Labour’s spending pledge war is over. Some believe the party’s election campaign will be stronger. Others wonder if Starmer and Reeves now stand for anything at all
It was in late September 2022, as Labour gathered for its annual conference in Liverpool, that the party’s top brass began to believe. The financial markets were in turmoil after Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikaze mini-budget the week before. Interest and mortgage rates were spiralling as the Liz Truss experiment imploded. The pound had crashed.
Members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet team tried to look and sound stern as the conference opened, reflecting the public’s fears of financial meltdown and worries about its effect on the cost of living, but secretly they could not believe their political good fortune.
