Starmer tells unions they’ve to alter like Labour Party, however did they hear?

Keir Starmer addressed the 156th annual TUC Congress where delegates from the labour union converge on the Brighton conference centre every year. Also known as the “workers’ parliament’, this week the Labour Party has rolled out its New Deal for Working People, and delegates have also celebrated finally seeing the back of the Tories…

IF he really wants to be unpopular, Sir Keir Starmer came to the wrong place. The first Labour Prime Minister to address the Trades Union Congress for 15 years was always assured of a warm reception.

The only question was whether he would get a hero’s welcome or merely rhapsodic applause, from a labour movement drunk with relief that the Tories are gone. It was more of the latter, 15 times during his half-hour speech at my count, and two standing ovations, with only a couple of cat-calls and no walk-outs.

But I wonder if the delegates understood, or even wanted to hear, his underlying message: the unions have to change as much as the Labour Party did in pursuit of power.

It was clear enough in his assertion that partnership in power means compromise, in return for the New Deal for working people pledged in the manifesto.

“This is not the 1980s,” he stressed in tones as thundering as he ever gets. “And not just on pay, but everything.”

Sir Keir turned a deaf ear to union pleas for a U-turn over the withdrawal of old folks’ winter fuel allowance. “I make no apology for the decisions we have had to make.”

There were even faux-Churchillian tones of blood-brotherhood, sweat and tears in his warning: “I have to level with you… it will be hard.”

I regularly watched this event with Mirror readers in the Fiddler’s Elbow here in Brighton. This time, from the largely-empty visitors’ gallery. Atmosphere is important. It felt like his audience was just glad he was there, marking a break with 14 years of misery.

Some union leaders gave the speech a lukewarm welcome, insisting that “change means change” – from government. That wasn’t quite what he was saying.