent worldview. Even New Labour’s own Prince of Darkness — the thrice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, a close McSweeney confidant — had the kind of intellectual scaffold that his softly-spoken younger protégé lacks. Third Way theorists like Anthony Giddens and the trendy bourgeois-bohemian Eurocommunist thinkers around Marxism Today presaged a post-class, center-left politics for the individualized, post-industrial consumer society, buoying Mandelson’s back-room Svengali operations in service of a Blairite nation-building project that was, at least, ideologically coherent.

But what is McSweeney’s guiding light, the source of his first principles? Thatcher, perhaps apocryphally, slammed down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty during a tense cabinet stand-off, bellowing “This is what we believe!” What book does Starmer slam down? Is it Roy of the Rovers? Nobody can say. And what about McSweeney? We hear, in briefings, second- and third-hand, that he has an instinct for the electorate, and a strategic mind that is lacking among many members of the political classes. No doubt this is true. He correctly surmises that the niche obsessions of the contemporary Left are an electoral dead end: the old, stalwart “anti-imperialist” stances that lead to alignment with terrorist groups; the apologia for all variants of anti-American Third World strongmen; and, among the younger, millennial-socialist currents, the obsessions with gender fluidity, postmodern cultural poses, or wildly unpopular attempts to push extreme climate evangelism on a bemused public. These are what drove the Irishman’s war against Corbynism. But to what end, other than victory for victory’s sake?

This week, an international brigade of center-left sensibles met for the Global Progress Action Summit in London. McSweeney was reportedly behind preparations for the event, which included high-profile Democrats like Pete Buttigieg, alongside the Spanish Socialist PM, Starmer himself, and senior UK cabinet ministers, among them Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. It was briefed that the PM’s chief of staff “sees Keir as being a leader among global progressives”. Perhaps becoming a leader among British progressives would represent the first baby steps. One has to crawl before one can walk. But the source of the briefing nevertheless claimed that the social-democratic jamboree would look to “write a kind of playbook of what it means to be a center-left government in the era that we’re now in”, eschewing both Left and Right populisms and the Third Way model of the Nineties.

The problem for all these parties, from Labour to the Democrats to their European equivalents, is that they’ve never abandoned the Third Way. They each placed all-in bets on the inevitability of a linear progression towards an end-of-history vision of social and economic liberalism. They consciously realigned themselves to rainbow-coalition voter blocs constituted around groups of urbanite sophisticates that represented a future of knowledge and service work and the sublimation of class for identity politics; the professional-managerial classes, public sector workers, the urban precariat, and ethnic and sexual minorities. The working class, understood traditionally as those in manual professions not requiring a degree, were considered expendable; their industries were on the way out, in any case, and they would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

That politics has died in a wave of populist insurgency across the developed world. The working class didn’t disappear, but they’re no longer working on production lines, or unionized, and they’ve certainly no longer got an ear bent towards the gray, stodgy representatives of a distant liberal graduate class. And the attempted reconstitution of productive industrial capacity in Western economies is now the core focus of center-left politics. McSweeney seems to grasp both these trends. But he also seems either unable or unwilling to do what’s necessary to chart a course for genuine renewal for building a new growth model, almost two decades since neoliberalism died, or for reanimating Labour as the real party of the labor interest. This would involve identifying losers, as well as picking winners.

Over the summer, an anonymously authored paper circulated among disgruntled backbenchers and parliamentary staffers. “What did we learn on our summer holidays?”, it asked. It provided a brutal diagnostic for those returning from recess. “Labour”, it says, was governing “a country it does not know”. A rudderless government “is divided in itself”. Multiplying crises “have not produced positive change but political inertia”, with the governing party retaining “its old atrophying instincts… repeating its mistakes, ad nauseum.”

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Even McSweeney’s allies stress his weakness. A Blue Labour-aligned party figure laments the fact that “Morgan is just one man”, albeit a powerful one, struggling forlornly against the tide. But in Get In, McSweeney is the clear protagonist. Rather being driven by Sir Keir, the narrative is centered on the mysterious Irishman who conducts apparent Sun Tzu-like factional warfare while engineering an emphatic but clinical and loveless general election result, only for the curtain to fall and reveal it was all a pyrrhic victory, all much ado about nothing; a government with a historic supermajority, but without a plan for power, a project, or a guiding philosophy.

The Prime Minister’s most senior aide is quoted as telling a friend that “Keir acts like a HR manager, not a leader”. He’s “not driving the train”, says another. “He thinks he’s driving it, but we’ve sat him in front of the DLR”. Everyone knows who we’re meant to think is the real driver. But the thing about briefing to all and sundry that you’re a Clausewitzian strategic genius, pursuing politics as war by other means, is that you have to take the rough with the smooth: you can’t claim credit for the good times without being blamed for the bad. And on the eve of the Labour conference, these are no doubt bad times. One might even posit that for the Government, things can only get better.

MPs with thin majorities smell blood, and Downing Street is rankled. McSweeney is not universally loved even there. Some Labour staffers still gripe at a supposed boys’ club that was built around the Cork man. “I don’t rate him,” one tells me, “but I know I’m an outlier”.

McSweeney isn’t omnipotent. There’s more than a little frustration with the way the Government’s crucial first year has gone in Number 10. National renewal feels more like managed decline. The “Change” headline of the rather thin manifesto turns out to involve only barely perceptible, piecemeal reforms. “Insurgent government” looks more like a process-obsessed administration; government of, by and for the lawyers. If the standard quip is that politicians must campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then Starmer campaigned in prose and is governing in disjointed bullet points. Next week in Liverpool, both the PM and McSweeney will be hoping that today’s Labour librarians stay silent.

The Conservative Government, by contrast, were stumbling through their 17th year in office against a backdrop of scandal, corruption and sleaze. Increasingly caught in the crossfire of a tabloid war, each weekend would bring another problem. John Major’s press secretary Christopher Meyer would receive a phone call every Saturday night outlining how the Sunday papers had another story to drop. Each time they had to decide whether to sack someone or stand by them. “The notion of a corrupt government,” Meyer recalled in his memoir, “began to spread like poison through the country”.

By-election defeats and division over Europe had put New Labour in the box seat. Businesses began to defect towards them. On the eve of the 1996 conference, Chelsea FC shareholder Matthew Harding, who had made £150 million on the Lloyd’s insurance market, gave the party its biggest ever individual donation: a £1 million boost to support an “Enough is Enough” advertising campaign to kick the Tories out. “I think New Labour has a far greater understanding of the enterprise economy than many people in the Tory Party do,” he said.

And yet, despite the momentum behind him, Blair arrived in Blackpool to find a party, a media and a wider public that was deeply sceptical about his ability to win. Old titans such as Barbara Castle stirred conference by making a speech on pensioner poverty and accused the leadership of ignoring their concerns. Aged 86, she put forward a package that was shot down by Harriet Harman as being too costly. When the row spilled over into the media, she accused the leadership of engaging in a “dirty tricks” campaign against her. “They are fighting dirty because they’re frightened,” she said.

Others believed that the party was lacking a “big vision” for the country. Future home secretary Charles Clarke warned that “uncertainty and lack of direction could be fatal” come election time. Deputy Leader John Prescott, by contrast, said there was too much vision. “Sometimes you can go too fast,” he warned. New Labour had “hit the bloody wall, the buffers”. On the Left, meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn took to the pages of Tribune to argue for a much wider policy debate. “Those of us who question the strategy,” he wrote, “are told that we are either disloyal or dangerous”.

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The media had also not yet warmd to the idea of Blair as Prime Minister. At The Daily Mail, Ann Leslie was convinced that Blair was not sexy enough to win over the voters, explaining why “women find this man so smarmy”. At the Daily Telegraph, star commentator Boris Johnson accused him of “weaving like a drunken magpie from allusion to allusion”. “Sooner or later”, observed Johnson, “he will face a serious revolt”. The pollsters agreed. The doyen of the BBC election night coverage, Anthony King, analysed the polls and found indifference to what Blair was trying to achieve. “There will be little rejoicing if Labour comes to power but little gnashing of teeth either,” he wrote. When the commentator Matthew d’Ancona observed the mood on the ground, he coined a new phrase for growing tribe within the party — “Scared Labour” — who believed that their lead would evaporate by Christmas.

History, of course, tells us that Labour had nothing to worry about. But any comparison with 1996 is going to do little to assuage fears that Starmer has not yet sealed the deal with the voters either. For all the analysis — from the bookmakers to journalists to pollsters — who say that he is heading for a historic victory, there is a sense that the public are still unconvinced. The argument, backed up by recent polling, shows that there may still be a route to victory for Sunak.

Starmer, as Blair found out in 1996, will have to win over a sceptical country that doesn’t take to opposition leaders lightly. For all the talk that British politics is continually in a “State of Chaos”, voters rarely want to change the governing party. It is, after all, a remarkable fact that the teenagers who were able to vote for the first time in 1979 are now in their early Sixties and have only seen the governing party change twice: through Tony Blair and David Cameron. It is little wonder that scepticism to opposition poll-leads runs deep within the national psyche.

All of which means that this conference season matters for Starmer. It is also perhaps why, according to reports, Starmer is “struggling a little” with his upcoming speech. Yet if Starmer needs some inspiration, he could do worse than consider how those three winners — Thatcher, Blair and Cameron — took their party from opposition to government.

In the Seventies, Thatcher warned that there would be no quick economic fix — “We Conservatives don’t have a blue-print for instant success” — but there was still a commitment to change the economy by reducing taxes and staying out of pay disputes. For Blair in 1996, the speech was a reassurance that Old Labour was dead but that he would not disrupt the settlement of the previous decade. Underpinning it was a call to move on from the class politics of the past: “forget the past, no more bosses versus workers — we are on the same side, the same team, and Britain united will win!” As for Cameron, he promised an end to the “gravy-train” of politics as well as “big government” that had caused as many problems as it had solved.

When Starmer delivers his speech in Liverpool, there will be an expectation that he sets out his own vision for government. At the same time, however, he must also do the thing that all successful opposition leaders do: speak to the voters who haven’t voted for you in decades. Both Blair and Cameron sought to do so by neutralising their traditional weak spots and moving the policy agenda to their turf. “It is the weak and the vulnerable who suffer most from crime,” Blair said. “So, we will be tough on the causes of crime, but tough on crime too.” Cameron likewise decided to fight Gordon Brown on poverty. “Labour still have the arrogance to think that they are the ones who will fight poverty and deprivation,” he argued. “Don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”

Yet the task for Starmer is arguably bigger than the one presented to Blair and Cameron. The multiple crises facing the country are more like those that faced Thatcher at the end of the Seventies. Back then, few people believed that she actually had the will and the means to mould the country in her image. The desire to win those voters over was central to her conference speech in 1978. She began by mythologising Labour’s past and accepting that people had a strong bond with the idea and values of the party. She had already told Tory agents to go out to the country and win them. “They remain cut off from us by a wall of misunderstanding, old battles, old prejudices.”

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In that speech, she talked about how much she had respected the leaders of Labour’s past. “Many of us remember the Labour Party as it used to be. In the old days it was at least a party of ideals. You didn’t have to agree with Labour to understand its appeal and respect its concern for the underdog.” By the time the Winter of Discontent came she had an argument ready that opened the door for Labour voters to switch party for the first time. For all the parallels with the Seventies, Starmer has been unable to narrate the crisis of the past few years into one coherent thread.

Starmer used the Covid pandemic to argue that the fundamental relationship between people and government had changed. He talked up a 1945 moment, casting himself as a modern day Clement Attlee: “I believe people are now looking for more from their government — like they were in the Second World War.” Yet the language of “security” and “fiscal responsibility” combined with the decision to ditch many of his original pledges has left people wondering how radical he will really be. Starmer has not only admitted that his plans “may not set people’s pulses racing”, they have also opened him up to attack; first as Captain Hindsight, and then as a “flip-flopper” who can’t be trusted. In his speech in Manchester last week, Sunak signalled that it would be his attack line come an election: “The worst thing about Sir Keir is that he just says whatever he thinks will benefit him most.”

Tories hope that come election time the voters will see him as an opportunist, like Neil Kinnock, who ditched all his policies just so he could become Prime Minister rather than a pragmatist like Tony Blair. Labour hope that voters want an end to the “chaos” and the politics of broken promises. But at the same time, history shows us that the opposition leaders who win are able to get the “pluses racing”. Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron were not only able to narrate a crisis — they could also tell voters a story about how their leadership would change the face of Britain. As he arrives in Liverpool, Starmer is going to have to learn quick that safety-first can only get you so far.

As an atheist, and as someone who had to apologise the last time he went to church after its leaders were accused of carrying out “exorcisms” on gay people, you might have thought this would be a tough gig. And yet it wasn’t.

The theme was deliberately chosen so he could reflect on the way local communities had pulled together during the pandemic: “One of the things I’ve been profoundly struck by in the last 18 months is the fact that people have looked out for each other in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime.” And he thanked people of faith for playing their part in all this. “I may not believe in God, but I do believe in faith,” as he once explained. Christians, he said on Sunday, were the Labour Party’s “moral compass”.

But the “love thy neighbour” story is a good deal more morally challenging than Keir Starmer seems to realise. For it is not a moral tale designed to celebrate social togetherness; it is supposed to challenge the listener to think about who their neighbour might be. And this is the message that appears to be lost on Angela Rayner.

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After all, the point of the Good Samaritan story is that the audience hated Samaritans. They were “scum”. Too often this story is simply taken to be a heart-warming moral tale of helping others in a time of need — hence Starmer’s words about our coming together in the pandemic, with references to food banks and so on.

That’s all good and fine. But the parable’s purpose is not to make us all feel good about ourselves. It is the “scum” that acts with compassion, while the morally righteous pass by on the other side of the road. Applied to the Labour conference, the story should be renamed “the Good Tory”.

And here we reach the heart of the Labour Party’s problem with voters. It believes far too much in its own virtue — and so gives itself the licence to disparage its opponents in any way it likes. They are “scum”, we are the righteous. They deserve it.

At the end of Sunday’s church service, Starmer was presented with a copy of Graham Dale’s God’s Politicians: The Christian Contribution to 100 years of Labour. It is a “contribution” which has historically been fundamental to the success of the Left — arguably even more so than to the Right — but has been on the wane following the decline of Christianity.

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Theologically, the Christian contribution to the Labour movement has rested on one fundamental idea: that what used to be called the “brotherhood of man” was rooted in “the Fatherhood of God”. To claim that all human beings are children of the same heavenly Father is to establish a deep ontological equality between all people and readily serves as the basis for a politics of social justice. But while this basic religious assumption can be harnessed as a powerful defence against divisive forces of social change — most notably certain forms of unbridled capitalism — it can just as much be used to express our fundamental connectedness with people with whom we passionately disagree.

In other words, the Fatherhood of God cuts both ways: it serves as the basis for food banks and better social security, but it also resists the dehumanisation of those some might label “scum”. It is no coincidence that churches are perhaps still the most socially diverse gatherings in the country.

But social justice has come to mean something else to the modern Labour Party. Justice is a complicated word in Christian ethics because theologians have long recognised that it can have a persecutory flavour. In many ways “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is the epitome of justice in so far as the punishment is proportionate to the crime.

Starmer spoke proudly yesterday of his former life in the Crown Prosecution Service. The scales of justice that hang over the Courts of Justice in which he plied his trade speak precisely to this sense of balance — the punishment fitting the crime. But without being tempered by mercy, justice alone can lead to a kind of revenge mentality in which retribution is cheered and celebrated. This is especially prevalent among those who are convinced of their own righteousness. Which is why, generally speaking, I fear people’s virtues far more than their vices.

Martin Luther famously had a complete about turn in his theology when he recognised that he actually hated the idea of a just God, because if God was just — and so treated people according to their just deserts — then we would all be lost. Polonius says to Hamlet: “My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.” Hamlet replies: “God’s bodykins, man… use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?” From this perspective, we are all wrong-un’s, in need of forgiveness.

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And so social justice — unmoored from the Christian belief in forgiveness and a society rooted in the Fatherhood of God — can easily turn into something that most of us might legitimately fear. After all, who of us would escape a whipping were the extent of our social sins exposed? That is why I — and I suspect I am not alone — am terrified at the prospect of angry people such as Angela Rayner gaining a whiff of real power. I fear that what they call justice many of us would experience as persecution. We would become scum.

That isn’t to say, as the great theologian Stanley Hauerwas once commented, that just because we should love our enemies we shouldn’t have any. Yes, there is struggle and political contest. Yes, there must be passion. But justice warriors must also recognise in their opponents something inherent in all of us — we are all potentially loveable, all fallen. When Labour violates this basic human solidarity out of a heightened sense of their own righteousness, voters rightly flee. Because the fear is that it’s Labour that has now become the nasty party.

Sir Keir Starmer, from autocue:

Comrade delegates. Fellow Knights of the Realm. Common folk. Ladies. Gentlemen. Old, young, happy, sad. People with an important sexual or gender disposition we absolutely need to know about. Everybody in this fantastic, broad, inclusive, tolerant, united, forward-looking, secular church of ours – thanks for another brilliant Conference. Wow. Amazing. No, thank you.

I have a very important announcement to make. But first I ask Conference for your forbearance as I attempt the customary humorous preamble. Ha ha. Yes. Yeah.

Older comrade delegates may remember the American pop songster Roger Miller. And his fantastic hit record, England Swings. Way back in the 1960s, when the internet was still only science fiction. You madam — in the front row there. You remember him, I bet. You look as though you were a bit of a swinger yourself, eh! Oh, it’s Harriet Harman. I rest my case! As I used to say! Fantastic.

“Ingerland swings…” went the refrain. “Like a pendulum do”. Ingerland swings. Like a pendulum do. And in post-war Britain, politics did indeed swing like a pendulum do. The Tories got in for a couple of terms, people got bored with them, voted us in and so on ad infinitum. Well, comrade delegates. Look where we are now. The political pendulum swings still. It do, it does. But entirely within the Labour Party. The Government blunders from strength to strength, stumbling towards their goal of running a one-party state. Meanwhile, Labour’s trapped, padding from left to right and back again like a mangy old tiger in some unremembered cage. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Netflix series about a zookeeper guy called Joe Exotic, fantastic watch, really takes your mind off things.

But seriously, again. Apart from the BBC, no institution does self-loathing quite like the Labour Party Conference does it, comrade delegates? Oh, we all pretended as usual to enjoy a coming-together, a renewal of purpose. Statements were made and listened to solemnly. Consensus was declared, as is customary, on the badness and wrongness of Toryism. Speakers have emphasised Labour’s unique contract with working people. Now everything will be packed up for another year, nothing will have changed, and that’s the bloody problem. Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

But things have to change. That’s why I have prepared some KEYWORDS to illustrate my speech. They are: SLOGAN, SEIZURE, MILITARY COUP, TWITTER, NET ZERO, UNIONS, ELECTORAL COLLEGE and NEW LEADERSHIP. Hey, guy there in the raspberry beret — you get it! Full disclosure, I’ve had two gins and tonic to stiffen the sinews, come on, it’s showtime!

OK firstly, comrade delegates: SLOGAN. This year’s slogan — A New Leadership — is pretty good. On one level — here I am, not Jeremy Corbyn, fantastic! Sort of winning already. Also, on another level, Labour can offer the leadership the country isn’t getting from Mr Tumble at No 10. It’s also good on a meta-level, we’ll come to that later.

Comrades, I’d like to talk about SEIZURE. I’m not having one, I’m advocating one ha ha, all right now, settle down. I’m proposing a mass seizure of assets that should never have left public ownership in the first bloody place. Now I’m guessing from that noise, like the air being squashed out of 1,000 paddling pools, that you’re shocked. Well tough halloumi because it’s time we embraced SOCIALISM once again. “Oh but why are you abandoning centrist policies, which must be the way forward because they always have been, Sir Keir?” you whine, like abandoned puppies. Yeah, well I’m sorry. That “essay” I wrote for the Fabians about tiptoeing along the middle of the road. I’ve had a major rethink. I have marked that essay “D minus, see self”. I have had a word with self. The new Me begins now.

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Fact: young people love socialism. They get it. They can see what Vulture Capitalism’s doing to the world and they know that Disaster Socialism is the only way forward. Why should they be denied a stake in their own future when THE FUTURE IS SOCIALIST my gasping comrade delegates! We watched while buy-to-let landlords bought right-to-buy council houses and turned them into rent-to-frack human juicers. We need rent controls and affordable housing. “Deal”, as we say in Shadow Cabinet.

Here’s a puzzle — what’s the point of having privatised railways and bunging them more than £7 billion a year in subsidies? If the French state, the German state, the bloody Dutch state can own our railways, so can OUR state. Same with all the energy companies and the NHS. Oh dear, shareholders, your luck can go up or down, read the small print, we’re having the LOT back, cost price, sling your hook. “Oh but how are we to achieve this legally, Sir Keir?” I hear you mewl like neurotic kittens. Listen, I worked my way up from conveyancing solicitor to Director of Public Prosecutions, leave the paperwork to ME!

“COUP”. It’s an ugly word, and God knows I hope it doesn’t come to it. But I had some Generals round for a barbecue last month and let me tell you they are HARD for regime change. One of them told me in confidence that they’d cheerfully invade the Cotswolds if it meant the end of “Commander-in-Chief Fuckjumbo and that shower of arriviste shits”. His words, not mine.

Talking of posh, I’m seriously pissed off with the media, who keep unhelpfully calling me “Sir Keir”. Sir Keir doesn’t sound like the sort of guy who’d keep the Red Flag flying anywhere, does he? It’s a bit much when the leader of the Labour Party sounds more aristo than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. What’s particularly unfair is that I notice more and more journalists, finally tiring of our capricious, dithering arsehole of a prime minister, have started calling him by his surname rather than his clown name. I think I’d be much more appealing as “Starmer”. Imagining an exclamation mark after that. “Starmer!”, sort of like a white “Shaft!” Lady over there to my right, you’d like that too, am I right? Ha ha, no offence love, just banter.

Talking of which, can we stop trying to triangulate policy positions by asking “What Would Twitter Say?” Firstly, who cares what Twitter says? Secondly, we all know what Twitter says, which is “FUCK YOU, BE KIND!” Comrade influencers — social media is not an important forum for the exchange of ideas. It is a mosh pit. It is a primal therapy screaming room. It is a distraction. When I first came into politics, people would stare out of the window or have a cigarette to break up the monotony of their day. Now they scroll through Twitter to find out who’s said hurtful words to whom. Who has “liked” the wrong “tweet”. Can you hear how infantile that sounds? “Hashtag I Stand With…”? NO. Stop “standing”, comrades! You CLAP are CLAP not CLAP in CLAP fucking CLAP HAMILTON! Log off, comrades. Twitter is a bourgeois prison of the mind.

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What’s next? Ah yes: ELECTORAL COLLEGE. All that “we’re changing the rules about how we elect a leader”. Soz, just winding up the crypto-Stalinists. As usual. Ha ha Corbyn you peevish, brittle old git. Next…er, NET ZERO. A Green Deal for a Green Britain. Green Jobs for Green Industry. Green Power to a Green People. A Green Future with a Green Economy. Delegate comrades, are we willing to turn Green Platitudes into a Green Reality? Only green time will greenly tell…

Ah yes. THE UNIONS. Protection of workers’ rights has never been more important. OK, maybe it has. But frankly the Starmerist wing of the Party, which has been headed by me, should shut up now and set about strengthening the power of the unions. Closed shops, lightning strikes, bring it on. Oh, and let’s have Clause 4 back, see how Lord Blair of Baghdad likes THAT. If the entire country’s unionised, what could possibly go wrong? In return, unions would be obliged to take their stupid dinosaur heads out of their arses, so fingers crossed. Why do I feel so giddy, comrade delegates? It’s not just the gin.

I’M STANDING DOWN. Oh that paddling pool noise again. Yeah, happy now? I won’t wait until we’re “in power”. I’ll shuffle off this afternoon, so we’ve actually got a shot at being in power. Comrade delegates, I was always only ever a caretaker leader. We just needed a breather after the Corbyn Experiment. Time to hang up my brown coat. Time for a new broom. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and the earlier I go the more noble I seem. Anyway, I’ve got a LOT of Seizure Paperwork to tackle. So without further ado comrades, I’d like to hand over to Deputy Leader Ange Rayner. Cheers, yes please, ice and a slice love!

Sir Keir Starmer leaves the stage. Ms Angela Rayner addressing Conference:

All right? Yeah, totally endorse what Starmo’s just said there, let’s crack on. You can see what it says on the wall behind, “A NEW LEADERSHIP”, here we go then.  Comrade delegates, this is the 21st Century right? Labour has never had a woman leader yeah? Let’s correct that now. Proposal: make the contest for a new leader a women-only shortlist. All those in favour gasp. Motion carried. All are welcome to put themselves forward but don’t get me wrong. One of my best mates ever is Rebecca Long-Bailey, but we’ll never get in if we’re led by that pillock, bless her, with her tiny little face in her mam’s make-up. I, Ange Rayner, am ideal, as I can totally unite the party. Look at my credentials, Conference. Northern, working class, free school meals, pregnant at 16, my life saved by a Sure Start Centre. Remember what administration brought those in? Exactly. I owe a LOT to the Blair years. I speak as I find. Remember how the Tories sneered at my lack of education? Remember? I do. Well now Nadine Dorries — NADINE DORRIES — is Culture Secretary.

Comrade delegates, I commend all this to Conference, here’s to a new beginning, a new leadership, Green Socialism, let me lead us into battle and twat the Tories. Cheers.