Labour turned its fire on Reform on the first day of its annual conference – branding the party’s policies “racist” and warning Nigel Farage as prime minister would “create a cultural wasteland” in Britain.
Sir Keir Starmer accused Mr Farage of peddling an “immoral” policy after the Reform UK leader pledged to scrap settled status for all non-EU migrants, a move which would threaten with deportation those who have been granted indefinite leave to remain.
In an explosive interview with the BBC as the Labour event got underway in Liverpool, the prime minister – whose party trails Reform in the polls – said the policy to abolish indefinite leave to remain “needs to be called out for what it is”, adding: “I do think that it is a racist policy. I do think it is immoral.”
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy doubled down on Sir Keir’s remarks, warning Reform is “trying to redefine what it means to be British in a narrow way” and would destroy Britain’s cultural landscape.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, she claimed Mr Farage’s assaults on so-called “woke” culture, plans to use an Elon Musk-style Doge to slash spending, and narrow, nationalistic view of what it means to be British would threaten arts and culture up and down the country.
Agreeing with Sir Keir’s description of the policy, she raised the example of her father, the Indian academic Dipak Nandy, who came to the UK as an immigrant and helped a Labour government draft the Race Relations Act.
The strongly worded interventions came as Labour started a four-day campaign to respond to the threat of a Reform government with a series of announcements, designed to show the party is getting tough on major issues such as immigration, and to show that an embattled Sir Keir still has a plan.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to unveil a crackdown on the right of migrants who are waiting for the permanent right to remain to claim benefits, while the technology secretary Liz Kendall wants to bring better diversity of race and gender into the tech sector.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce a jobs guarantee for young people, in a bid to drive down unemployment.
Speaking to The Independent at the Liverpool Philharmonic close to the conference, Ms Nandy warned the cultural landscape of the UK would be at risk if Mr Farage won power.
She said: “I think that Reform has the potential to turn this country into a cultural wasteland, building on the legacy of the Tories, where they erase culture and creativity from classrooms and communities.
“What you see in Reform is a group of people who are attacking and running down some of the things in this country that we are best at, that we’re brilliant at, that we’re proud of, and that helps to shape and define what it means to be British.
“Reform sees the BBC, but also arts, culture, creativity, museums, galleries … all of these things have become weapons in their culture war.”
She said the party was trying to “break apart” Britain. “These are the shared spaces where we come together as a nation and we celebrate who we are in all of our complexity and diversity.
“They’re trying to turn these things into weapons that break us apart.”
Ms Nandy has insisted culture is not an add-on for the UK but essential for “the things that matter” – social wellbeing, education, health and attracting investment.
Sir Keir has ramped up his attacks on Reform in recent days. Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, he said Mr Farage’s proposals would “rip this country apart”.
“It is one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here. I’m up for that,” he said. “It is a completely different thing to say we are going to reach into people who are lawfully here and start removing them. They are our neighbours. They’re people who work in our economy. They are part of who we are. It will rip this country apart.”
He also appealed for unity, saying the UK has not faced “a proposition like Reform before” and that people needed to fight for “the soul of this country”.
In what may be seen as a rebuke to Andy Burnham – the Greater Manchester mayor who is believed to be Sir Keir’s most likely challenger for Labour leader – the PM added: “There is a fight that we’re all in together, every single member of our party and our movement, actually everyone who cares about what this country is, whether they vote Labour or otherwise.
“It’s the fight of our lives for who we are as a country, and we need to be in that fight, united, not navel-gazing.”
Ms Nandy, who is close to Mr Burnham and represents Wigan, also insisted the party needs to be united to take on the fight with Reform and “must stick with Keir”.
She was his rival in the leadership contest in 2020, but noted “we were competitors in a contest, not opponents”.
She said her advice to the party was to stick to the path because “nothing is easy”, whether it was equal pay, the minimum wage, race relations or other big reforms Labour has achieved in its history.
But with ID cards threatening to split the party and more than 1.5 million people signing a petition against the plan, she insisted it is one of the solutions the party needs to offer that will win Reform-inclined voters over.
She described going to talk to the audience after being on the panel of the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night.
“One of the Reform voters from the last general election said to me, ‘although I didn’t agree with everything that you were saying, I really felt you were trying to solve the problems, unlike other people on that panel’.
“That’s why we’re announcing things like digital ID, the returns agreement with France, the process speeding up of the processing of asylum claims. The reason that we’re doing all of these things, it’s not just to show people that we’re serious about dealing with these things, but actually to start making a difference to them.”
In her speech on Monday, Ms Nandy will announce a rollout of cultural activity in the UK, including Every Child Can, a scheme based on work the Liverpool Philharmonic has done for 16 years that brings the opportunity to learn musical instruments to schools. There will be a new “Town of Culture” competition and £25m for the northwest region to invest in culture.
Ms Nandy, who was herself inspired as a child by having the world-famous Halle orchestra nearby, described meeting one young person who had come through the philharmonic scheme who said learning an instrument had given him “freedom”.
She said: “I want every child to have those opportunities, not just a privileged few.”
