Are water and housing current issues? Not according to Labour’s Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC).
Delegates have started arriving in Liverpool today for conference, but before they had even left home one key decision had already been made – not to allow a conference vote on either issue.
Whist Labour Annual Conference starts tomorrow, the Labour Women’s Conference is taking place today. This is for the first time since 2024, as the Labour NEC panicked last year about the Supreme Court’s decision that ‘women’ must be interpreted as people assigned female at birth. They cancelled the conference outright. This year the conference is taking place but excluding trans women, which also means that most of Labour’s affiliated unions have refused to send delegates. Labour Unions put out a statement of trans solidarity timed to coincide with conference:
JOINT STATEMENT FROM NATIONAL TULO
SOLIDARITY WITH THE TRANS AND NON-BINARY COMMUNITY
Labour’s 11 affiliated trade unions stand in total solidarity with the trans and non-binary community. Trans rights are human rights, and trans rights are workers’ rights. We in the trade union movement will do all we can to stand up for our trans members and all our trans siblings, to protect them from persecution, harassment and attack. The government must act now to protect all trans people, to make sure their rights are protected, expanded and upheld in our workplaces and communities.
On the conference fringe today, the key event is the CLPD pre-conference rally, at the Quaker Meeting House at 6:30. There is also a Justice for Palestine rally in the same venue at 3:30 (The Friends of Standing Together meeting on the same topic on Tuesday – 6pm at ‘The Liverpool’ pub – will be an important one too, with a focus on the Jewish-Arab anti-occupation movement in Israel itself, including practical solidarity protecting Palestinians on the West Bank).
Tomorrow morning LLI will be distributing our conference bulletin as delegates arrive – in particular urging delegates to support challenges to those CAC decisions to rule out CLP motions on Council Housing and on Public Ownership of Water. Conference votes and decisions on both topics are vital to adding some substance to Burnham’s hints of the need for change, but CLPs that have submitted motions on these topics have been told their motions are ruled out, told they do “not relate to a new issue not substantially covered in the NPF report”. The Labour Campaign for Council Housing (who originated the council housing motion), and Mainstream (who originated the water motion) have both raised protest in advance of conference.
CLPs were given till 6pm last Thursday to appeal by email – which several did, without success – but should still raise the issue on conference floor when the Conference Arrangements Committee reports in the first session of conference.
Anyone who reads NPF report will be able to see for themself that the proposals in these two motions are not addressed at all in that report. This is the same thing, once again, of using the NPF to stop democratic debate, and undermine CLP members’ rights in the party. This is, of course, exactly the purpose the NPF was set up for in the first place, and why it must be abolished as part of rebuilding a democratic conference. Meanwhile, as the NPF is from this year elected at conference, we urge delegates to vote for NPF candidates committed to transparency and a more democratic approach, such as those listed at https://futureweneed.com and https://www.mainstreamlabour.org/2026-nec-and-npf-elections (note NPF candidates are at the bottom of the page on both lists).
