It could be just me, but I’m beginning to find that all this “hope” stuff is getting me down. Everywhere you go at the Labour party conference, you are being urged to “Hope Again”. It’s on the screens in the main hall and on banners in the exhibition area. It’s on T-shirts, balloons and coffee mugs. It’s all just a bit much. Overkill. You now bump into Labour MPs who are visibly collapsing under the strain of having to walk around with an optimistic perma-grin. And the conference is only into its second day. Come Wednesday they will all be on intravenous Valium.
What does “Hope Again” even mean? Is it an instruction? Have we all been hoping in a highly unsatisfactory way so far? Are we being sent back to hope school to learn how to be more upbeat? In which case, I rather think these remedial classes in hoping will be wasted on me. I’ve always been a bit miserable. It feels a bit like someone going round and telling you “Smile. It may never happen.” Or to “Keep calm and carry on.” There are also distinct echoes of Samuel Beckett: Fail again. Fail better. Only in Liverpool it’s: Hope again. Hope better.
You also can’t help feeling that all this talk of hope is wasted on John Healey. He is a man with a naturally low-energy vibe. Someone in touch with the darker, more depressing side of his own personality. A man after my own heart.
As someone with the touch of Harry Potter’s Dementors, ready to suck the joy out of any occasion, he knows that anything that can go wrong almost certainly will go wrong. Anything good is merely a transitory, illusory state. Take Healey to the football and he will show you a bad time. His home team of Rotherham might go 2-0 up in the 88th minute and John will assure you they’ve peaked too soon – they are nailed on to lose 3-2. I speak from experience. I’ve done it myself. John, meet John.
Luckily for me, no one is expecting me to be a ray of sunshine. That’s way above my pay grade. Unfortunately for Healey, optimism was precisely what he was required to deliver in his first speech as chancellor to a nearly full Labour conference hall. To be the fiscal embodiment of “Hope Again”. To give us all a reason to live just a little longer.
Only he just couldn’t do it. He was never going to be able to do it. When John sees a “Hope Again” banner, what he reads is “Despair Again”. Come the end of his half hour on stage, he had managed to convert most of the audience to his way of thinking. At lunchtime, the queues for the assisted dying helpline tailed back into the city centre.
Not that Healey didn’t give it his best shot. He dropped the word hope into almost every sentence – or his minders had dropped it in for him – and every time, the lights seemed to get a bit dimmer. It was a battle of hope against hope. People had come willing him to succeed. To pull off one of the most astonishing personality transplants of the year.
Within minutes, though, a pall of depression hung over the hall. We were all just waiting for it to end. Hardly anyone could be bothered to even clap. The only standing ovation came for the reintroduction of the £15m Union Learning Fund. To give this some perspective, £15m is just a bit more than what the London townhouse of the Tory shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, is worth. Not that it’s a bad idea. It’s just not going to reboot the economy.
And it’s hard to blame Healey. Maybe another more dynamic and charismatic chancellor could have shifted the mood in the hall with feelgood vibes. But as well as being a bit miserable, Healey is also a realist. He knows things are tough and likely to get tougher. No amount of energy price caps and £2 bus fares are going to make a major dent in a cost of living which is only heading in one direction. Nor is it his fault. He is not responsible for austerity, Brexit, the war in Iran and the cost of borrowing. But he is the current fall guy. The chancellor tasked with fixing the unfixable.
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So what we got instead was a touch of nostalgia. A deep dive into the stories Labour has written about its achievements. Times when hope was very much alive. Just not now, no matter how often Healey prefixed his sentences with the H-word. Inevitably, though, the truth came out. How he wished he was chancellor back in the late 90s when the economy was on track and there was money to spare. Instead, we were where we were. You can tell people that the UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7, but it counts for little if everyone still feels broke and broken.
There was talk of growth. Of reindustrialisation. But mostly of the need for fiscal discipline. Which is code for saying that the budget in four weeks’ time is unlikely to be a bundle of fun for anyone. Look forward to some tax rises and welfare cuts. There was also a commitment to spend £6m on shipyards to build the UK’s nuclear submarines. Money that had already been promised. Always the best money for a government to spend. Old money repurposed as new.
Come the end, no one could have been in any doubt about the scale of the challenge ahead. Despite trying to be someone else, Healey had not been able to be anything but himself. And why not? It’s not as if there are any easy answers. Nor do the Tories and Reform have any solutions. They are just chancers pedalling pipe dreams. But most of the Liverpool audience hadn’t come for this. They had been told to come for hope and they wanted half an hour off to enjoy themselves. Instead they had been confronted with cold reality.
