In The Conservative Woman, Sean Walsh wonders why his home city of Liverpool was chosen to be the site of a modern political crime-against-humanity in the form of a Two-Tier Keir speech to the Labour faithful:

LIVERPOOL happens to be my city of birth, and my family is generational CIA (Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic). I get back there when I can, usually for funerals family reunions. I can confirm that if you don’t mention Thatcher, the Sun, any Manchester band, the Wirral, or ask a native to pronounce the word “chicken”, you will be made to feel more than welcome as a visitor there. Scousers are rightly celebrated for a quick, if chippy, wit and unique sense of humour. Not least by ourselves.

Hopefully that last quality will help the city survive this week’s invasion by activist lawyers, Islington familiars, boilerplate career MPs, lanyard fetishists, lobbyists, and the process algorithm who was slush-funded to the Labour leadership.

For years Liverpool dodged hosting the Labour conference and was probably resentful at the snub. Now its rejuvenated docklands are the go-to venue for this annual festival of enforced fun/confected joyfulness. It’s probably resentful at that as well.

I’m not sure British politics has seen a speech as bad as the one the Prime Minister gave to this year’s wake gathering. And before you mention Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood”, that speech was “bad” only in the minds of those who never read it or were unable or unwilling to appreciate the deep truths Powell was advancing behind the veil of metaphor.

The Prime Minister was vindictive and politically maladroit in equal measure. Powell, a genuine member of the British working class, was a trained classicist who thought, spoke and wrote in the languages and metaphors of the ancient world. Powell’s lack of condescension and unwillingness to dumb down created room for bad faith and mischievous interpretation.

Starmer, who thinks and speaks the language of the petty bureaucrat, has no such defence. Where Powell made his predictions in poetry (which have proven correct, let’s not forget), Starmer rams home his malevolence in bullet points and crass soundbites.

I make this unhappy comparison partly to draw attention to the decades-long decline in the culture of political speechcraft, which TCW recently wrote about, and to affirm that even by the standards of today Starmer was awful.

We expect our political speeches to be unlovely now. Starmer’s went beyond that and managed to be offensive and yet boring all at once. As I said, the Prime Minister is an algorithm, and there are three things you can say about algorithms: they lack memory, have no sense of humour, and are unaware that they are, well, an algorithm.

On his Substack, Christopher Gage offers “A forward-thinking manifesto to deliver change for stakeholders”. That’s just the sort of bafflegab progressive thinkers think the general public wants to hear, apparently:

Alice in Wonderland by Oskar Kokoschka (1942)

This year’s Labour Party conference kicked off in the idiosyncratic style befitting its more excitable, green-haired cohort: confusion, contradiction, and faux contrition.

On Sunday, Sir Keir Starmer, our accidental prime minister, condemned Reform’s plan to deport migrants as “racist and immoral”. By Tuesday, it was Labour policy.

Politicians will say anything to keep suckling on the erect nipples of eternal power. And Labour politicians, despite their holier-than-thou affectations, are no different. They’ve seen the polls. Reform has led with room to spare in the last one hundred.

Labour has changed its spots. Starmer’s new Home Secretary, the combative and admirable Shabana Mahmood, is one foot on planet earth, at least.

At the conference, Mahmood warned the Guardian-reading element that they “won’t like the things I do”. She duly unveiled plans to ensure migrants “earn the right” to stay here: speak English, pay their way, and don’t expect their family to follow.

These once radioactive proposals are now common sense — two-thirds support immigration restrictions, whilst one-half wants not only the door welded shut but for many recent arrivals to be ushered politely through it. If Labour wants to win another election, they’d better listen to Wetherspoon Man over Performative Male.

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As the week spluttered on, Starmer opted in to opting out to opting in to opting out. But Labour is listening. Nigel Farage, the Wetherspoon Man high priest, must feel his pockets lightened this week. Just glance at the swathes of Labour members waving the Union Jack, faces stretched incredulously like those masks from The Purge.

One impression emerges from this blancmange of bodily fluids: Farage has won the argument. Labour loves Britain, mate. Britain, big tits, Stella Artois, and XL Bullies.

Starmer even took it to Boris Johnson, onetime prime minister and two-time shagger of the year. The epithet “Boriswave” leapt from Starmer’s tongue with pace-sticked regularity. According to the prime minister, letting in four million people in two years — the Boriswave in Twitter slang — is an affliction so terrible that to reverse it would be, erm, even worse.

To be fair, such logic is not so much witless as it is anti-sense. And anti-sense has defined the Labour Party since I was spermatozoa.

One thing is clear. The Labour party, which presides over the sputtering, worn-out appendage known as Great Britain, needs some dire advice.

Here are a few proposals, the wholesale adoption of which would solve every problem befalling broken Britain.