Miliband wins vote on Labour party reforms with overwhelming majority: Politics live blog

And here extracts from Ed Miliband’s closing remarks.

I took a big risk last July. But I did it because I believed, and I believe today, that we can face up to the challenges that our country faces if we face up to the challenges in our party. That is what we have done today and we should all be proud of a Labour party that has shown the courage to change.

I want to say one thing very directly to the country. Some of you left us at the last general election. Some of you felt that we had lost touch. You were right. These changes, agreed today, are designed to ensure that this party never loses touch again with this country.

Ed Miliband is wrapping up now.

He says he wants to address the nation. Labour lost in 2010 because it lost touch with the people of the country. These changes are intended to ensure this does not happen again, he says.

Let’s go out and win.

And that’s it.

I will post a summary shortly.

Angela Eagle is announcing the result.

Union and affiliated societies: 48.42% in favour, 1.58% against.

Constituency parties: 37.87% in favour, 12.13% against

Overall result: 86.29% in favour, 13.71% against.

They are trying to get delegates to resume their seats so they can announce the result.

Here are some of the most interesting tweets I’ve seen about the debate.

I was wrong about Harriet Harman winding up the debate. (See 10.42am.) I was told earlier in the week that that was the plan, but presumably in the wake of PIE-gate there was a change of thought.

Delegates are voting now.

It is a card vote, and the result will be ready at 1.20pm.

Ashworth says his father was a trade unionist.

But no Labour politician ever asked him about his views, he says.

That is what these reforms re about - giving working people more say.

Ashworth says John Prescott asked Labour to show the leadership a bit of trust in his famous speech in 1993. The party should do the same today, he says.

Jon Ashworth, the Leicester South MP and a member of the NEC, is winding up the debate now on behalf of the NEC.

He pays tribute to Margaret Beckett, who spoke earlier. (She was one of the very few speakers I missed.) She was Labour’s first female leaders, he says. (Technically Beckett was leader after John Smith died, not just interim leader.) Having her here reminds us of John Smith’s vision, he says.

Ashworth says the collective voice of the unions in the party is staying.

The NEC will set up an implementation group to look at how these measures will be introduced, he says.

But Ed Miliband does not want to cut out working people. He wants to ensure they are heard.

When the Tories attack trade unions, they are attacking people like Natalie (a delegate who spoke earlier), working women who stand up for their rights and decent conditions, he says.

A youth member from Walthamstow says he supporters the registered supporters proposals, because it will allow people to try out Labour membership.

Tosh McDonald, the life president of Aslef, the rail union, is speaking now.

He says union money is the cleanest in politics.

Aslef are “firm but critical friends of the Labour party”, he says.

He says Labour should “rein in some of the people who have been using personal wealth to obtain influence in the Labour party”.

That is a reference to Lord Sainsbury, and the funding he provides to the Blairite group Progress.

John Hannett, the general secretary of USDAW, the shopworkers’ union, spoke earlier.

Keith Vaz, the Labour MP and NEC member, is speaking now.

He says there have been 25 speakers so far. But not one of them has been black or Asian.

In fact, there have been more speakers from Islington than black and Asian speakers, he says.

But he praises Ed Miliband for appointing more black and Asian people to the front bench than any other Labour leader.

Richard Johnson from Beford says he does not think Labour can afford these reforms. Some estimates say they could cost the party 60% of its union funding. That would be a “needless wound”, he says.

Sir Ian McCartney, the former Labour minister, says Labour will only stay relevant if he can have a connection to the new workforce that exists today.

He says he met John Prescott this morning. Prescott told him that, before he gave the OMOV speech in 1993 (see 10.42am), John Smith told him that if he got these reforms through, he would be “the one member with the one vote”.

Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, is speaking now.

He says today could be historic. It will be historic if Liverpool’s Daniel Sturridge scores against Southampton this afternoon.

(I’m afraid, as a football agnostic, that reference is lost on me, although even I can tell that that’s a way of ridiculing Ed Miliband’s claims that today’s reforms are the most significant since 1918.)

He says Unison supports the reforms. The old system was not working.

But the reform process was launched on the back of a “firestorm” that occurred in relation to the Falkirk selection.

Unite did nothing wrong. It was just trying to recruit people to Labour.

Yet Unite was subject to “smears”, he says.

He asks delegates to show their support for Steve Deans, the Unite convenor and one-time Falkirk chair who was hounded our of his job. Deans gets a large round of applause

Emma Burnell is speaking now on behalf of the socialist societies. She says at the last leadership election, she had six votes. She cast them all for Ed Miliband. But she would have needed 11,000 of those votes to have has much voting power as a single MP.

Dave Prentis, the Unison general secretary, is speaking now.

Unison will vote in favour, he says.

But this has been a distraction. Today is about putting behind us a divisive argument that should never have happened, he says.

Labour should focus on attacking the government.

Prentis says Unison’s collective voice remains untouched.

Unison always wants people to become full Labour members.

But, 82 days before the local elections, the country does not want to hear about Labour’s internal procedures, he says.

Instead, people want to know what Labour stands for. For example, the promise to rebuild the health service.

Trade unions helped the Labour party form itself because working people need a voice. That is as true today as it ever was.

There should be “no more washing our dirty linen in public”, he says.

He gets a strong round of applause.

I will post the full quotes soon.

Steve Brown rom Wansbeck receives a large round of applause when he says Labour needs to adopt more socialist policies.

Peter Fermin, a delegate from Hampstead, is speaking against the plans. He asks why, if Ed Miliband is so keen on internal democracy, the leadership ignores the party conference when it votes in favour of rail nationalisation.

Angela Eagle says no one has spoken against. She invites someone opposed to speak.

Martin Linton, the former Labour MP for Battersea, says it is to Ed Miliband’s credit that he has managed to bring in reforms that Tony Blair himself failed to implement.

Jocelyn Scutt, a delegate from Cambridge, says these reforms will stop people being able to have multiple votes in leadership contests. That’s a good thing, she says.

Paul Kenny, the GMB general secretary and chair of TULO, the trade union and Labour party liaison organisation, goes next.

He starts with a joke. A shark swallows George Osborne. Then he spits him out. Why? Osborne kept saying: “I’m George Osborne and I care about the poor”. Not even a shark could swallow that, says Kenny.

He takes issue with the first speaker. She implied that trade unionist did not campaign. But they do, he says.

Kenny says that watering down the union link further (ie, by reducing the voting strength at party conference) is off the table. Any “wine bar” talk on this should be discounted, he says.

He says that unions have always been in favour of OMOV.

But he says he is not sure how the registered supporters idea could work in practice.

Nevertheless, the GMB will be fully supporting the changes, he says.

Phil Wilson, the Labour MP for Sedgefield, is speaking now. He quotes Mick McGahey, the former Scottish NUM leader. McGahey said that if the Labour movement did not change, it would become a monument.

Trade union money is clean money, Wilson says. If Labour reforms its funding mechanism, it will make it easier to challenge the Tories about the source of their funding.

Lee Sheriff, Labour’s PPC for Carlisle, says the party needs to change the way it selects candidates.

(Although attention has focused on matters like the leadership election rules, the Miliband reforms also change the rules that apply when people are trying to get selected as a Labour candidate. Mark Ferguson covers these changes in this useful LabourList post, 10 Things You Need to Know about Ed Miliband’s Party Reforms.)

The first speech comes from a CLP activist from Barrow in Furness who says she will be voting for the reforms because she believes in the union link.

It is not fair that we keep the joy of door-knocking all to ourselves, she says. We should share that with others (ie, affiliated union members, who, under these plans, would become more fully involved in party affairs).

The debate is about to start. But it would not be a Labour conference without someone raising a point of order.

Someone asks about an emergency resolution, complaining about the reforms all being voted on as a package (as is happening), and not one by one.

Eagle says this is what the party decided. She moves on to the debate.

Miliband says his father only spoke once at a Labour conference. It was in 1965. He spoke about being part of Labour being part of a great adventure.

He also spoke about nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, Milband says, but Miliband says he thought he would not mention that.

Let’s vote to change our party, so tomorrow we can change our country, Miliband says.

The speech is over. He is getting a standing ovation.

Miliband says if people vote for these reforms, they will be voting for Labour to become a movement again.

Vote for these changes to make Labour a genuine movement again that can change Britain.

Miliband says Keir Hardie used to call Labour a movement.

Think about that word, says Miliband. It is movements that change things.

Labour should campaign. It should campaign for a living wage. And, over the next 200 days, it should campaign to keep Scotland in the UK.

Miliband says today it is time to complete the changes started by John Smith.

At the moment the vote of an MP is worth 1,000 members’s votes in leadership elections, he says.

Instead, there should be equality, he says.

Miliband says there used to be a time when people in some areas were told the local Labour party was full up.

But last year someone at Westminster said to him: “What will happen if all these people [ie, the union members who are not individually affiliated now] do join up?”

Miliband says he knows what would happen - Labour would be better off.

That gets a large round of applause.

Miliband recalls meeting a woman called Tracy recently. She was a member of USDAW. But she had not voted for years. She did not think politics was for her.

Miliband is now using some of the material released overnight. See 10.46am.

Miliband says Labour needs the courage to change.

People join the Labour party for noble reasons.

But that is not the way the public see it, he says.

People think politicians are all the same.

Miliband turns to the Lib Dems.

They will have their spring conference in Nick Clegg’s local garden centre, he says.

Or a telephone box.

Miliband says Labour needs to change the way politics is conducted.

Remember that picture of the Tory front bench recently. There were people from Eton, people from Harrow, and people from Westminster. But not a single woman, he says.

The Tories have not got MPs in the big northern cities, he says.

And what did the Tories say after the Wythenshawe and Sale East byelection? That they did not expect to do well, because the constituency contained the largest council estate. That says it all, he says.

Ed Miliband is speaking now.

He says the party has shown great discipline in considering the changes.

The Collins reforms were overwhelmingly backed by the NEC, he says.

They amount to be biggest change to the party since 1918, he says.

Eagle says there will be a three-minute limit on speeches.

The conference is now starting.

Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman, Angela Eagle and Iain McNicol, the party general secretary, have just taken the stage.

I got the impression that there was a particularly loud cheer for Harman. There is nothing like being attacked by the Daily Mail to boost your standing in the Labour party.

The main unions are backing the Miliband reforms. But the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union are going to vote against.

They are not exactly a mighty force in the party, and I don’t think I’ve ever written about them before. But yesterday they sent me a press release. This is from Ian Hodson, the BFAWU’s president.

When any politician starts talking about ‘reform’ the klaxons start blaring as ‘reform’ usually means dilution, erosion or a total dismantling of a system for ideological gain.

Trade Unions are already an honest and transparent movement of mainly ordinary folk who want the voice of working people to be heard loud and clear in the political arena. The recommendations in this draft have the potential to silence the voice of ordinary people and hamstring their representation in Parliament.

There would be no Labour Party without Trade Unions and they have earned the right to decide their own structure and deserve to be consulted in any ‘reform’ discussion in relation to the Political Party they formed. If Labour want to dictate that relationship whilst taking the money, that money can easily be removed and spent elsewhere.

Although the Miliband reforms are widely supported in the party, some members are opposed.

Outside the ExCel centre some activists were handing out a Campaign for Labour Party Democracy containing this article by Jon Lansman giving eight reasons to oppose the Miliband reforms.

Labour’s Luke Akehurst isn’t impressed.

Labour released some extracts from Ed Miliband’s speech overnight. Here they are:

Today I ask you to seize the chance to change our Party so that together we can change the country.

More and more people are turned off from politics. It increasingly feels like a match being played while the stands are emptying. We won’t turn that round by saying we’re right and they’re wrong. We won’t do it by singing the old songs even louder. If we do we’ll find ourselves shouting in an empty stadium.

That’s why today we are debating much more than our internal party structures. We’re debating something far bigger: how do we get people back into our politics? Think about the people you meet in your daily lives. Let’s not fall for the myth that they don’t care. They do. They are just turned off political parties.

We have to have the courage to change. There are thousands of working people, affiliated to our Party, in your constituency. But at the moment you have no way of reaching them. Home helps who look after the elderly, and worry about their own mums and dads. Classroom assistants who teach our sons and daughters, and have high hopes for their own kids. Construction workers who build the homes we live in, but worry about whether they can afford a home of their own. People who keep our shops open morning, noon and night, but are at the sharp end of the cost-of-living crisis. And the porters, nurses and all the health service workers who support the pride of Britain: our National Health Service.

These are the working people affiliated to our party. But too often affiliated in name only. And think of all the other people, not in trade unions, whose voices we also need to hear: low-paid workers whose boss won’t recognise a union, small-business owners struggling to get a loan from the bank, stay-at-home mums who ask whether anyone is going to speak up for them.

I don’t want to break the link with working people. I want to hear the voices of working people louder than ever before. But in the 21st century, not everyone wants to be a member of a political party. And you shouldn’t have to pay £45 to have a voice in the Labour Party. That’s why I want to bring in the 100,000s of people who are supporters of our Party. And make them part of what we do.

Only Labour can be the party that fights for every person, from every walk of life, from every part of the United Kingdom: North and South, young and old, women and men. Only Labour can be a truly One Nation Party.

And today, we won’t just be voting to open our doors. We’ll be voting for the biggest transfer of power in the history of our Party to our members and supporters. Today, in leadership elections, an MP’s vote is worth 1,000 times more than each Party member’s.

Twenty-one years ago John Smith set out on the journey of One Member, One Vote. Today we can complete that journey.

Let’s make ourselves the party of equality. Not just in the policies we propose, but in the politics we practice.

And we can bring people in if we make them part of campaigns that change their communities. Keir Hardie used to call our Party a movement. Think about that word. It’s movements that change things.

Let’s invite people in and show what we can do together. Campaigning to stop the payday lenders ruining people’s lives, campaigning for and winning a living wage across our country. campaigning to freeze that energy bill, and in the next 200 days, campaigning and winning the fight to keep Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.

It has always been movements and people that change countries and change our world. If I am elected as Prime Minister I want to change this country, but I can only do it with a movement behind me, supporting what we do and shaping our policy.

Today if you vote for these reforms you will be voting for Labour to be a movement again. Arguing our case house by house, village by village, town by town. But movements are only as strong as the people within them. The depth, the diversity, the reach of a movement is the true measure of its strength and its ability to make change.

That’s why we have to change, that’s why we have to bring people in. Today, let’s vote to change our Party. Let’s build a movement. So that tomorrow, we can change our country.

Many people think that Labour adopted OMOV in 1993. John Smith was leader at the time and, after a bitter row, he narrowly won a vote on OMOV reform at party conference. It was a dramatic occasion, and it was widely assumed that Smith only won because of John Prescott’s wind-up speech, which has the unusual distinction of being remembered as both the most garbled, but also one of the most effective, party conference speeches of modern times.

But 1993 OMOV only applied to the selection of party candidates. Labour still selected its leaders using an electoral college, which meant that in the 2010 leadership election ballot papers were sent to 2.7m union members, many of whom do not even vote Labour.

Today that’s going to change. At a special conference in the ExCel centre in London the party is going to vote for a package of measures covering leadership election, membership and links with the union. Ed Miliband launched the process last year, in the light of the controversy about the Falkirk selection, and at the time his proposals focused on ensuring that the party would only take money from union levy payers if they had taken a personal decision to opt-in. That idea has survived, although it will not be fully implemented for another five years. But full OMOV for leadership elections (or a version, because “members” could be full members, affiliated members, or registered supporters) is now probably the key element in the package.

Here’s how the Labour party summarised the reforms in a news release yesterday.

These reforms will give:

· Union members a positive choice over paying affiliation fees

· People who want to become Affiliated Supporters their own individual voice within Labour

· An equal vote in leadership elections to Members, Affiliated Supporters and Registered Supporters according to the principles of OMOV

· Londoners who support Labour the chance to choose the Party’s candidate for Mayor

· A guarantee that the process for selecting candidates is free from manipulation and fair to everyone

And here is the 42-page document, compiled by Ray Collins, the former Labour general secretary, explaining the reform proposals in detail (pdf).

Sadly, today’s drama will not match 1993’s. There is wide support for the reforms in the party, and they are certain to be approved by a very large majority.

Still, there are concerns about them in some quarters, partly because they could jeopardise Labour party funding, and partly because one implication of OMOV is that the unions should give up their 50% vote share at party conference - which is something union leaders bitterly oppose. Today’s debate will give us a glimpse into the sometimes murky world of the Labour/union relationship.

Here’s the agenda for the day.

11am: Angela Eagle, shadow leader of the Commons and chair of Labour’s national executive committee, opens the conference.

Around 11.05am: Ed Miliband speaks.

Around 11.15am: The debate starts.

Around 12.50pm: Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, winds up the debate.

1pm: Delegates vote, using a card vote

Around 1.30pm: Result is announced.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow