Keir Starmer on Sunday warns his party not to become “giddy” about the prospect of power, as he declares that Labour is “bang on schedule” to win the next general election. After his party’s stunning win over the Scottish National party in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, the Labour leader uses an exclusive interview with the Observer to spell out how a Labour government will “power” economic growth across the country by training up hundreds of thousands of workers in a new nationwide network of skills colleges, geared to the needs of local economies and industries of the future.
But with his party riding high in the polls – and new modelling on Sunday suggesting Labour could be on course for a 1997-style landslide – Starmer tells his party to avoid any hint of triumphalism at its conference in Liverpool, which opened on Saturday. “It is not going to be giddy, it is not going to be ‘job done’,” Starmer says. “So you won’t get razzmatazz. You won’t see mistakes that have been made in the past by opposition parties.” The Labour leader’s office – aware of how the party’s high hopes of victory were derailed despite poll leads in 1992 and 2015 – has even sent out orders for no one at the Liverpool conference to refer to Starmer, or to introduce him on stage, as “the next prime minister”, as is customary for opposition parties in the run-up to general elections. “There won’t be anything like that, no presuming anything,” said a senior aide. Rather, Starmer makes clear in the interview that while he wants to convey confidence about Labour’s purpose and missions, this must be underscored by a sense of seriousness and constant appreciation by all those working for victory that huge challenges still lie ahead. “The battle has hardly begun in terms of this final part of the journey,” he says. While some in his party worry that he lacks vision and eye-catching ideas, the Labour leader insists several times that he will not announce policies unless they have been “bombproofed” – meaning fully costed – and until they have been tested out to ensure they will work and can be launched during a first Labour term in office. “I am not prepared to have an incoming Labour government that does not deliver for working people,” he says. Nor will he be rushed. The final “retail offer” for voters in the form of a campaign “pledge card”, he says, will have to wait until much nearer to election day. Starmer says his plans to revolutionise skills training are central to his guiding mission to fire up economic growth in industries that will be most important to the UK’s future. Business leaders across all sectors have, he says, bombarded him with messages that they cannot find workers trained for their needs. As a result, Starmer says that under a Labour government, they would be able to work together with local councils – using money raised from a revamp of the apprenticeship levy – to set up specialist training colleges that equip workers specifically for local industries, and with a particular emphasis on sectors such as renewables, nuclear, engineering, computing and modern toolmaking: “Everything we do will be about delivering growth.” Asked where he feels his party now stands on the path to power, Starmer says it has come further than anyone expected when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. “We can see the summit clearly now,” he declares, before warning of the steep climb that still lies ahead. If successful on election day, Starmer says Labour will then inherit huge economic problems after 14 years of Conservative mismanagement, making the need for well-thought-through policies even greater. “It is going to be a real mess,” he says. Optimism surrounding Starmer and Labour will be further fuelled by new modelling seen by the Observer that shows the party could win a massive 190-seat majority, with the Tories losing every “red wall” seat secured in 2019. The constituency-level model, commissioned by the 38 Degrees campaign group and based on a large-scale poll of 11,000 voters by Survation, puts Labour on course to win 420 seats (two more than Tony Blair in 1997), the Tories 149 and the Liberal Democrats 23. Separately, the latest Opinium poll for this newspaper shows the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has received no poll bounce from his party’s conference in Manchester, where he attempted to paint the Tories as the party of “change”, despite having spent the past 13 years in government. Labour’s lead is up three points to 13 (43%) compared with a week ago, while the Conservatives are unchanged on 29%, with the Lib Dems down 1 point on 11%, and the Greens and Reform UK both down 1 point on 6%. Meanwhile, 52% of people now expect Labour to be the largest party after an election, against just 26% who think the Conservatives will be. At the conference, Labour will make announcements for each of Starmer’s five policy missions on delivering economic growth, clean energy, a reformed NHS, safer streets and breaking down barriers to opportunity. With the Tories determined to cause Starmer and Labour discomfort on gender and wider cultural issues, Starmer says – without any hesitantion – that he agreed with Sunak when the prime minister said in his conference speech last week: “A man is a man and a woman is a woman.” Asked if he shared that opinion, Starmer responded: “Yes, of course. You know, a woman is a female adult.” He then added that in “tens of thousands of conversations” that team Labour have had on doorsteps, no one had raised the issue.Referring to Labour’s byelection win in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, described by the party’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, as “seismic”, Starmer was more reserved: “This result tells us that voters in Scotland want change and now see the Labour party as the party of change. We are humble in victory, but the results gives us a very strong foundation to win other constituencies in Scotland.” • This article was amended on 8 October 2023. An earlier version said Keir Starmer “took over [the Labour leadership] from Jeremy Corbyn in 2019”. Though Corbyn resigned that year, Starmer was not elected to the post until 2020.