LABOUR has a “moral choice to make” by focusing on the issues the public cares about, a Morning Star fringe meeting at the party’s conference heard today.

Morning Star editor Ben Chacko was joined by MPs Richard Burgon and Kim Johnson, PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote, Unite national lead officer Onay Kasab and councillor Emine Ibrahim to discuss whether Labour can “win back the working class.”

It comes amid Labour losing support from younger and left-leaning voters and the far-right Reform UK leading in the polls.

Mr Burgon highlighted the “clear risk and likelihood” of Britain seeing its first far-right government in history if there was an imminent election.

He told the packed room: “We’ve had right-wing governments. We’ve had very right-wing governments. We’ve never had a far-right government.

“And that’s the prospect that we face as a movement, as a society and as a country.”

The Leeds MP said he welcomed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s speech earlier for tackling the “racist policy of deportation” of legal migrants, but added: “We cannot fulfil our historic duty to prevent a Reform government by trying to scare people into voting for us just [to] prevent a Reform government.”

He likened such a move to the Democrats’ failed attempt in the US to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidential election.

Labour is failing in the opinion polls for not tackling causes that the public considers vital issues, such as the cost-of-living crisis, he warned.

“There is a moral choice for the government to make,” Mr Burgon said. “We cannot beat Reform on their territory.

“In [Keir Starmer’s] speech today… there wasn’t a single policy announcement in relation to the cost-of-living crisis.

“Many of us were expecting that an announcement was imminent on lifting the two-child benefit cap — that’s the kind of policy that should have been announced today.”

He said there should have also been a massive council-house-building programme and rent caps, adding: “These things can’t be dismissed, as the Prime Minister did, as somehow ‘the politics of left grievance.’

“This is the politics of justice [and] fairness. It’s the politics of taking action in government to lift living standards after people have suffered for 14 years under the Conservatives.

“If the Prime Minister had listened on the winter fuel payment cuts [and] disability benefit cuts, which I and others voted against, if he had listened on Gaza, then we wouldn’t be in [this] appalling situation in the opinion polls.”