Haigh pledges action on ships and insourcing

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LOUISE HAIGH announced that British shipyards would build a new marine research vessel and pledged a major insourcing of Whitehall services at Labour conference today.

Ms Haigh, effectively number two in the government, sought to banish memories of Labour’s two faltering years in office by showing that a “government of guts” was now getting to grip with things.

Labour was at its best when “we are brave and we are bold,” she told delegates.

“We’re putting the guts back into governing and we’re putting the public back in control.”

She said the government would not watch British shipbuilding continue to decline.  

“We will commission a new state-of-the-art marine research vessel designed to meet the new challenges we face,” she said, adding that it would be built in a British shipyard.

And she was applauded when she said: “When existing contracts end, in 18 months’ time, we will begin bringing more than a thousand outsourced cleaning, catering and security jobs across Whitehall back in-house.

Lucy Powell, Mr Burnham’s party deputy, also presented a government moving on from the blighted era of Sir Keir Starmer, whose name went entirely unmentioned on the conference floor.

Drawing a contrast between then and now, Ms Powell said: “We’re in a big battle of ideas, a battle of values, a battle for attention. 

“It’s no good any more just diligently getting on with the job. We have to show purpose underpinned by values.”

Promising to make and win “the big arguments,” she urged the party to “seize this opportunity we have with this second hearing, to really punch home that Labour story.”

Ms Powell and party chair Bridget Phillipson competed to invoke the conference slogan “hope again” most passionately and frequently.

Ms Phillipson offered “hope not fear” before Ms Powell, who is also education secretary, went one higher, pledging “hope and optimism,” and stressing that her “department for hope, this government of hope, will put children’s hopes at the very heart of everything we do.”

In bracing imagery, the deputy leader also called Reform boss Nigel Farage “a modern-day love child of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher.”

Their only speaker somewhat off-message was outgoing general secretary Hollie Ridley, an appointee of Sir Keir’s factional strategy chief Morgan McSweeney.

She outlined the McSweeney approach to tackling Reform: agree with them. “That’s our Reform strategy. Showing people that we understand their concerns. That we share them,” she told conference.

Ms Ridley is being replaced by Co-operative Party general secretary Joe Fortune.