Labour conference preview: what to watch for in Liverpool

Labour’s first conference under Andy Burnham runs from Saturday, in a city the party has now used for its set-piece gathering five years running. Delegates arrive with a leader whose leadership contest promised something genuinely different from the Starmer years and a summer that has already tested how much of that promise survives contact with government.

The usual conference choreography will still be there – the set-piece speeches, the exhibition hall, the fringe circuit running late into the evening – but underneath it, this week is really about whether that early promise is holding up. We set out that argument in more detail here – this piece is the guide to where it’ll actually play out on the ground in Liverpool.

Burnham’s first big speech test

The leader’s speech, Tuesday at 2pm, is the week's central moment – Burnham’s first as party leader and prime minister and the closest thing conference offers to a verdict on his opening months in office. His record so far is a scatter of modest cost-of-living measures. VAT stripped from domestic electricity bills from October (worth around £45 a year to the average household), free bus travel for children through August and a promised cut to the bus fare cap that doesn't actually land until January 2027. Whether Tuesday’s speech offers anything bolder, or simply restates what’s already been announced, will tell delegates a great deal about how much room Burnham thinks he has to move.

The rent controls double-header

Two fringe sessions, a day apart, will test the same question from opposite directions. Monday’s Ending the Rent Squeeze (JRF, IPPR and NEF, chaired by iNews’s Vicky Spratt) makes the outside case for rent controls as a fast, cheap cost-of-living intervention. Tuesday’s Should Labour Embrace Rent Controls? (Labour's own Housing Group) puts the same question to the party directly – awkward territory given Burnham personally called for rent-freeze powers as Greater Manchester mayor in 2023, only for his housing secretary, Angela Rayner, to rule controls out in July. Worth watching whether Labour’s internal panel goes anywhere near that contradiction.

The Socialist Campaign Group rally

Tuesday evening’s rally (Princes Suite 2, Crowne Plaza) is the single clearest read on where the parliamentary and union left actually stand three months into Burnham’s leadership. John McDonnell, Richard Burgon and Nadia Whittome share a platform with the general secretaries of UNISON, the NEU, PCS and the FBU – a lineup that, in June, put out explicit demands for Burnham to take “immediate bold steps” against “over 40 years of neoliberalism”. This is where we find out whether that pressure is being taken seriously or simply filed and forgotten.

The Holborn subplot running under everything

The Holborn and St Pancras byelection – triggered by Keir Starmer quitting his own former seat – sits underneath most of this week’s conversations without ever quite being the headline. Labour’s selection of council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali, decided inside three days from a shortlist of three near-identical candidates, hasn’t done much to counter the argument that the party still confuses control with confidence. Zack Polanski, standing for the Greens, will be watching conference as closely as anyone in the hall, looking for lines he can use.

The other rooms worth knowing about

Away from the main hall, the Liverpool Quaker Meeting House – outside the secure zone, no pass required – is functioning as the week's unofficial left-fringe hub, with sessions from Momentum, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the Socialist Health Association and Palestine Solidarity Campaign all clustering there across the four days, including a Saturday evening session on Gaza sanctions ahead of conference even opening. It’s a useful barometer of mood among members and activists that the platform speeches won’t capture.

The bigger question

Underneath the individual sessions, conference is really being asked one thing. Is this a party regrouping around a leader who promised something different from Starmer, or one papering over a fight it hasn’t actually had yet? Liverpool won’t settle that argument this week. But how much room the platform gives the party’s left to make its case – in the hall, on the fringe and in the corridors between – will say a great deal about which way it’s heading.