Follow along for live updates. Click here to watch the speeches from the main stage…
16:07: They’ve now run out of draft lager at the outside bar in the Labour Conference secure zone. An emergency if ever there was one…
15:28: Burnham on Rayner vs Mahmood immigration split: “It just reflects that there’s a consultation… what we’ve got to do is strike the right balance.”
15:10: Burnham on defence: “I’ll set out tomorrow how we’ll change things to make the necessary investment in defence”. Points out he ‘inherited’ a defence investment plan with a shortfall.
15:07: Burnham doubles down on his social security / national security word salad. Just now on LBC:
“It can’t be a case of choosing between social security – and I use that phrase in the old fashioned sense – and national security. Resilience is built from the ground up. If we have lots of young people out of work, they may be at risk of being involved in things that might harm security at a local level, or national security, if people are trying to manipulate the country… so you’ve got to see these things together.”
Right…
Continue reading “LIVE BLOG: Guido on the Ground at Labour Conference”
Labour’s tax minister has refused to say if or when the government would respond to a consultation on making the business environment easier for entrepreneurs. After almost a year…
James Murray, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster General, was present a fringe event hosted by the Chartered Institute of Taxation and CenTax (authors of the Farm Tax among other things). He was asked when the government would be responding to a consultation it launched at the last Budget…
The consultation, titled “Tax Support for Entrepreneurs,” opened on 26 November 2025 and closed on 28 February 2026. Since then – crickets…
He said:
“It will be published in due course, please know I have been talking to the team about all the responses to that so that can definitely be fed into the work we’re doing, the thoughts we’re having.”
Murray also remarked that the government would be more aggressively pursuing those who it claims are not satisfactorily self-employed and should therefore move inside IR35 rules to pay more tax: “it’s definitely something that is on my radar.” It never stops…
In Mahmood’s short speech to Labour Conference:
“I know that, throughout our consultation process, some have said elements of these reforms are not fair…
To that: let me say this. We will come to a position that balances fairness for those who came here legally, and fairness to British citizens across this country.”
Angela Rayner attacked Mahmood’s retroactive earned settlement reforms going into Conference. Looks like the Housing Secretary won…
This comes at the same time as the Home Secretary announces a new route for charities and non-profit organisations to sponsor Palestinian and Afghan migrants to come to the UK. Does the joke about Italian tanks now apply to Burnham’s Labour Party…
Read her full speech below:
Continue reading “Mahmood Suggests Immigration Reforms Will Be Watered Down”
Guido hears Hugh Grant has pulled out of his appearance at Hillsborough Law & Press Reform: A Rally for Justice in Liverpool. No reason has been given yet. Conference attendees arriving at the secure zone today have been handed a promotional pamphlet with Hugh’s face on it. Never take Hugh’s presence for granted…
UPDATE: Email fired out to signer-ups now says: “Speakers include a host of MPs, campaigners and high profile supporters of both Hillsborough Law & Hacked Off’s campaign for higher media standards and independent press regulation – now with comedian and actor John May as host.”
As Labour delegates gather in Liverpool for conference, CND activists are handing out their latest newsletter featuring a column from the Transport Salaried Staffs Association union general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust which argues that the left should oppose regime change in Tehran. Off comes the mask…
Eslamdoust, whose union is affiliated to Labour, writes that her CND comrades must “continue to campaign against nuclear weapons, but also we must campaign against nuclear intimidation and regime change.” Her column lists the “sanctions, covert operations, assassinations of scientists, military threats and attacks” Iran has “endured“. It says nothing about the regime itself and demands an end to “economic collective punishment”…
Eslamdoust is no fringe activist – she was a Labour councillor in Camden for twelve years and mayor of Camden for two terms, as well as holding senior jobs inside the Labour Party. Including running the secretariat for the NEC Equalities Committee…
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was pictured shaking hands with the Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi in New York last week. Labour support for Iran is worrying, let me aya-tell-ya…
Deep inside Labour’s voluminous conference documentation is a proposal to “examine the possibility of rejoining the European Union being a manifesto promise for the next general election“. That position has growing support within Labour…
A policy proposal from Bristol Central Constituency Labour Party designed to push the leadership to publicly adopt a pro-rejoin position is sneaking through the conference process. Burnham himself recently claimed he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU within his lifetime and is pursuing a stealth rejoin agenda as PM…
The idea has gone through a Labour mechanism called a ‘reference back’ which sees it sent to the powerful National Policy Forum – the highest policy authority inside the party. As Labour Attorney General Ellie Reeves boasted in her speech about the NPF yesterday, this move often prefigures the later adoption by the leadership of particular policies…
The wording is pretty clear: “Conference calls on the NPF to look beyond the ’24 manifesto commitments with respect to the EU relationship and to press for faster re-alignment with the EU 23 single market within this parliament and to examine the possibility of rejoining the European Union being a manifesto promise for the next general election.” Don’t say you weren’t warned Burnham wants to rejoin the EU as quickly as possible..
Prominent Labour backbencher and amateur ornithologist Stella Creasy has spoken out again against free speech. At an event discussing free speech…
At a fringe event at Labour Conference old-Labour style MP Jonathan Hinder spoke out against the free speech controls in the UK right now before Creasy protested that speech is unacceptable which “stops somebody else’s view from being heard.”
She said “it’s recognising the impact and the context in which people have conversation and debate… [recognising] the value of free speech but understand, if we are progressives and socialists, tackling the barriers that stop people from being allowed to be heard at all,” adding that “those barriers don’t disappear” when speech is fully unregulated. Oh boy…
Creasy added that she supports enhanced harassment legislation and “if we want to stand up for free speech, we have to stand up for the right of people to say stop – actually, you’re not going to change my mind, this conversation isn’t one I want to continue being part of and how you go on behaving means that I don’t feel that I can’t speak at all, in order to protect [those spaces] where people do feel they can have a discussion.” Eesh…
She added pursuing a regime in which speech is forced to “recognise various identities” is a good thing – “I am passionate about the fact that we can do that.” This is basically the Labour view on free speech – meaning command and control…
Bookmark this from Andy Burnham:
2029: “that’s when the next election will be.”
May 2027: “Absolutely not.”
“No election any time soon.”
“All of this speculation on an early election, I can knock that dead.”