Morgan Jones, David Klemperer, Parth Patel and Ben Glover

What did we learn at Labour Party conference?

Oct 10, 2025

8 min read

Ten days on from the Labour Party's annual conference in Liverpool, four members of the Renewal editorial team who attended offer their reflections on the events of the week.


A stay of execution

The mood music going in to conference could not have been worse for the leadership, but by the time The Red Flag had been sung on Wednesday morning, the atmosphere was positively chipper. Starmer’s speech, specifically the bits where he said he really hates Reform actually and that we will fight them on the beaches (paraphrase) went down well with the party faithful. Much as I’m inclined to agree with the assessments that it was a stay of execution not a reprieve, the conference probably went about as well as the leadership could have hoped. If the party sticks to the messages about properly taking on the far-right, it can avoid morally and politically untenable situations like its immediate response to the Tommy Robinson march through London last month.

The B plot to Starmer’s not-so-bad-conference was a poorly played few days from prince-across-the-water Andy Burnham. Part of his appeal is that he can be projected onto; he can be a vehicle for the dissatisfactions of people with really quite disparate desires, through the miracle of Vibes. It’s hard to keep the projection going if things keep being nailed down – whether it’s the member pleasing comments about rejoining the EU (surely you’d save that for later in the day) or more notably comments about the bond market that stirred genuine unease amongst plenty of people pretty unhappy with Starmer. If he wants to be leader it feels like he should be keeping his powder drier than this.

One thing was strikingly absent from conference, however: on-the-floor wrangling and heated policy debate. In the various conferences I’ve attended in various different roles, it is of course always possible to pay more or less attention to what’s happening in the hall itself. But I’m not sure I can remember a conference with quite so few stories coming out of the actual mechanisms themselves, and even my conversations with delegates mostly revolved around how muted the whole thing was. In some ways this speaks to successful management by the party (better to have your members debating animal rights than anything that might cause you actual headaches) but it also strikes me as short-termist: the party does the need to talk to itself and hash out positions.

Morgan Jones is co-editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.


Staring into the void

Keir Starmer described this year’s Labour Party conference as having 'lots of energy, lots of vibe' [sic], but the reality was that the party felt more than ever like a professionalised husk: conference floor was an exercise in going through the motions, fringe events were mostly sparsely attended, and grassroots activists seemed outnumbered by think tankers, lobbyists, and SpAds.

If the Secure Zone was testament to the 'hollowing' of Labour as a mass membership organisation, the baying mob of anti-digital ID protestors outside was a glimpse at the other end of Peter Mair’s void – the incoherently discontented, whipped up by the online algorithmic swirl into footsoldiers for the new right-wing omni-cause; flag-waving whitecaps on the turbulent sea of alienation and societal mistrust in which Labour now finds itself adrift. 

How can Labour adapt to this new reality, of brittle institutions that no longer command loyalty, of a public that is hostile and angry, and of a politics that is increasingly mediated through screens and social media? Deliverism might be dead, but it is not clear with what Labour will replace it; across the panels and receptions of the week, two rival approaches presented themselves.

The first was bold and forthright. Decked out in MAGA-style 'Build Baby Build' caps, YIMBYs and Growth Groupers attempted to emulate IRL the frenetic political style of their X timelines. Bouncing with nervous energy, they hopped from reception to reception, promising to smash obstacles, explode regulation, and karate-chop impediments to growth – anti-declinist wheezes that sometimes felt more calibrated to the dynamics of the online attention economy than to the exigencies of the real thing. Their bet is that Labour can grab on to a zeitgeist embodied by initiatives like Looking For Growth, and win at what Keir Starmer in his speech called the politics of 'click here for a new country'.  

The second was quieter, more understated. At fringes hosted by organisations like UCL Policy Lab and the Co-operative Party, MPs, activists, and local campaigners talked about place, community, and the need to practice politics on a human scale. If the YIMBYs and Growth Groupers were offering a politics of immediacy and speed, what these 'progressive communitarians' were describing was a politics of patience and perseverance – substituting what Kirsty McNeill called the 'hard work of interpersonal relationships' for the instant satisfaction of digital dopamine. Their bet is that beyond people’s apparent preferences for outrage, anger, and lives lived online, there is a hunger for connection, community, and conviviality – and that Labour can win by revitalising places so as to make these relational goods accessible to all.

David Klemperer is co-editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.


A nation-building project

For the first time since becoming Prime Minister, Starmer described the ideas that might animate his political project: mutuality and dignity. In his evocation of these contemporary variations on Labour’s two eternal principles, solidarity and equality, we saw a glimpses of conviction and emotion from a usually prosaic Prime Minister. Starmer also described a battle for the soul between two ideas of the nation: one ethnic and the other civic. Labour is going to attempt to supersede rather than cast aside the revival of national and community politics on the right.

And so finally we see it. The project is to defeat ethno-nationalism. But with what? We still know more about Reform’s national restoration project than we do about Labour’s nation-building one. That is partly a problem of narration: Labour’s plans on public investment, industrial strategy and public ownership are to all intents and purposes a new form of economic nationalism. But it is also emblematic of the government’s need for more programmatic and strategic thinking. If it wants to re-animate an idea of a common good, it is going to have to instrumentalise that across foreign, economic and social policy, and develop a plan that is different in kind and not just degree to its current approach to state reform.

To sail the new winds of nationalism at the end of globalisation as we knew it, Labour needs to recover its ability to think about the state as sovereign not just administrative. Parts of the left will oppose an embrace of nationalism, which has a bias to reactionary over progressive expressions. But a national social democratic party in the current context has little choice but to marshal it to egalitarian and modernising goals. Labour has managed that in the past, and can again. But it is difficult – and ultimately impossible without a more demanding programme capable of both reimagining nation state and making the future susceptible to collective endeavour.

Parth Patel is Associate Director for democracy and politics at the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a contributing editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.


Big tent Starmerism

Reform’s rise has obscured the Conservative Party’s collapse. Farage was on everyone’s lips, from Cabinet Ministers in the hall to hacks across the many watering holes. Yet Labour’s age-old opponents were barely discussed in Liverpool.

Given their history as the centre-left’s great bugbear, this is surprising. The party that delivered a sledgehammer blow to the trade unions, forever weakening the labour movement. The scrappers of Sure Start and the wreckers of public services, after New Labour’s record investments in the public realm. That great electoral bugger, always snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, whether 1970, 1992 or 2015.

The Tories’ collapse has created enormous space in British politics. Vast, rolling fields of it; acre after acre. At one side, an insurgent ethno-nationalism, which the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood rightly identified in her conference address. At the other, only Labour. The Liberal Democrats, despite having their best leader since Charles Kennedy, can never be a major party in the immediate future; Coalition memories loom too large in progressives’ minds. The Green Party has the reverse problem: ascendant in the metropolitan cities but fighting an entrenched Liberalism in the market towns and suburbs. The various nats, of Scottish or Welsh flavour, can never speak for ‘one nation’, for obvious reasons.

That leaves Labour, and Starmer’s speech was as clear a sign as any that he gets this. For all the focus on the PM’s speech about being a direct attack on Farage, it was also a clear pitch for ‘one nation’. A direct appeal to what you might call the ‘silent majority’; a British people who are 'not unreasonable…they are pragmatic, compassionate and tolerant.' There was a distinctively 'one nation' flavour to the lead announcement in the run up to conference too - a significant expansion of the government's Pride in Place programme. This will be investing in deprived communities in every corner of the entire United Kingdom - a clear departure from Levelling Up bungs to leafy Tory swing seats.

It’s welcome that the Prime Minister and those around him recognise this opportunity: they don’t come along often. In Kemi Badenoch the Conservatives have a uniquely weak leader during their uniquely most perilous position since the Corn Laws. Indeed, the centre-right is potentially undergoing a Peelesque split, with the departure of Danny Kruger to Reform, alongside scores of councillors who make up the Tories in the country at large.

But building a genuine one-nation, ‘big tent’ politics will take more than identifying that portion of the electorate who tell pollsters ‘never Farage’. While it has ‘won’ elections, ‘never Le Pen’ has delivered ideologically incoherent government in France, sowing the seeds of the chaos seen regularly on French streets and surely a far-right victory in 2027. Indeed, it might be more appropriate to look to an earlier period in French politics and the approach taken by Charles de Gaulle. His ‘Gaullist’ programme of one-nationism involved taking dramatic steps to rebuild the national sovereignty of the French nation after two destructive world wars. That, for me, remains the primary aim for Britain today: rebuilding our national sovereignty after an economic experiment which uniquely opened our borders to a range of international threats and unwanted influence.

That is why take back control remains the best political slogan of the twenty-first century. Delivering that cannot be done on a status quo ticket. It will require the transformation of the British state. It’s good to see the energy around the desire to ‘disrupt’ the state’s status quo, championed by ministers like Josh Simons and the influential Labour Growth Group. But this needs to go beyond rebuilding executive power, however important that is. The primary reason governments fail to deliver the change the public wish to see is not too many quangos, but profound changes to the national economy since the 1980s.

When the private sector makes up the majority of GDP, and more than 80% of employment, any account of sovereignty focusing only on the state resembles the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. As David Edgerton has chronicled, the primary change in the British economy since neoliberalism’s rise isn’t state vs market, but global vs national. This means that any attempt to change how business operates is bound to fail. Everyone agrees the UK economy is starved of investment; but why would foreign shareholders accept lower profits today for a better Britain tomorrow? Everyone agrees taxes need to rise, but why would big business - reliant on footloose ‘global talent’ - support taxing high-paid workers to rebuild the post-industrial north and midlands, far from the core cities they inhabit?

Crucially, this economic agenda would supply the centre-left programme needed to maintain a ‘big tent’ politics. Because it remains a truism, but a useful one, that the ‘silent majority' in the country leans left on the economy, right on social issues. To look again at the continent, this 'big tent' politics might resemble christian democratic politics, such as the CDU in Germany, which fuses leftish economic positions with rightish social ones.

Or indeed the Conservative Party of old, before its Hayekian transformation. The party of industrial policy, protectionism, mass home ownership and working-class aspiration. Disraeli, Baldwin and Macmillan, not Thatcher, Osborne and Truss. It’s clear that the old Tories’ clothes are there for the taking - an obsession with tax cuts at their conference in Manchester confirmed this. It's up to Starmer now whether to wear them.

Ben Glover is Head of Policy Analysis at the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, but writes here in a personal capacity. He is a contributing editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.