Barely two seconds into her Labour conference speech, Rachel Reeves had already deployed the phrase “economic credibility”. There were whoops and applause. The next huge cheer from the hall at the party’s annual gathering in Liverpool erupted when the shadow chancellor promised that any tax or spending changes would be subject to an “independent forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility”. In a setting where paeans to the NHS and digs at the Murdoch press were once reliable greatest hits, this felt different. The fiscal discipline imposed on Labour’s spending plans since Reeves became shadow chancellor two years ago was the new fan favourite. Daring to repeat the lament of her internal critics who claim she’s simply making “the same choices as ...

If Labour wins the next general election, “conversations” about reforming the electoral system could follow, a shadow cabinet member hinted during an event at the Labour Party conference. “I’m personally for, kind of, looking at electoral reform-type stuff,” Lucy Powell, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, told an audience at a fringe event on Monday morning. The issue had threatened Labour unity at last year’s conference, when party members voted overwhelmingly for the leadership to back proportional representation. The policy is also now generally supported by the unions, but the leadership has not endorsed it. Powell said electoral reform was “a bit of a distraction” and that “we’ve got to win the election with the rules which we’re operating under, ...

The conflict in Israel is overshadowing everything at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. At a Tony Blair Institute event yesterday, David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, was clear that Hamas was a terrorist organisation and the attacks should be condemned. He was also clear that Israel’s response should be proportionate and remain within international law. There was a risk that Jeremy Corbyn – who refused to condemn Hamas – would become the story. But the former party leader is not a feature of this year’s conference. He does not even have a pass to the secure zone. His influence has been subdued. He is not the equivalent to that other former party leader, Liz Truss, who paraded her ideology unopposed ...

“Let’s face it – sometimes it’s tiring being a woman in this world,” Angela Rayner told an audience of Labour women, the day before the party’s annual conference began in Liverpool. “Especially under a Tory government!” But being Keir Starmer’s right-hand woman can’t be easy either. Zhooshing up the chronic Peroni Dad’s public appearances with her straight talk and steely glamour. Just look at the two of them arriving at this conference, like a couple turning up to a Christmas party having squabbled in the car over their very different interpretations of its dress code – Rayner in a long-sleeved ankle length scarlet dress, Starmer in a navy collarless shirt and quilted gilet. Adele and her roadie. Kat and Phil. Since she ...

Labour would reverse the Conservative government’s Rwanda deportation scheme, even if the Supreme Court declares the policy legal and small boat crossings decline, Keir Starmer has said. Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg show this morning (8 October) as the Labour conference began in Liverpool, the opposition leader said his party would not continue with the “wrong policy” of sending asylum seekers to central Africa. Starmer’s announcement opens up a clear dividing line between the Conservatives and Labour on immigration policy. As my colleague Andrew Marr recently reported: “Ministers are growing increasingly confident that their appeal to the Supreme Court over the Rwanda deportation policy, expected in November, will go the government’s way.” Explaining his opposition to the scheme, Starmer said: “It’s hugely expensive. It’s ...

It is only one result, and it is only a by-election. But despite these caveats, Labour’s overwhelming victory in Rutherglen & Hamilton West feels like the moment that Scotland finally began to change its mind. Following the long years in which the SNP banished Labour from its former west of Scotland heartlands, Labour didn’t just win back Rutherglen, near Glasgow: it stomped into town and seized it in an iron grip. The party’s candidate, Michael Shanks, won 17,845 votes, or 58.6 per cent, to the second-placed SNP’s 8,399. Every other party, including the Conservatives and the Greens – who are in government with the SNP at Holyrood – lost their deposit. Keir Starmer will be hoping that as goes Rutherglen, so goes ...

Net zero targets moved back, HS2 curtailed or even cancelled. The chopping and changing of public policies adds to the general disruption, when policy is supposed to act as a shock absorber and reduce uncertainty. Underpinning this chronic condition is the UK’s addiction to short-term thinking and endless tinkering. We get panic and paralysis, but nothing gets done. As a country we seem obsessed with the short term. In public life, almost all decisions follow either the business cycle of quarterly reporting or the electoral cycle at a time when we need a fundamental transformation. We fret over the risk of a technical recession – which amounts to two consecutive quarters of contraction in economic activity. But the real issue is ...

“I was stood next to the heckler,” the BBC reporter Ione Wells tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, regarding the man who’d just been thrown out of Suella Braverman’s speech at the Conservative conference. “In quite a soft tone he said ‘there’s no such thing as gender ideology’ as Braverman was listing things she thought ‘woke’ institutions were adopting. Security immediately swarmed him and escorted him out.” The man in question was not just any heckler: it was Andrew Boff, the Conservative chairman of the London Assembly. There’s something quite telling, not to mention funny, in the fact experienced political correspondents are unable to recognise such a long-standing fixture of the capital’s political scene, even as he is being physically dragged away: a ...