{"id":785594,"date":"2026-09-28T19:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785594\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T19:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:42:12","slug":"reality-pays-a-visit-to-the-labour-party-conference-but-its-the-hope-again-that-kills-you-john-crace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785594\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality pays a visit to the Labour party conference, but it\u2019s the \u2018Hope Again\u2019 that kills you | John Crace"},"content":{"rendered":"

It could be just me, but I\u2019m beginning to find that all this \u201chope\u201d stuff is getting me down. Everywhere you go at the Labour<\/a> party conference, you are being urged to \u201cHope Again\u201d. It\u2019s on the screens in the main hall and on banners in the exhibition area. It\u2019s on T-shirts, balloons and coffee mugs. It\u2019s all just a bit much. Overkill. You now bump into Labour MPs who are visibly collapsing under the strain of having to walk around with an optimistic perma-grin. And the conference is only into its second day. Come Wednesday they will all be on intravenous Valium.<\/p>\n

What does \u201cHope Again\u201d even mean? Is it an instruction? Have we all been hoping in a highly unsatisfactory way so far? Are we being sent back to hope school to learn how to be more upbeat? In which case, I rather think these remedial classes in hoping will be wasted on me. I\u2019ve always been a bit miserable. It feels a bit like someone going round and telling you \u201cSmile. It may never happen.\u201d Or to \u201cKeep calm and carry on.\u201d There are also distinct echoes of Samuel Beckett: Fail again. Fail better. Only in Liverpool it\u2019s: Hope again. Hope better.<\/p>\n

You also can\u2019t help feeling that all this talk of hope is wasted on John Healey<\/a>. He is a man with a naturally low-energy vibe. Someone in touch with the darker, more depressing side of his own personality. A man after my own heart.<\/p>\n

As someone with the touch of Harry Potter\u2019s Dementors, ready to suck the joy out of any occasion, he knows that anything that can go wrong almost certainly will go wrong. Anything good is merely a transitory, illusory state. Take Healey to the football and he will show you a bad time. His home team of Rotherham might go 2-0 up in the 88th minute and John will assure you they\u2019ve peaked too soon \u2013 they are nailed on to lose 3-2. I speak from experience. I\u2019ve done it myself. John, meet John.<\/p>\n

Luckily for me, no one is expecting me to be a ray of sunshine. That\u2019s way above my pay grade. Unfortunately for Healey, optimism was precisely what he was required to deliver in his first speech as chancellor to a nearly full Labour conference hall. To be the fiscal embodiment of \u201cHope Again\u201d. To give us all a reason to live just a little longer.<\/p>\n

The prime minister, Andy Burnham, raises John Healey\u2019s fist aloft after the chancellor\u2019s conference speech. Photograph: Zeynep Demir Aslim\/ZUMA Press Wire\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Only he just couldn\u2019t do it. He was never going to be able to do it. When John sees a \u201cHope Again\u201d banner, what he reads is \u201cDespair Again\u201d. Come the end of his half hour on stage, he had managed to convert most of the audience to his way of thinking. At lunchtime, the queues for the assisted dying helpline tailed back into the city centre.<\/p>\n

Not that Healey didn\u2019t give it his best shot. He dropped the word hope into almost every sentence \u2013 or his minders had dropped it in for him \u2013 and every time, the lights seemed to get a bit dimmer. It was a battle of hope against hope. People had come willing him to succeed. To pull off one of the most astonishing personality transplants of the year.<\/p>\n

Within minutes, though, a pall of depression hung over the hall. We were all just waiting for it to end. Hardly anyone could be bothered to even clap. The only standing ovation came for the reintroduction of the \u00a315m Union Learning Fund. To give this some perspective, \u00a315m is just a bit more than what the London townhouse of the Tory shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, is worth. Not that it\u2019s a bad idea. It\u2019s just not going to reboot the economy.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s hard to blame Healey. Maybe another more dynamic and charismatic chancellor could have shifted the mood in the hall with feelgood vibes. But as well as being a bit miserable, Healey is also a realist. He knows things are tough and likely to get tougher. No amount of energy price caps and \u00a32 bus fares are going to make a major dent in a cost of living which is only heading in one direction. Nor is it his fault. He is not responsible for austerity, Brexit, the war in Iran and the cost of borrowing. But he is the current fall guy. The chancellor tasked with fixing the unfixable.<\/p>\n

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So what we got instead was a touch of nostalgia. A deep dive into the stories Labour has written about its achievements. Times when hope was very much alive. Just not now, no matter how often Healey prefixed his sentences with the H-word. Inevitably, though, the truth came out. How he wished he was chancellor back in the late 90s when the economy was on track and there was money to spare. Instead, we were where we were. You can tell people that the UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7, but it counts for little if everyone still feels broke and broken.<\/p>\n

There was talk of growth. Of reindustrialisation. But mostly of the need for fiscal discipline. Which is code for saying that the budget in four weeks\u2019 time is unlikely to be a bundle of fun for anyone. Look forward to some tax rises and welfare cuts. There was also a commitment to spend \u00a36m on shipyards to build the UK\u2019s nuclear submarines. Money that had already been promised. Always the best money for a government to spend. Old money repurposed as new.<\/p>\n

Come the end, no one could have been in any doubt about the scale of the challenge ahead. Despite trying to be someone else, Healey had not been able to be anything but himself. And why not? It\u2019s not as if there are any easy answers. Nor do the Tories and Reform have any solutions. They are just chancers pedalling pipe dreams. But most of the Liverpool audience hadn\u2019t come for this. They had been told to come for hope and they wanted half an hour off to enjoy themselves. Instead they had been confronted with cold reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It could be just me, but I\u2019m beginning to find that all this \u201chope\u201d stuff is getting me…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-785594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}