Labour conference 2017: Jeremy Corbyn's keynote speech – as it happened

The Labour party has also released the results of an election for two seats on the national constitutional committee (NCC), a body that deals with party discipline. As Paul Waugh reports at HuffPost UK, the two leftwing Momentum-backed candidates won easily.

This morning Labour released the results of the card vote taken yesterday on three important changes to Labour’s rule book. All three passed overwhelmingly.

Here are the figures.

1 - Adding four new members to the national executive committee

For: 98.9%

Against: 1.1%

2 - Changing the nomination rules in leadership and deputy leadership elections, so that candidates need the backing of 10% of MPs and MEPs, not 15%

For: 89.23%

Against: 10.77%

In this vote unions, who have half the vote at conference, were overwhelmingly in favour (98.11%). But amongst the constituency party members, who have the other 50% of the voters, there was some opposition. Almost 20% of CLP delegates voted against.

3 - Tightening up disciplinary rules covering conduct including antisemitism (details here)

For: 96.28%

Against: 3.72%

My colleague Rafael Behr likes the singing.

Here’s a flavour of it.

A Labour MP has brushed off reports that she mocked Prince Harry’s military career at a fringe meeting of the party’s Brighton conference, claiming the coverage proves the press are in charge of the narrative, the Press Association reports.

Emma Dent Coad, MP for Kensington, reportedly questioned Harry’s ability to fly a helicopter when addressing a meeting entitled Reigning In The Monarchy.

The Sun quoted her as saying: “Harry can’t actually fly a helicopter ... He tried to pass the helicopter exam about four times and he couldn’t get through it at all so he always goes for the co-pilot. So he just sits there going: ‘vroom vroom’.”

Dent Coad also reportedly said that Harry and his brother, William, were “not very bright”, adding: “Just let them drift away, be playboys or whatever.”

But responding to the coverage on Wednesday, she pointed to the lack of media reports about her comments on the Grenfell Tower disaster, which happened in her constituency.

She told the Press Association: “I’ve spoken five times about the Grenfell fire, yet this is all they’re interested in, which really proves the point I was making about the press in charge of the narrative.”

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At the Labour conference proceedings on the stage have started. The Rainbow Chorus, a LGBT choir, are singing.

The Labour conference hasn’t quite finished yet, but it’s time to take stock. Here are 10 things we’ve learned from #LabCon17.

1 - The Labour party is more united than it has been for 20 years. You probably have to go back to 1997 to find a Labour conference so devoid of meaningful division. After Tony Blair’s first year as prime minister, conference became a showcase for divisions either within the leadership (Blair v Brown), or between leadership and membership. This year there has been a blast of harmony, to a large extent explained by the fact that ...

2 - Internal opposition to Corbyn in the party has collapsed. That is not because all those MPs and party members who were sceptical about him last year have seen the light. In private many still have their doubts about the Corbyn project, even though the election result did a lot to allay their fears. But there is no trace of any alternative political agenda in the party in the moment, and no MPs are making more than a half-hearted effort to articulate one. The only exception is Europe, where pro-Europeans have been trying to mobilise against the leadership, but ...

3 - Labour’s pro-Corbynism trumps its pro-Europeanism. That was the significance of the conference decision on Sunday not to have a “meaningful vote” (to use the phrase coined by Keir Starmer in another contest - when talking about parliament’s final vote on the Brexit deal) on staying in the single market. It did look like a classic, Blair-era leadership stitch-up, but party members (following the unofficial Momentum whip) voted overwhelmingly not to have a vote, as well as the trade unions, so it was a genuine democratic decision. When your party members are doing your stitching up for you, you have achieved a level of control that even Blair would have envied. But, after some Twitter venting on Sunday night, Labour’s pro-European largely went quiet – possibly because they know that party policy is gradually sliding their way. Corbyn is refusing to rule out keeping the UK in the European Economic Area for good after Brexit - perhaps because he is more interested in staying Labour leader and becoming prime minister than in indulging his lifelong single market scepticism.

4 - Labour has a genuine problem accepting it lost the general election. Collectively the party seems to be suffering from some sort of cognitive dissonance on this point, much to the amusement of journalists who have been been able to engage in projects like this.

Given that expectations of what Labour would achieve before the general election were so universally dire (including amongst Corbynites, although some of them seem to have forgotten this), this elation is understandable. But it also means that ...

5 - Labour appears complacent, and has not been thinking hard about what it needs to do to win the next election. The sensible step for any party that has lost a general election is to hold a postmortem, work out what went wrong, and strategise about what needs to be done to gain those extra seats. There has been almost no evidence of the party collectively doing any of that this week. Instead there is a widespread assumption that, now it has been established that Corbyn is not an obvious electoral liability, Labour is likely to win next time because the Tories are floundering and all governments inevitably fall. That may well turn out to be what happens, but there is no guarantee, and a more hard-headed party would be saying things intended to extend its electoral appeal. That has not happened so far this week, although we are told that Corbyn will use his speech later to address not just the party, but the nation at large.

6 - Corbyn is so dominant that, not only does he face no challenge to his leadership, there is not even an obvious successor. In most political parties, at any one time, there is someone generally identified as the next leader in waiting. They often never become leader (Yvette Cooper filled this slot for a few years in the Miliband era), but their presence means the leader is always, to an extent, on probation. Corbyn, though, is so pre-eminent that the usual chatter about who might be the next leader is extremely muted. The danger is that the party is starting to look like a personality cult. It isn’t, quite, but even if you acknowledge that there is an irony element in the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chanting that has become the conference anthem (will it replace the Red Flag at the end of proceedings today?), there is something just a little too North Korean about it all.

7 - Labour is now perhaps better understood as a party for the young than a party for the working class. This is something we knew from the general election voting demographics but it has been dramatically illustrated in Brighton by the thousands of young people turning up for the Momentum-organised The World Transformed (TWT) events, an alternative progressive politics festival taking place alongside the conference. It has been extremely well organised, and it has seen people queuing around the block to hear the kind of speakers who only attracted tiny audiences at fringe events a few years ago. After just two years, TWT now seems an integral part of Labour conference.

8 - Business is taking Labour much more seriously. After Corbyn was first elected party leader, a lot of the corporate lobbyists who normally attend party conference stayed away. They assumed they did not need to worry about preparing for a Labour government. But that has changed, and this year they are here in force. They might not necessarily like Labour much, but they feel the need to engage.

9 - Corbyn is getting much, much better at handling the media. He was elected leader because of his politics, not because he was good on TV, and until this year his broadcast interviews were often marred by policy clangers or tetchiness. But over the last six months he has improved enormously, not least at the essential political skill of being able to sidestep tricky questions. (Remember how he handled Andrew Marr’s question about illegal strikes?) In this respect he is acting much more like a conventional politician, without having sacrificed his reputation for authenticity – a rare achievement.

10 - Labour’s transformation has not finished. Corbyn may have achieved complete dominance over the party, but reshaping it is still a work-in-progress and, behind the scenes, there is considerable nervousness amongst MPs not sympathetic to Corbyn about where the party will end up, and whether they will end up being deselected. The party voted through some rule changes yesterday, but the founder of Momentum has made it clear he would like to go further and a review of party democracy being carried out by Corbyn’s political secretary Katy Clark – which has received surprisingly little discussion at conference – could end up being the vehicle by which this happens.

Jeremy Corbyn has been tweeting about his speech.

Tom Watson, the deputy Labour leader, has said the party was surprised by its success in Scotland in the general election. Labour won seven seats, holding Edinburgh South and picking up six others from the SNP.

In an interview with BBC Radio Scotland, Watson said: “Frankly we were surprised at the results in Scotland.”

But he went on:

We shouldn’t have been because I was up campaigning in the local elections in May, I was on the doorsteps in Glasgow and people were beginning to tell me their views on the health service, the education system – obviously after 10 years in government the SNP are failing in the delivery of those public services.

Labour was now trying to win back more seats from the SNP, he said:

If we’re targeting those seats it is because generally they are former Labour seats and we would like to re-engage voters there and win their confidence back.

Watson also insisted that Labour’s leadership was opposed to the prospect of any deal with the SNP – despite veteran MEP David Martin suggesting the groundwork should be laid for a possible coalition between the rival parties at Holyrood.

Martin said while the prospect may seem “unthinkable” to many, signs of increasing co-operation between the two parties had been growing. He suggested moves to recognise common ground were necessary now in case the 2021 Scottish elections fail to give either party a majority.

Asked about this, Watson said:

I’ve never talked about doing deals with the SNP ... Some of our colleagues still do, but that’s certainly not the leader and deputy leader that say that.

Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, told the Today programme this morning that Labour could not commit to giving public sector workers a 5% pay rise. She said the party would love to be able to promise that, but that it would not make promises it could not deliver.

Instead Labour was currently proposing an inflation pay rise, she said.

We’re a government in waiting; the Conservatives would like you to think that we’re talking about a magic money tree and promising things we can’t deliver.

We’ve set out quite clearly that we would like to give – we’d love to give public sector workers a 5% pay rise but we cannot do that at the moment.

What we’ve said is we will make sure that they get an inflation pay rise, which is more than what this Conservative government have done.

We can’t undo the damage that the Conservatives have done to our public sector for years and years but what we will do is reverse some of that and start putting us on the right path.

But it’ll take longer than I would personally like to see, but we have to be responsible about that and that is what Jeremy Corbyn is going to set out in his speech about responsible government, about making sure we are investing in our future and that we have a credible plan to do that.

Rayner was also asked about the Telegraph story saying Labour was proposing a “robot tax”. (See 8.59am.) “That’s not what we were talking about at all,” she said.

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It’s the final day of the Labour conference and Jeremy Corbyn will wrap it up with his keynote speech just before lunch. It will be the third year he has addressed Labour conference as leader and never has he had such a receptive audience.

Corbyn’s office released some excerpts overnight. Here is the Guardian’s overnight story about what he will say.

And here are some of the key passages we’ve seen.

• Corbyn will say Labour is a government in waiting.

Against all predictions, in June we won the largest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 and achieved Labour’s best vote for a generation. It’s a result which has put the Tories on notice and Labour on the threshold of power.

Yes, we didn’t do quite well enough and we remain in opposition for now. But we have become a government in waiting. And our message to the country could not be clearer: Labour is ready ... We are ready for government.

• He will say he wants to make public services and businesses accountable to the public.

I promised you two years ago that we would do politics differently. It’s not always been easy. There’s quite a few who prefer politics the old way. But let me say it again. We will do politics differently. And the vital word there is “we”.

Not just leaders saying things are different in a way that leaves everything the same – but everyone having the chance to shape our democracy. Our rights as citizens are as important as our rights as consumers. Power will be devolved to the community, not monopolised in Westminster and Whitehall.

Now let’s take it a stage further: make public services accountable to communities, business accountable to the public and politicians accountable to those we serve.

Let the next Labour government transform Britain by genuinely placing power in the hands of the people - the creative, compassionate and committed people of our country.

Quite what this means in practice has not yet been set out, but potentially the implications of this approach could be very radical. For example, one idea being kicked around informally by Labour MPs would be to enable patients to somehow vote out GPs if they feel they are getting a bad service.

• He will say the Tories are bungling Brexit.

The Tories are more interested in posturing for personal advantage than in getting the best deal for Britain. Never has the national interest been so ill-served on such a vital issue. If there were no other reason for the Tories to go, their self-interested Brexit bungling would be reason enough.

So I have a simple message to the cabinet: for Britain’s sake pull yourself together or make way.

• He will say Grenfell Tower is emblematic of “a failed and broken system” that Labour will replace.

The disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.

Now that regime has a tragic monument – the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower, a horrifying fire in which dozens perished, an entirely avoidable human disaster.

A tenants’ group of Grenfell residents had warned, and I quote words that should haunt all politicians: “The Grenfell Action Group firmly believes that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord.”

Grenfell is not just the result of bad political decisions. It stands for a failed and broken system, which Labour must and will replace.

• He will say that the rise of automation will make more investment in lifelong learning essential.

We need urgently to face the challenge of automation; robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant. That is a threat in the hands of the greedy but what an opportunity if it’s managed in the interests of society as a whole.

But if planned and managed properly, accelerated technological change can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure, a springboard for expanded creativity and culture, making technology our servant and not our master at long last.

The tide of automation and technological change means training and management of the workforce must be centre stage in the coming years. So Labour will build an education and training system from the cradle to the grave that empowers people not one that shackles them with debt.

The Daily Telegraph has written this up as Corbyn proposing a tax on robots.

Corbyn’s speech is the only item on the conference agenda today. It starts at 12.15pm.

But, before then, I will be covering the buildup, and looking at the best conference analysis on the papers and on the web. I will also be posting a “10 things we’ve learnt from the Labour conference.”

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

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

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