Labour election chief defends Keir Starmer’s praise of Margaret Thatcher but admits to ‘bit of a fuss about it’ – UK politics live

Good morning. Keir Starmer is speaking at a Resolution Foundation conference later where, as Kiran Stacey and Pippa Crerar report, he will say that Labour will not “turn on the spending taps” if it wins the next election. It is a message that firms up what he and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, have been saying for at least a year, best understood as an attempt to neutralise what is currently the Conservative party’s main attack line against the party, but one with colossal implications for how a future Labour government might govern.

Pat McFadden, the party’s national campaign coordinator, has been giving interviews this morning, but he has been preoccupied by having to clarify remarks made by Starmer over the weekend praising Margaret Thatcher. McFadden insisted that Starmer was paying tribute to her effectiveness, not her policies. McFadden told LBC:

I remember when Gordon Brown was prime minister, he invited Mrs Thatcher to tea at No 10 and he described her as a conviction politician who saw the need for change, and we had some of the same fuss at that time.

There’s a long history to these things, and what Keir was doing in the speech yesterday was making the same point – that there are conviction prime ministers who changed the country and he wants to be one of those, not a prime minister who drifts along and is buffeted by events.

I agree that she was a conviction politician, but it’s not an endorsement of her policy, and the truth is Gordon Brown praised her, Tony Blair said she was a towering figure, now Keir’s said what he said. Every time a Labour leader acknowledges this, there’s a bit of fuss about it.

On Sky News, asked if he admired Thatcher himself, McFadden said that was “not the word I’d use”. He explained:

I recognise she won [the general election] three times. I would hope if we were going to win elections, we would make change with the same determination but not in the same direction.

Starmer made two interventions at the weekend and in the second, an interview on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House where he was asked about his pro-Thatcher Sunday Telegraph article, Starmer stressed that he admired her sense of purpose. He said:

Thatcher did have a plan for entrepreneurialism; [she] had a mission. It doesn’t mean I agree with what she did, but I don’t think anybody could suggest that she didn’t have a driving sense of purpose.

But in the Sunday Telegraph article, which the paper wrote up as Starmer heaping praise on the former Tory PM, Starmer went a bit further. He wrote:

Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory. To build a “New Jerusalem” meant first casting off the mind-forged manacles. That lesson is as true today as it was then.

It is in this sense of public service that Labour has changed dramatically in the last three years. The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party.

This implies admiration not just for Thatcher’s skill at using the levers of the government to implement change (which only a fool would deny), but also for her desire to unleash “natural entrepreneurialsm”. And if Starmer accepts the UK was stuck in a “stupor” in 1979, he is implicitly criticising Labour, which by then had been in power for most of the previous decade and a half. These views are still contested in Labour, although even Jeremy Corbyn when he was party leader did not propose trying to reverse the entire Thatcher economic reform agenda.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10.15am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, holds a Q&A at a Resolution Foundation conference to launch its Ending Stagnation report. He will be interviewed by Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist. The full conference agenda is here.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2pm: Keir Starmer speaks at the Resolution Foundation event.

2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

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