“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urgent task is the cultural wildfire that needs extinguishing before it takes hold.

The rise of anti-migration neofascism is more threatening than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Shock tactics by a few hundred people in black shirts and balaclavas are designed to invade the national consciousness, their noxious hate bleeding into the mainstream – and they do.

Keir Starmer began well, hosing down the summer 2024 rioters with rapid arrests. But since then, the truth is that Labour has looked ambivalent in challenging aggressive St George’s flag-raisers, and the asylum hotel protesters who claim to be “protecting” the country whose values they are trashing. At the same time, the self-proclaimed patriots of GB News, the Mail, the Telegraph and Elon Musk’s X pump out daily hate of the country. Burnham’s task is to face them down with top-level leadership, and the sheer force of his positivity.

It won’t be easy. Nick Lowles, the founder of the advocacy group Hope Not Hate, says the cordon sanitaire that once defended democratic politics from the far right and ethno-nationalist thuggery is gone. He has patrolled that line all his working life, and now he’s alarmed about the feeble responses from mainstream politicians to the swelling ranks of racist demagogues........

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