This article consists of News and thoughts from the Tuesday of Labour conference 2025.

On Tuesday 30/9/25, the Unison motion on Social Care, which includes (mild) push-back against the government’s plans limit migrant rights, was passed. Aside from that (which the leadership did not venture to put up speakers against) there was little controversy in the hall, but as in previous years, a fairly lively range of Tuesday fringe meetings, including one for the Lairds 37 and another for the Labour Party Northern Ireland.

Despite the lack of controversy, an evidently overwrought official conference team excluded three journalists, amidst of course a blaze of damaging publicity.

Deputy leader candidate Lucy Powell has spoken, mildly but unmistakably, against the EHRC’s likely “guidance” to restrict trans right. Oddly, this statement was reported in the media on Wednesday as having been made at a fringe meeting on Monday, but no source says which fringe meeting, and the statement seemed to be unknown in the conference on Tuesday.

The Guardian on 30 Sep reported that Reeves will lift the 2-child benefit cap in the November budget, despite the leadership manoeuvring to avoid a debate on the cap at conference.

The Socialist Campaign Group fringe drew over 100 to listen to a string of MPs and union leaders Mick Whelan and Fran Heathcote. Nadia Whittome MP specifically mentioned trans rights in her speech. Most other speeches were general calls for Labour to be more left-wing.

The joint CLPD-Momentum meeting the same evening started late because of time-overlap with the SCG meeting, but drew maybe 60, modest by historical standards but better than last year. Brian Leishman, unusually for a left Labour MP these days, called for the left to organise on a class basis, with those who create new wealth agaisnt those who hold wealth. The theme was largely argument for activists to stick to it in hard times and aim for more victories like the forced u-turn over disability benefit cuts.

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, again the same evening, drew 30 or so. Dave Barter from LLI was among the speakers.

Despite the weather being much better than at the 2022, 2023, and 2024 Labour conferences, the range of left-wing leafleters outside was thinner than previous years. The liveliest was a group of primary school children who had come to press for free school meals. There were no paper-sellers other than for Solidarity (which we are told did ok, though a bit less well than previous years) and Chartist.

A small group of far-rightists waving the Union Jack (with one flag emblazoned “Save Our Kids”) turned up. The adults with the primary school kids were able to keep the children safe from these bigots. So we’ve had more than two small far-right protests outside this conference, as well as the larger one organised by farmers (focused against Inheritance Tax changes and Digital ID), which it seems some non-farmer groups joined.

One possible factor in there being fewer conference people “circulating” outside the “security cordon” this year (despite better weather than in 2022, 2023, or 2024) is that they didn’t want to have to tackle those far-right protesters, who were often vocally agressive with those whom they identified as Labour.

Security and police presence at Labour conference has been notched up year by year. This year as last, the “security cordon” includes not only the conference centre, but the large open space outside it, and a number of big hotels near the conference centre; so it must be that many delegates spend very little time outside the “cordon”.

As we arrived on the morning of 30/9/25, the footway-bridge leading from Albert Dock towards the security cordon had a line of cops standing in the middle of the footway. (Why? The police sergeant in charge said it was orders, but made no sense to her). The cops eased off once delegates and visitors started arriving in numbers, but later we had armed police, guns ready in their hands, walking across the bridge.

Results were announced this morning for the Conference Arrangements Committee and National Constitutional Committee CLP sections ballots. They went badly. For the CAC, the lowest-placed right-winger, Alan Olive, got 144,833 votes, and the best-placed left-winger, Jean Crocker, 41,756. For the NCC, the worst-placed right-winger was Adam Langleben on 140,328, and the best-placed left-winger Rachel Garnham on 47,194.

The disability benefits and Winter Fuel Allowance U-turns evidently haven’t encouraged critical-minded members enough to avoid at least some repeat of what happened in the Blair years, when a lot of remaining Labour members disliked Blair and his policies but were too despondent to bother about getting themselves delegated to conference, so that (contrary to all previous patterns) conference delegates became typically more deferential and right-wing than average not-very-active members.

Perhaps further despondency generated by the rise of Reform, and the evident difficulty of shifting Labour to fight back rather than seek to appease, is another factor. Certainly some not-very-left members are deeply dissatisfied with Starmer over issues like benefit cuts, but despondent about alternatives.

Part of the picture, again, may be the low level of trade-union action now and the meagre results of the small strike wave of 2022-3. In an interview with Labour List today, Neil Kinnock says: “There would have been absolutely no point in me going after Militant in 1984 because we were in the middle of a strike” (the 1984-5 miners’ strike). He thinks, rightly, that move to purge the left at that time of high worker mobilisation would have been defeated. Only the defeat of the strike – and, as Kinnock makes clear, the timidity and ineptitude of the Militant leaders of Liverpool council, who ended by dispatching redundancy notices to their workers as a “tactic” in place of confronting the Tory government – allowed Kinnock to marginalise the left.

Whether the new soft-soft-left initiative – Mainstream Labour, organised by Andy Burnham with Open Labour and Compass – can make openings to turn this round a bit over the next year, we don’t know. Mainstream has done very little at this conference beyond running a social, which was well-attended and heard feisty speeches, but signalled no definite organising plans.

A number of defeats for the leadership at this conference show that there is surely potential for reviving the left. But for now, anyway, it looks like uphill work.