Daily Times

Britain’s Labour party gathers for its annual conference on Sunday, buoyed by being back in power for the first time in 14 years but already under pressure on several fronts. The four-day gathering in Liverpool, northwest England, comes two months after Labour secured a landslide general election victory over the Conservatives that made leader Keir Starmer prime minister.

The centre-left group last held its yearly get-together as Britain’s governing party in 2009 when Gordon Brown was premier. “The atmosphere will be celebratory because it’s just won a majority of 174 seats,” said Patrick Diamond, a former Downing Street policy adviser. “In that sense it will be an upbeat conference,” he told AFP. Tony McNulty, a government minister when Labour last ran the UK and a veteran of more than 30 party conferences, agreed but added that any backslapping is likely to be restrained.

“I know from Starmer down they’ll want as a government to do it in a very business-like way. They’ll be trying not to over-celebrate and over-congratulate themselves,” he told AFP. Tempering the mood will be anxieties over the size of the task Labour faces as the party gets to work implementing what it has called “a decade of national renewal”.

Starmer, 62, has spent much of his first weeks in office accusing the Tories of leaving everything from the economy and prisons to the National Health Service in a total mess. The Conservatives in response accuse him of scaremongering over the inheritance and claim that he is laying the groundwork for tax rises. “It feels a bit doom and gloom on another level, so it’s a fairly mixed bag,” said McNulty.

The conference comes at the end of a week dominated by negative headlines over Starmer receiving more than ?100,000 ($132,000) in declared gifts and hospitality since December 2019 — the most of any MP. The Tories accuse him of hypocrisy since the government is asking ordinary Britons to tighten their belts. British newspapers are also full of reports of tensions at the top of government between Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray and several political advisers. It is all adding to a feeling that Starmer’s short honeymoon after taking office on July 5 is well and truly over.

Week-long riots by far-right activists in early August sucked up energy while he endured flak, including from Labour left-wingers, for refusing to scrap a controversial child benefit cap.

He has also repeatedly defended scrapping a winter fuel benefit for 10 million pensioners as a necessary “tough choice” to help fill a ?22-billion “black hole” in public finances that he says the Tories left behind.

“It’s this weird situation where they haven’t really done that much (and) some of the few things they have done have actually been very unpopular,” said Steven Fielding, a politics professor at Nottingham University.