As I write, Andy Burnham has been Labour Leader and Prime Minister for just over a month, and it is one month now until Labour’s 2026 annual conference on 27-30 September in Liverpool.
There is certainly a shift in mood within the Labour Party. Not having faced a leadership election, Burnham has not put forward any policy platform to party members as Starmer did famously with his rapidly abandoned “ten pledges” in the 2020 leader contest. Burnham is, instead, straight into government.
Small-scale as they might be, measures such as removing VAT on domestic electricity bills, restoring the £2 bus fare, free 24-hour bus travel for disabled people, present Burnham as having different priorities to Starmer, with his focus on “growth” and “small boat crossings” (and indeed, his relegation to embarrassed obscurity of positive actions by the Starmer government, like the Employment Relations Act, the Renters’ Reform Act, the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, rail renationalisation, etc.).
Burnham’s talk is to some extent a revival of mainstream “Labourism”, and provides opportunities for members of Labour and of affiliated unions to push for a change in policy.
Right-wing
But Burnham’s is still a right-wing version of “Labourism”, and relative to polls of partly members opinion and Labour conference votes, Burnham himself remains firmly to the right of the Labour Party membership and structures, and of active union members.
Polls suggest that 85% to 95% of Labour members are for public ownership of water, a policy passed also at at least one Labour regional conference. Burnham explicitly speaks only of “public control” (which already exists) and reforming that control through measures such as regional franchising.
Where even Labour’s 2025 annual conference, the most right-wing conference for many years, called for wealth tax, reversing Tory cuts, defence of leave to remain, and expanding collective rights and sectoral bargaining, Burnham makes no reference to such specifics. He has apologised on behalf of the party for its previous handling of the Gaza situation, but in unspecific terms. He has said nothing about the 2025 Labour annual conference’s call for suspension of all arms trade to Israel, or bans on trade with the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Some of these issues are coming to the fore within the party in the run-up to conference. Affiliated unions have raised concerns about the continued weakness of the Employment Rights Act, especially on zero-hours contracts, though whether they will put anything hard-hitting to conference on the issue remains to be seen.
Motions
A number of CLPs have already passed motions for conference calling for public ownership of water or for a massive council housing programme including the rebuilding of council Direct Labour Organisations, or (promoted by Momentum) repeating last year’s policy on Gaza and the West Bank. CLPs’ deadline to submit motions is 17 September, and those motions have to be “contemporary” (criteria are slippery, but are usually understood to include at least reference to events in August), so many CLPs will decide their submissions in September.
They will also decide then on proposals for “reference back” of sections of this year’s (studiedly bland and non-committal) National Policy Forum report. Each CLP can submit up to four references back, and those are subject to no “priorities ballot”, but that opening has been little used by CLPs in recent years.
A template motion originating from the Labour Campaign for Council Housing and adapted by Labour Left Internationalists calls for the Labour Government to commit to measures such as repealing Right to Buy, ending above inflation rent increases for council and housing association tenants, and investing in a council house programme of 100,000 homes a year.
A motion originating from Mainstream and the Socialist Environment and Resources Association is calling for “the Government to urgently return water in England into public ownership”, calling this “the first step toward ending neoliberalism”.
Similar motions have been sent to conference by CLPs in recent years, but failed to win in the “priorities ballot” that tales place among delegates on the first morning of conference. The LCCH, Mainstream, and Labour Left Internationalists campaigns for CLPs to pass their motions need to extend to efforts to win delegates to voting for them in that ballot this year. It is not easy. The right of the party always organises to keep such motions off the priority list, and the Conference Arrangement Committee helps by carving such motions into separate policy areas and keeping the actual text of motions from delegates until the very last minute. In 2025 even the motion on repealing the two-child benefit cap failed to win “priority” to get to conference floor, despite much publicity about it. (It looks like the Labour leaders had already decided to scrap the cap, but did not want it to look as if they had been pushed into that by a conference vote).
Rule change proposals from CLPs, under long-established procedure, come up for debate only the year after they have submitted. It looks like there will be only one such rule change for debate in 2026, a bland and uncontroversial one. The National Executive retains the right to “spring” rule changes on conference only days or hours before the event. There is no report yet of plans to do that this year, but vigilance is necessary.
Labour women’s conference is in the same Liverpool venue on 26 September, the day before the general conference. In 2025 Labour women’s conference was cancelled because party officials said they weren’t sure how to respond to the April 2025 Supreme Court decision reinterpreting the term “women” in the Equality Act. This year the conference excludes trans delegates. Most unions will boycott it in protest, but as of yet no union is making a fight of it. Rather, Unison is complying with the trans-exclusionary “Flaherty judgement”, and no union has said it will defy it (although the City of London Corporation is de facto defying it with its decision to keep the Hampstead Women’s Ponds trans-inclusive).
In 2025, both Mainstream and Momentum had little activity around the conference, though the Tuesday-evening CLPD-Momentum fringe meeting drew large numbers. CLPD produced its regular bulletin, but with weaker distribution than in early years. Labour Left Internationalists was the only Labour left group to organise a continuous agitational effort at the conference entrances.
National Executive
By the time of conference, the new Labour National Executive will have been elected. Polls published by Labour List (based on small samples) suggest that this year the CLP seats could be won in majority by candidates of the left or soft left — gaining six of the nine seats, with recently re-admitted member Jess Barnard topping the poll.
It remains to be seen what the composition of CLP delegates will be at conference. Last year, left members had either been out-organised in their CLPs or had not put themselves forward. There was an increase, not much in the hard-bitten right-wing contingent, as in the “go with the flow” contingent. It also remains to be seen what the affiliated unions will push for conference, and how hard. Unions generally reveal their motions to conference (even to their own activists) only days before.
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