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Labour Conference 2024 Labour in power must remember who it represents

IAN LAVERY MP looks at the first months of Labour government and warns a new approach is needed if it is to reshape Britain

LIVERPOOL hosts Labour’s first conference as a party of government since 2009.

Despite many positive steps taken by the party in its first few weeks, the press cycle has been dominated by far-right violence, the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance and ongoing briefings against Labour’s top team from within.

Conference offers an opportunity to reset the narrative close the door on a decade and a half of failure and offer a concrete vision of the much-needed change that the party was elected on.

Liverpool should be a chance for celebration at sweeping away the Conservatives in a landslide. But having been elected in a landslide on a small vote share, tensions are already surfacing as to the direction the party is travelling in government. As delegates assemble, conference also provides an opportunity for party members and affiliates to signal their contentment or otherwise with this trajectory.

Earlier this month TUC conference demonstrated an alternative to some of Labour’s choices in the first few months. Opposing the winter fuel cut, supporting universal free school meals and backing a change to the economic choices of the past 14 years which have so damaged the fabric of our country. In the run-up to Labour conference even the most supportive of our trade union affiliates are calling for less “doom and gloom” and more hope.

The decision to scrap winter fuel allowance has caused real anger amongst the public, party members and MPs. Though substantial, the rebellion on the vote masked the strength of feeling within the party.

People from right across the traditions of the Labour Party are deeply uneasy at the government taking this course of action and many MPs deeply upset at being forced to vote with the government on the measure.

The failure to produce an impact assessment report or to explain how cutting this benefit will help us deliver prosperity in the long run is problematic.

After saying they’d put the country before the party, MPs who represent an average 72,500 people are asked to blindly follow a decision by a small number of people that they do not believe is in the best interests of their constituency or the country, then threatened by the whips should they dissent.

I am incredibly concerned that many pensioners on the margins will feel unable to heat their homes adequately and fear a bad flu or indeed Covid season. That bland sounding headline “excess winter deaths” may come to haunt the Labour Party and a winter crisis in the NHS may well wipe out any supposed savings.

As factions within factions step up a whispering campaign in the press against the prime minister reminiscent of a government in its dying days, not one elected a matter of weeks ago, people in the country are suffering.

It should come as no surprise that some would undermine a Labour government when the extent of right-wing plotting to undermine a left-led Labour Party has now been exposed.

The reality, however, is that the left is not dead and Labour members are not supportive of the policy agenda that some inside the party are pursuing.

The elections to the NEC earlier this week showed Open Labour candidate Ann Black led the first preference votes with Jess Barnard of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance next in the voting.

There are excellent socialist MPs from across the UK grounded in their communities and who understand that Labour must champion the cause of workers and the working class more generally.

Winning a landslide on 33 per cent of the vote is unheard of. Across the country there are many seats with incredibly slender majorities and they are being nibbled at from all sides.

Greens and independents challenge us from the left, the Tories and Lib Dems from the right and Reform from the far right, Plaid and the SNP in Wales and Scotland respectively.

British politics has been in flux for more than a decade and has not yet settled that what the future brings will be shaped by Labour.

In the general election campaign so many people told me they had given up on politics and that they wouldn’t vote. We still have an opportunity to grow our share of the vote simply by delivering for ordinary people. If we don’t we risk driving them into the arms of others.

The Labour and trade union movement has been the biggest driver of progressive change our country has ever seen.

This can continue to be the case as long as we work together and remember on behalf of whose interests we wield power.

If we continue the failed economic orthodoxies of the past 14 years our movement, from a position of parliamentary strength, could be confined to oblivion. We all have a duty to ensure that does not happen.

Ian Lavery is Labour MP for Blyth & Ashington.

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