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News Article :-
Buoyed by the polls and brimming with confidence, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, declared on Tuesday that he was ready to assume the mantle of power. But first he had to shake the glitter off his suit jacket.
As Mr. Starmer took the stage at his party’s annual conference in Liverpool, he was interrupted by a protester who rushed up behind him and showered him with green and blue glitter. It took a full seven seconds for security guards to run onstage and tackle the man, who shouted, “Politics needs an update!”
Taken aback but not thrown off his stride, Mr. Starmer shed his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and tried to turn the spectacle into an object lesson about the transformed party he now led.
“Protest or power,” he said, referring to Labour’s lengthy stint in opposition. “That’s why we changed our party.”
After the police dragged the protester from the stage, Mr. Starmer vowed to rebuild a Britain that he said had been broken by 13 years of Conservative rule, a project that he suggested would take two terms — a decade — in government.
“What is broken can be repaired; what is ruined can be rebuilt; wounds do heal,” Mr. Starmer said to a cheering crowd. “Today we turn the page, answer the question ‘why Labour?’ with a plan” for what he grandly proclaimed a “decade of national renewal.”
He offered no new announcements, but outlined an ambitious commitment to change planning laws to help build 1.5 million new houses, add more police officers, and overhaul the ailing National Health Service. He also promised to end preferential tax treatment for residents of Britain with non-domiciled status — a longstanding Labour goal but one with particular relevance given that the wealthy wife of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Akshata Murty, claimed that status until last year.
For Mr. Starmer, 61, an intense, serious-minded but charisma-challenged former prosecutor, the conference was vivid evidence of how far he has been able to pull his party out of the wilderness since he took over as leader after Labour’s crushing defeat in the general election in 2019, its worst performance since 1935.
Once torn by divisions between its hard-left and centrist factions, Labour projected near-lockstep unity in Liverpool, with little of the backbiting or protests that used to interrupt its gatherings. Once contaminated by anti-Semitism in its far-left ranks under Mr. Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, the party this week expressed robust support for Israel in the aftermath of the bloody incursions into Israeli territory by Hamas fighters.
“I utterly condemn the senseless murder of men, women and children — including British citizens — in cold blood by the terrorists of Hamas,” Mr. Starmer said, to a standing ovation.
Except for a handful of activists waving Palestinian flags outside the conference hall, there was lit
