Reporting on some reactions to the 11 June Spending Review and proposing action in preparation to the Labour’s 25 Conference, linking to some motions for use and offering guidance on deadlines.
Unite the union is right to comment: “After months of campaigning by Unite’s retired members and others… the government has U-turned on the winter fuel allowance”.
Sharon Graham added: “This is an important step forward… [But] instead of what seems to be a never-ending cycle of cuts, Labour needs to revisit the fiscal rules and bite the bullet on a wealth tax”.
Momentum was also right to say:
“Extra spending on the NHS and housing is a necessary step, but doesn’t go nearly as far enough…
“Already we’ve seen a U-turn on Winter Fuel Payments,which wouldn’t have happened without pressure from socialist MPs, but the Chancellor is still determined to stick to arbitrary fiscal rules…
“The Government must now go further by taxing wealth…”
The Spending Review was more a swerve than a U-turn. It shows that campaigning within the labour movement makes a difference; but also that Reeves and Starmer remain determined to keep the difference as small as possible. Probably they want to use the welcome concessions on the Winter Fuel Payment, the NHS, and free school meals as gambits to evade or reduce pressure on disabled benefit cuts, the two-child benefit cap, the restoration of funding to local government, and proper action on NHS pay, services, and capital spending.
The groundswell is there. We need to organise it
As local Labour Parties’ reactions to the disabled benefit cuts have shown, the big majority of Labour members criticise the government’s current course from the left, as do trade unionists.
Rachel Reeves has a minus-28% approval rating among Labour members, and Liz Kendall minus-22. They are by far the most unpopular cabinet members, and the next most unpopular is Keir Starmer himself. The most popular are Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband, presumably perceived as quietly signalling they would like something less right-wing
A poll of Labour councillors (not members) had them identifying Imogen Walker as the most right-wing of Labour MPs, probably because she is the partner of Morgan McSweeney. Starmer, Reeves, and Kendall were all ranked towards the right-wing end of the spectrum.
87% of members think the UK government should be more critical of Israel than it currently is (for example, by withdrawing all arms-export licences).
Labour conference
28 September to 1 October in Liverpool.
Your CLP will probably have elected its delegates by now (cut-off date 27 June). Please email us at lableftint@gmail.com to tell us about them. We will have a team in Liverpool; if you’re interested in coming as a helper, please let us know.
The rule requiring that CLP motions be “contemporary” was reintroduced in 2024 and is still in force. It means that motions have to include some substantial reference to events after a certain cut-off date. (And not just that. It’s a slippery rule. Motions can still be set aside as not “contemporary” even if they include such reference. In the past, some years huge numbers of motions have been ruled out on those grounds, other years few). But in any case we can’t even draft motions until we know the cut-off date. That is not yet clear. We are investigating.
In the meantime, ask your CLP secretary to be sure to schedule a meeting early in September, on or before 10 September, so the CLP can decide a motion and get it in by the deadline (5pm, Thursday 11 September 2025).
CLP secretaries have an online form to submit motions. You should ask them also to send in the CLP motion by email, so they have a record. At least one CLP motion just “disappeared” in 2024 (it was submitted, but the office said it hadn’t seen it, and since the submission was by online form, the CLP secretary couldn’t prove the motion had been sent).
As well as swerving, the right wing wants to clamp down
At the 20 May National Executive, the officials announced that they would no longer release Labour membership figures, even to the NEC.
They also pushed through the cancellation and postponement of Labour women’s conference, and the cancellation of other conferences called for in the rulebook after the Democracy Review of 2018 but never enacted (Black members’, LGBT, etc.) The union delegates, or certainly most of them, voting against the wholesale cancellation, but the leadership went through with it anyway.
The Starmer-Reeves leadership know that their talk of “stability” producing “growth”, and that then resolving all social problems, is empty.
There is no new growth. The substantive Labour policies which were supposed to help drive it, like setting up GB Energy, have been stalled. Trump’s tariff wars are not Reeves’s fault, but they surely make the prospects of renewed capitalist stability and growth even fainter.
As well as swerving, they are clamping dcwn. We should be on the watch-out for new anti-democratic rule changes being pushed through the NEC and then through conference at the last minute this year.
Starmer and Reeves know the clampdown will encourage yet new tranches of activists to quit Labour or dial down activity. They positively want that. They cannot get a membership which likes what they do, but they aspire to get a membership which is too beaten-down to make protests.
Don’t let them have their way. This is the time to revive our activity in the Labour Party, and to draw those who have lapsed back into action.
Texts to be adapted for motions in your CLP
Trans rights
Disabled benefit cuts
Taxing top wealth
Local government funding
Migrant and asylum rights
Labour Left Internationalists 