I want to speak with you openly, just as I would if we were sitting down over a coffee. As you read this, I hope you’ll remember that someone may try to sell you a feeling and call it hope. Please don’t buy it.

Last week the Labour conference was in Liverpool. Everywhere you looked they had three words up. Hope Again. On the walls. On the screens. On the mugs. Andy Burnham stood up, his first big conference speech as Prime Minister, and he talked about his dad, Roy, and about a National Care Service. He talked about the government taking more hold of water, energy and housing. He talked about councils stepping in on empty homes, and about getting closer to Europe again. The hall clapped. They clapped a lot. Clapping is easy. Hope is not.

Now I have been around long enough to know when a crowd is being warmed up. A nice story about your family will do it. People think, he is a good man, so the plan must be good. That is not how it works. A man can be kind at the breakfast table and still be wrong about the country. Warmth is not a policy. And a policy is not a Saviour. Write that down if you need to.

Years ago I remember attending the meetings Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle held at the Odyssey Arena in Belfast (I’ll post the video at the bottom). Great big outreach nights. The word on the posters was Hope. People came in off the street, some of them with nothing much going on in their lives, and what they heard was not a party trying to restart itself. What they heard was Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. That is a different hope. It does not need a conference to hold it up. It does not come down when the banners come down.

Peter wrote to people who were under pressure. He said, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3, NKJV). Born again. A living hope. Not a mood in a hall. If you are born again, you have already been given the only hope that lasts. Nobody in Liverpool can add to that, and nobody in Liverpool can take it away.

Jeremiah saw this coming a long time before any of us. He said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord’” (Jeremiah 17:5, NKJV). You trust a man, you lean on a man, you make a man your strength, and your heart has already stepped away from the Lord. That is the curse. It does not always look like a curse on the night. It looks like applause. It looks like a slogan. Then the years show it up.

The very next breath in Jeremiah is the other side. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:7, NKJV). Same chapter. Two men. One leaning on people. One leaning on God. You get to choose which one you are. I would rather you choose young, before the slogans get a hold of you.

So what did they actually offer, once you take the Andy Burnham family story off the top? Councils are to get stronger powers over homes left empty. The wait drops from two years to six months. There is a clearer path to take bad rented houses into public hands. Water companies lose the old bar on the government owning them. Energy is pulled nearer the state. From 2030 the pension triple lock is to be trimmed, so the care plan can be paid for. These are not small tidies. This is the old socialist reach. The things you live by move toward the ruler, and the person who owns them has less say.

The Bible has a story about that. Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard. He wanted it for a garden of herbs, near the palace. Sounds reasonable, does it not? A bit of ground doing nothing, and the king could use it. Naboth said, “The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you” (1 Kings 21:3, NKJV). Empty homes are a real grief. I am not pretending they are not. Children need somewhere to sleep. But taking another man’s inheritance is still taking. A good reason does not make a wrong thing right. You learn that young, or you learn it late.

There is a harder thing than housing, and I am not going to dress it up. This week Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had passed Britain intelligence that an Iranian-sponsored attack was coming, and that pretty much the next day London put sanctions on Israel. He said the collapse in front of an Islamist-Marxist alliance is dangerous for the West. Andy Burnham has said there are strong indications Iran played a part in what happened at RAF Fairford. Five men were arrested near that base on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences, then bailed. Fairford is a base American aircraft have used. A government gets a warning, and then spends its strength on the nation that warned it. That is not wisdom. Solomon said, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when a wicked man rules, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2, NKJV). Groaning is what you hear when the people in charge will not do the plain job of keeping the people safe.

You will hear the phrase Islamist-Marxist alliance, or red-green alliance, and you need to know what it means, because people will tell you it is a scare story. It is not a club with a card. Red is the hard left, the Marxist way of seeing the world. Green is political Islam, the push to run public life by Islamic law. I am not talking about the Muslim man who has a corner shop who wants to get on with his day. I am talking about an ideology. The two sides do not believe the same things. One wants the party over your private life. The other wants sharia. They walk together because they share an enemy. The West. America. Israel. The old free way of living.

It has happened before. In Iran in 1979 the left walked with the Islamists to bring down the Shah. A lot of clever people in the West cheered. Then the clerics got the state, and they jailed and killed the leftists who had helped them. The bargain is old. Since 7 October 2023 you have seen the banners side by side in our own streets. They do not have to love each other. Shared hate is enough for a march. Psalm 2 saw it. “Why do the nations rage, and the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed” (Psalm 2:1-2, NKJV). Then it says, “He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision” (Psalm 2:4, NKJV). They plot. He laughs. Do not forget which one is on the throne.

So be wary of a party that will not name this. Be wary of a government that brings in, in large numbers, people shaped by an ideology that does not want the peace of this land, and then tells you that worrying about it is the sin. Islamist ideology is dangerous. It has said so in its own books. It has shown so in its own deeds. That is not the same sentence as “every Muslim is out to hurt you.” Some are not. Some have run from the very thing I am describing. Love your neighbour. Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31, NKJV). He never said switch your eyes off. Love the person. Do not love the lie. Test the spirit. If somebody will not let you test it, that tells you something too.

And do not let the news do your thinking. The BBC joined two bits of a Donald Trump speech, more than fifty minutes apart, and made it sound like one call to violence. They later said the edit was an error of judgement. Two senior people resigned. An edit is still an edit. The first voice you hear often sounds finished. Solomon said, “The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbour comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17, NKJV). Hear a thing. Then turn it over. That goes for GB News and Talk TV and the rest of them as well. I am glad when somebody says what the BBC will not say. I am not handing them the keys of the house. One media studio is not the whole witness.

Here is what I want you to do. Do not get your hope from Liverpool. Do not get your fear from a headline. Pray for the people in authority, the way Paul told Timothy, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life (1 Timothy 2:1-2, NKJV). Folks, pay attention, and name things plainly. Do not let lies reshape what you have witnessed. If you want to remember or know what hope looked like when it was preached openly, watch Whitewell at the Odyssey, it not a political slogan on a wall or on a mug. Our living hope is the resurrection; everything else is fleeting.

Our living hope is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He died for your sins, and He rose again. He is coming again, too. Everything else is temporary and will fade. The conference may one day be forgotten, but the Lord will never be. You can trust Him—that is the hope that holds firm even when the banners come down.