Renewed ‘austerity drive’ will make racism worse, says Diane Abbott – Labour conference live

• Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, has said she understands why some voters are perturbed by donations accepted by her and other government ministers, while arguing that a complete stop to such gifts would require a wider debate about how politics is funded. As Peter Walker reports, she pushed back strongly against claims she might have not properly declared donations such as accommodation on a holiday in New York, saying she had done everything necessary. In another interview Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said she had accepted donations for a 40th birthday event and another reception because they were held “in a work context”. As Sam Coates from Sky News points out in a blog, the two replies indicate the lack of coherence at the heart of Labour’s response to the freebies controversy. Coates says:

It is increasingly easy to find Labour figures railing about “disproportionate” focus in the media on donors and gifts and freebies as new stories arrive hourly.

Yet, they have come unprepared to answer questions; cabinet teams still making up contradictory answers on the fly.

On Sunday morning, education secretary Philipson said taking donations from Lord Alli was fine because the birthday party he funded was a work event.

An hour later and deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, said that taking donations in kind – namely the New York apartment – is fine because the holiday was a private event.

How do we reconcile both?

• Hollie Ridley, Labour’s new general secretary, said the far right is just as much a threat now as it was in the days of the BNP, only “better dressed”. (See 3.47pm.)

Here is John Crace’s sketch on the first day of the Labour conference.

Robert Peston from ITV and Sam Coates from Sky News have both written good takes on Labour conference, the freebies controversy, and the challenge facing Keir Starmer this week. Both are worth reading. Here are two extracts.

From Coates’ blog

Somehow [Labour] are struggling to communicate how they are changing the country – a problem that risks undermining so much of their agenda if they can’t get this fixed.

Take the announcements this weekend. Today’s policy was “planning passports” for brownfield sites, yet one cabinet minister admitted to me they couldn’t explain it.

The party literature says it changes the presumption so that proposals that meet certain design and quality standards will be automatically approved.

But if this can’t be communicated, and people can’t explain why this measure – amongst many – is critical to the planning reform project, will anyone notice?

From Peston’s blog

There are two big lessons [from the freebies controversy].

First is that Starmer must close the gap urgently between his rhetoric and administrative reality. Saying that he stands for new transparent honest politics jars with a decision by his office not to automatically and instinctively disclose a £5k donation of clothes and fashion items made by a party donor Waheed Alli to his wife.

Second, the sheer volume of the furore around the gifts is an illustration of the cast-iron law that politics abhors a vacuum.

If Starmer since being elected had engaged the nation in a very specific project of national renewal, the free frocks and Arsenal boxes might have seemed annoying oversights, misdemeanours at worst.

Starmer has loudly, repeatedly and credibly warned that the economy and public services are a disaster area inherited from the Tories. But the public recognised that in delivering the worst election result for the Conservatives in more than a hundred years.

What voters who rejected the Tories wish to know – including millions of them who voted Reform, LibDem and Green, rather than Labour – is what difference Starmer will make.

Some readers have been asking why Keir Starmer says he accepts hospitality to watch football in a corporate box because he cannot go in the stands for security reasons, when Rishi Sunak, his predecessor as PM, was photographed watching a football match from the stands.

In his Sunday Times long read today, Tim Shipman provides an answer.

The prime minister owns season tickets for him and his son, which he continues to pay for. He has been able to take two seats in a box, moving around each game so he is never in the same place twice, a requirement of his security team. Starmer has already twice paid the difference between the value of his seats and those he has been given. The sums are “a few hundred pounds”.

More understandably, his team has not been able to brief about the security threat, which sources say is much higher than it was when Cameron or Sunak sat in the stands. This is because Islamist extremists are targeting Starmer and senior cabinet ministers over the government’s approach to the war in Gaza.

The Labour MP Diane Abbott has said the government is engaged in a new austerity drive which will make racism worse.

Speaking at a fringe meeting organised by the campaign group Stand Up To Racism, she said:

We are in a very difficult period. There is both a renewed war drive and a renewed austerity drive.

Whenever either of these happens, they are always accompanied by an increase in racism. Now that both are happening simultaneously, black and Asian people in this country, as well as Muslims, are bearing the brunt of the government attacks.

Sue Gray, the PM’s chief of staff, is not at Labour conference, Sam Coates from Sky News reports.

I understand the PM’s chief of staff is not here because she’s working in Downing Street on government business and in preparation for the major international UNGA conference next week.

The Labour MP Rachael Maskell says she has been “sickened” by the revelations about colleagues accepting donations. In a post on X, she also says she hoped delegates vote against the winter fuel payments cut.

I have been sickened by revelations of ‘donations’. It grates against the values of the Labour Party, created to fight for the needs of others, not self. Meanwhile pensioners are having their Winter Fuel Payments taken, risking going cold. I trust conference votes to change this.

In theory, conference is the Labour party’s supreme decision-making body. But in practice, it isn’t, and leaders can and do ignore conference votes if they want to. A vote against the winter fuel payments would not persuade Rachel Reeves to reverse it.

The Labour leadership faces a conference battle over cuts to winter fuel payments as trade unions push for the policy to be reversed, PA Media reports. PA says:

Delegates to the party’s annual conference in Liverpool are expected to debate Labour’s economic plans on Monday, with the decision to remove winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners set to feature.

The exact wording of the motion delegates will vote on will be determined tonight, but trade unions Unite and the Communication Workers Union have put forward proposals calling for the policy to be scrapped.

Unite has already unveiled billboards around Liverpool with the slogan “Defend the winter fuel payment” and plans to stage a demonstration outside the conference centre ahead of the debate on Monday.

The prize for the most ambitious speech of the day goes to Darren Jones. As chief secretary to the Treasury, his main job is to say no to spending bids by ministers, which is not a stance liable to make you popular at Labour conference.

But today he did float an idea likely to appeal. Most Labour MPs are focused on winning the next election (which cannot be taken for granted because the government was “cautiously hired, on a trial basis, liable to prompt dismissal if it deviates even slightly from its focus on voters’ priorities”, according to a new analysis of the election produced by Labour Together, the thinktank closest to No 10).

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have talked about a decade of renewal, implying they envisage being in office for 10 years,

But Jones today floated the idea of Labour winning five more terms (which would take them to 2049, if all parliaments were to run a full term). Or even longer. He told the conference:

I want our Labour party to become the natural party of government.

A title the Conservative party claimed for years, but we can take it from them.

We have the chance to prove that we are the changemakers. That our changed Labour Party can be trusted to govern.

Not just for one or two terms, but three, four and five.

That together, as a united Labour Party, we can deliver for Britain.

Transport union leaders Mick Lynch and Mick Whelan have added to the pressure from Unite’s Sharon Graham for Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves to ditch the fiscal rules and increase spending.

Speaking at a fringe event, RMT general secretary Lynch said Labour should “look up” from the immediate political agenda and negative headlines. He said:

They cannot keep the bosses and media happy every day. They’ve got to step out of the straitjacket they’ve put themselves in economcially with these fiscal rules. They’ve got to be bolder.

It’s got to start with Rachel Reeves changing her position. If you use Tory fiscal measures you’ll get Tory results.

We’ve got to have a progressive budget… [Councils and services] need adequate funding, that means proper taxation.

Sharing the platform was Whelan, Aslef’s general secretary, who said that when it came to public spending decisions, the “worst analogy was that of a household” – an analogy used by Reeves, and Rishi Sunak before her. Whelan argued the UK could raise new money to fund services in the way it had done to bail out banks in the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Lynch said the RMT would back Labour, but said it “must go further” on nationalisation, including bringing rail freight back into public ownership.

He said governments had allowed the “leeching of £11bn of profit” from rail to private shareholders, including to off-shored rolling stock companies.

Lynch said that it was also time for Labour mayors including London’s Sadiq Khan to address their practices on locally run transport services.

He said:

There are problems ahead of us. This railways bill is good – but it’s like a ratchet, we move it up and don’t let it slip back. Privatisation of passenger services will be illegal on national rail – but not on Merseyrail or London Transport.

People like [Liverpool mayor] Steve Rotheram and Mayor Khan have to stand up and say do they believe in what [transport secretary] Louise Haigh is doing, or are they going to go their own way and keep concessions? Because the money will keep being milked out. We can’t have that any more.”

Is he on board with public ownership, or with money being leeched out?

The Sunderland Central MP Lewis Atkinson also cautioned that his party be aware of how it “looks and speaks” and not to be a turn off visually to working class voters.

Referring to Labour’s “identity and how we look and talk”, Atkinson gave the example of campaigning on Friday in a working class council estate in his Sunderland AFC shirt.

We need politicians and the Labour party to be appealing in how it speaks and not to be visually a turn-off to working class voters. That doesn’t mean always being in suits and talking about, you know, broadly middle class concerns.

The class of Labour party membership has switched very much middle class over the last five or 10 years, and we need to reverse some of that. or at least be aware of it.

A Labour MP who believes his Sunderland constituency would be Reform UK’s “number one target” at the next general election has said his party needed to defeat the challenge of Nigel Farage’s party by backing tactical voting on the scale used to oust the Tories.

In a highly candid assessment of his own party, Lewis Atkinson also spoke of his “moments of frustration” during the election in July when Farage held a rally in Sunderland and “for whatever reason that wasn’t a priority for the national party to tackle”.

Atkinson, who took his Sunderland Central Constituency after coming 6,073 votes ahead of a Reform UK candidate in second place, also warned that his party “needs to be skilful” in how it responded to Reform – even as he said there was a clear “overlap” between its supporters and extremists who encouraged violence during the summer riots.

He told a fringe meeting organised by the anti-extremism campaign group, Hope not Hate (HNH):

What we cannot do is label 27% of people Sunderland as far right.

If I think ahead to the general election in 2029 or the local elections in 2026, we in Sunderland know we will be Reform’s number one target, certainly in the north-east of England and probably across the whole of the country.

Atkinson said he wanted two things to happen.

First, Labour had to “retain and gain support in white working class communities”, he said, adding that the new government had to deliver “palpable change”.

Second, he said he would like to see tactical voting on the scale that was used to oust the Tories, but directed against Reform UK.

At the same event, HnH’s chief executive Nick Lowles said:

Reform is an existential threat to the Labour party and this country and there can be no accommodation to both Reform UK as a party, and to the racism that they pedal.

Lowles also said it would be a mistake for Labour to go easy on Reform UK in some constituencies on the grounds that a strong Reform UK vote would hurt the Tories more.

At the conference this morning Hollie Ridley was unanimously endorsed as Labour’s new general secretary. In her speech, Ridley talked about her upbringing, and said she was inspired to join Labour to campaign against the far right. She said:

As a working class girl born in 1987, I was never supposed to be on this stage. It wasn’t in the script.

At school, like so many girls from my communities like mine [she’s from Dagenham], some told me to lower my expectations, that politics wasn’t for people like me.

But when Nick Griffin [the BNP leader] descended on my hometown, I knew that I had to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. That was the very first time I went door knocking.

I was not prepared to let the far right sow hatred and division in my community.

Doing nothing was not an option. The far right filled vacuums. They exploited fear. But the local party worked hard to show local residents that politics could be a force for good, that their vote could make a difference, and when they finally sent the BNP packing, I was hooked.

The local activists who run that campaign were incredible, and they lit a fire in me that still burns today. It was at that point that I knew that I wanted to do something that every girls dreams of growing up – I wanted to be a Labour party organiser.

Ridley also said the far right remained a threat.

The threat of the far right that got me involved is as real now as it was then. They may better dressed, but you know what they say about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And we are going to have to work together every single day to defeat that threat. But we know that we can do it.

The line about the far right being “better dressed” seemed to be a reference to Reform UK, but Ridley did not say that explicitly. Reform UK are a worry for Labour; there are 89 seats that Labour won where Nigel Farage’s party is in second place. But in the speeches today ministers have not been talking about them.

Labour lost four seats at the general election (five if you include Jeremy Corbyn) to independent candidates because the party was seen as too pro-Israel and not supportive enough of the Palestinian’s cause. In his speech David Lammy defended Labour’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war, and restated its commitment to the two-state solution. He said:

In my first weeks of government, I went to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Words no previous foreign secretary had even used.

We have used the full weight of Britain’s diplomacy to push to protect civilians, now.

Get all the hostages out, now.

Allow unrestricted aid into Gaza, now.

We have provided millions to fund field hospitals in Gaza.

We brought the security council together to demand polio vaccinations for Palestinian children.

We have respected the independence of the international courts. And we have made the right decisions to stand up for international law.

We have called out the violent settlers in the West Bank. We have continued to fight for the hostages and to support their families.

We have never lost sight of the end goal: an irreversible pathway towards a two-state solution.

I believe in the right of Israel to be safe and secure.

And I also believe in the justness of the Palestinian cause.

It is only once Palestinians and Israelis have the same fundamental rights: Sovereignty, security and dignity in their own independent, recognised states that we can achieve a just and lasting peace for all.

David Lammy, the foreign secetary, told delegates that foriegn policy under Labour has been about showing that “Britain is back”. In his speech in the conference hall, he explained.

On my first weekend as foreign secretary – when I travelled to Germany, to Poland, to Sweden in less than 48 hours – I was proud to say: Britain is back.

When Keir Starmer, and my dear friend John Healey and I flew to Washington DC a few days later to meet with world leaders and commit unshakeably to NATO. We were proud to say: Britain is back.

When the Labour government hosted 45 European leaders at Blenheim Palace, to reset our relationship with Europe, we said: Britain is back.

When we restored funding to UNRWA for their work in Gaza, what did we say?

Britain is back.

When we stood up for international law when it was not easy: what did we say?

Britain is back.

In my first four months, I visited 10 countries, engaged over 20 world leaders and 40 foreign ministers and what did I tell them?

Britain is back.

And when, unlike Rishi Sunak last year, the Prime Minister and I travel later this week to the UN General Assembly later this week; what will I say?

Britain is back.

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