Politics latest: Reform UK waging ‘all out war on future generations’, says Miliband | Politics News

As we sat down to begin our annual conference interview shortly after the prime minister had delivered his speech to party members, I asked Sir Keir Starmer how he was feeling? “Good,” he said, “it was a speech I needed to give”.

He was right to feel buoyed. After 15 months of being battered about in government, with ever-worsening polls, open challenges to his leadership and endless private grumbling from within his own government, the PM answered his critics in a speech that showed both his emotion and intent as he pitted his vision of Britain against that of Nigel Farage.

It was a dividing line that united his party behind him as he set up the battle at the next election between Labour and Reform, between, in his words, “decency or division, renewal or decline”.

He also marched directly into societal wars with a rallying cry that was met with rapturous applause in the hall as he savaged racists who graffitied a Chinese takeaway and criticised people seeking to sow “fear and discord across our country”.

This was a PM that found his voice and identified his enemy in Farage as he sharpened his attacks and asked the public to pick a side.

In our interview, he continued the argument, describing Farage’s plan to deport people who currently have indefinite leave to remain in the UK as “racist”.

“I think that’s a very dangerous place for us to go as a country, and it goes against everything that I believe in,” he told me.

But Starmer was keen to play the ball, not the man, as he told me he didn’t think Farage was a racist and stressed that he didn’t think Reform voters were racist either.