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Labour conference 2023: promises and prospects
NICK WRIGHT looks at the context behind Labour’s current position, what could do in power, what it is likely to do — and how the labour movement itself should react
Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is joined by his wife Victoria after delivering his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Picture date: Tuesday October 10, 2023.
Join the traditional march from Clerkenwell Green, which will bring together countless international workers’ organisations in a statement against the far right
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LABOUR’S Liverpool conference basked in the expectation that the victory over the Scottish nationalists at Rutherglen heralds a return to the days when the party could rely on a substantial, even inflated, block of Scottish seats.
The rough parity that First Past the Post (FPTP) voting provided in the post-war period has eroded — remember the Conservatives were the biggest Scottish party in 1968 — and the post-independence referendum wipeout of Labour's Scottish contingent, only temporarily mitigated by the return of a handful of extra MPs generated by the 2017 Corbyn surge, looks like ending.
Naturally, Labour has spun the Rutherglen by-election figures as signalling a massive increase in Labour's Scottish presence at Westminster. The victory margin was substantial but the peculiarities of the seat — it alternates between the SNP and Labour — and the general crisis of the SNP and independence movement as a whole, helped Labour.
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