Keir Starmer will show it is a “new day, a new dawn” for Labour in a party conference speech pitched to draw a line under the Jeremy Corbyn era, one of his shadow cabinet ministers has said. David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, said the Labour leader would concentrate on “fixing some of the issues that the British people asked us to fix”, and he rejected the idea that the party was too focused on “identity issues”. Before Starmer’s speech, Lammy said Corbyn was “the past”, and he rejected the idea of blanket nationalisation of industry, saying Labour was not doing a “PhD in Marxist philosophy”. He said the focus was on fiscal responsibility when it came to issues such as raising the minimum wage to £15 an hour or looking at bringing some sectors into public ownership, with the question always being whether the UK could afford it. Asked about his past praise for Corbyn, Lammy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We lost. You’ve got to recalibrate when you lose. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It’s a new day, a new dawn. Keir has his moment and I wish him the best of luck.”
Lammy was asked about transgender rights after saying there were “dinosaurs” on the right and the left who wanted to “hoard rights” instead of recognising them for trans people. His remarks were taken by some to be a criticism of the Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who sparked a row after saying “only women have cervixes” and then said she felt too unsafe to attend this year’s party conference. However, Lammy denied he had been talking about Duffield and criticised the BBC for asking him about the issue. “You, the BBC, are choosing to land on this subject – that most British people aren’t talking about in a fuel crisis – and spend minutes on this because it keeps Labour talking about identity issues and not about the substantive policies that Keir will set out,” he said. In his keenly awaited speech later on Wednesday, Starmer will repudiate the legacy of Corbyn without mentioning his name, and accuse the government of being “lost in the woods”. He will put addressing Britain’s mental health crisis after Covid at the heart of his pitch to voters, with a promise that a Labour government would make mental health treatment available to everyone who needs it within a month, and create drop-in mental health hubs aimed at children and young people. The pledges will be set out in Starmer’s first in-person address to the conference in Brighton, which he hopes will show Labour is “back in business” and has a programme for tackling “the chronic problems revealed by Covid”. Labour believes the mounting fuel crisis is stoking voters’ concerns about Boris Johnson’s competence, with the government assailed on a number of fronts and even the Tory-leaning press accusing Downing Street of having lost its grip. “The shine has come off,” said a party spokesperson. Lammy said the prime minister had shown he was a “clown” who had been “missing in action” while people queued at the pumps. He blamed the fuel crisis on the government for having botched the Brexit deal, which he said Labour would have to look at how to fix. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “Brexit is responsible for some of the problems we are seeing. On this fuel crisis, there are not queues to get fuel in France, in Spain, in Germany, but there are fuel queues in our own country. That is as the result of exiting the European Union with the deal that Boris Johnson struck.” After Johnson on Tuesday appealed to the public not to fill their cars with petrol unless necessary, Starmer will seek to contrast the government’s chaotic approach with the scale of the challenges facing the country. He is expected to say: “I see the government lost in the woods with two paths beckoning. One path leads back where we came from. None of the lessons of Covid are heeded. The divisions and flaws that were brutally exposed by the pandemic all worsen. “But there is another path down which we address the chronic problems revealed by Covid with the kindness and the togetherness that got us through.” He will call mental health “one of the urgent needs of our time”, and promise that a Labour government would tackle it on a number of fronts. Starmer will be joined in the conference hall in Brighton by his wife, after spending part of their family summer holiday hammering out a first draft of his speech. Many colleagues regard it as a make-or-break moment for his leadership, amid concerns about whether the party has succeeded in gaining a hearing from the electorate and whether the public knows what Starmer stands for.