Starmer’s Labour rule changes to be put to party’s conference after bruising row

Published

3 years ago

September 25, 2021

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Sir Keir Starmer’s watered-down proposals for changing Labour’s rulebook will be put to the party’s conference in Brighton following a bruising internal row.

The Labour leader has been forced into retreat, amid opposition from trade unions and the party’s left wing, in his bid to alter the rules on how his future successors are elected.

Sir Keir abandoned an effort to scrap the “one member, one vote” system that saw Jeremy Corbyn twice elected to the Labour leadership.

But he has managed to put a revised shake-up of Labour’s rules to a vote at the Brighton conference, with a vote expected on Sunday.

Critics have accused Sir Keir of an attempt to shut out Labour’s membership and its left wing from future leadership elections, with allies of Mr Corbyn urging conference attendees to reject even the leader’s watered-down plans.

But Sir Keir said, if approved, his plans would put Labour “in a better position to win the next general election”.

The row threatens to continue to overshadow the beginning of Labour’s gathering in Brighton.

Sir Keir’s first in-person conference as party leader has been billed as hugely important to his hopes of shaking off critics and offering evidence that he can lead them to victory at the next general election.

A focus has also once again been thrust on Sir Keir’s relationship with his deputy, Angela Rayner, after she used an eve of conference newspaper interview to confirm she would be willing to stand as a leadership candidate in the future.

But there were signs that Sir Keir should be confident of asserting his authority at the Brighton conference by having his rules shake-up approved on Sunday.

Labour’s general secretary David Evans challenged his critics by calling a vote on his own position on Saturday, which he subsequently won by 59.05% to 40.95% to suggest Sir Keir and his allies maintain the majority support of delegates in Brighton.

This was despite Mr Evans facing heckles of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn!” as he asked members why they joined the party in his conference address.

Away from the internal party tensions at Brighton, Sir Keir and Labour shadow ministers will seek to use Sunday to focus on education and climate policies.

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In an interview with the Sunday Mirror, Sir Keir reiterated Labour’s pledge – which was also made in the party’s 2019 election manifesto – to end the charitable tax status of private schools in England.

It is calculated this could raise as much as £1.7bn in extra VAT and business rates revenues, which Labour would intend to use to boost funding for state school pupils.

“Labour wants every parent to be able to send their child to a great state school,” Sir Keir said.

“But improving them to benefit everyone costs money. That’s why we can’t justify continued charitable status for private schools.”

Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow business secretary Ed Miliband will use a conference speech on Sunday to announce that Labour would invest up to £3bn over the coming decade to make the steel industry greener.

Calling on Labour to become the “party of climate and economic justice”, Mr Miliband is expected to say: “As we respond to the climate crisis with all the transformation that entails, we have a fateful choice to make: We can try and put a green coat of paint on an unfair, unequal, unjust Britain.

“Or we can make a different choice. For a green Britain where there is an irreversible shift of income, power and wealth to working people.”

Politics

Bitfinex database breach ‘seems fake,’ says CTO

Published

1 hour ago

May 5, 2024

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<div>Bitfinex database breach 'seems fake,' says CTO</div>

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino explained that if the hacking group was telling the truth, they would have asked for a ransom, but he “couldn’t find any request.”

Politics

Labour taking ‘Tory crown jewel’ feels like a momentum shift

Published

4 hours ago

May 5, 2024

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Labour taking 'Tory crown jewel' feels like a momentum shift

It was a wafer-thin victory, but a huge win.

The symbolism of Labour taking the West Midlands mayor, a jewel in the Tory crown, could be felt in the room as Labour activists gathered in Birmingham to celebrate the win with their new mayor Richard Parker and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

There are moments on election journeys when the momentum shifts – and this win felt like one of them.

“We humbly asked [the voters] to put their trust and confidence in a changed Labour Party and they did. And that is a significant piece of political history that we’ve made here today,” said Sir Keir at his victory rally.

“So the message out of these elections, the last now the last stop before we go into that general election, is that the country wants change.

“I hope the prime minister is listening and gives the opportunity to the country to vote as a whole in a general election as soon as possible.”

This win gave them the boost that was missing when they won the Blackpool South by-election on a massive 26-point swing, but then failed to pick up the hundreds of council seats they were chasing.

This win, on just 1,508 votes or 0.25 per cent of the vote, was a body blow for a Conservative party that believed they could just about cling on. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is now the last Tory standing.

For Labour, then a moment to bookmark.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Hartlepool by-election win in 2021 was a low point for Sir Keir – he told me this week that he considered resigning over the loss because he thought it showed he was the barrier to Labour’s recovery – this too will feel devastating not just for Andy Street but for the PM too.

Labour has beaten him in a street fight. He’s bloodied with Sir Keir now emboldened.

“This was the one result we really needed,” said one senior Labour figure. “It’s been our top focus for the past week and symbolically a very important win.”

And Labour needed the boost, because, as Professor Michael Thrasher pointed out in his Sky News’ national vote share projection calculated from the local election results, Sir Keir was not picking up the sort of vote share that Tony Blair was winning in the run-up to the 1997 Labour landslide.

His latest calculation of a 35% vote share for Labour and 26% for the Tories, put Sir Keir winning a general election but short of a majority.

What the West Midlands mayoral win did for Sir Keir was to give him a clear narrative that he is coming for the Tories and will do what he needs to take them down.

It raises inevitable questions about what is next for Rishi Sunak. The prime minister had nowhere to go today, not one win to celebrate. The worst performance in council elections in 40 years, was already pretty much as bad as it gets before the loss of Andy Street. The former Conservative mayor was magnanimous towards the prime minister, saying the loss was his alone.

But colleagues will not be so generous. One former cabinet minister said this loss was “devastating”. “We’re done and there’s no appetite to move against him,” said the senior MP. Many Tories tell me they are now resigned to defeat and believe Mr Sunak and his team needed to own it, rather than the rest of the party.

The coming days might be bumpy, the mood will be stony. But Tories tell me not much will actually change for them.

For Sir Keir, he now needs to sell not the changed Labour Party, but his vision for changing the country. The West Mids mayor’s win was dazzling, but it could have so easily gone the other way. And as Mr Sunak fights to survive, Labour still has to fight hard to win.