A few days after the big Burnham speech in Liverpool, Bryn Griffiths, the host of our Labour Left Podcast, spent his Saturday reflecting upon what it all meant. His first stop was the Momentum National Coordinating Group and then it was on to Lewes Labour Party for a round table discussion on the Burnham Bounce. Labour Again My own response as Andy (he feels like an Andy rather than the harsher ‘Starmer’) sat down after his Labour Conference 2026 speech was a heartfelt “I think we’ve got a Labour leader again!” I had been driving my car but I had actually cheered once or twice as Andy spoke - an event during a Labour Prime Minister’s speech - which is without any historical precedent.

An update primarily compiled from reports from Justice for Colombia. Just two months after right wing President De la Espriella took office, Colombia’s fragile decade-old peace process hangs in the balance. The agreement, signed between the government and the leftist FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army), promised to bring an end to over 50 years of war in the country. Yet since then, nearly 500 former FARC-EP combatants who signed the agreement and more than 1,700 activists have been murdered. Of the 13,500 accredited FARC members in the peace process, over four per cent may have died violently, despite having disarmed and begun reintegrating into civilian life.

But will the government change its policy? asks Martin Wicks. At this year's Labour Party Conference, the Labour Campaign for Council Housing's resolution, sent in by at least ten CLPs, was kept off the agenda by a decision of the Conference Arrangements Committee. In fact, 1,126 CLP resolutions were deemed not 'contemporary'. Only 90 CLP resolutions made it on the agenda. It was judged not to be a 'contemporary motion' because, we were told, the National Policy Forum report had 'substantially' covered the issues in it. That was nonsense. There was only a single paragraph on housing.

The move comes just over a year after Syngenta, owned by state Chinese firm Sinochem, was given more than £2 million in Scottish Enterprise funding to expand its Scottish site

Over 120 campaigning organisations and unions across Europe, including CEO, Global Justice Now and EPSU have issued a joint call to governments and the European Commission to scrap all existing public...

Rosie Brocklehurst reviews Indefensible: How lawyers failed to stop the Post Office scandal, by John Hyde, published by Bristol University Press. The Horizon Post Office scandal is one of the biggest cases of injustice in recent British legal history. Many journalists reported on the story, but there are four journalists who should be singled out for the sheer persistence, scale of coverage and skill they have shown in bringing the story to public attention: Nick Wallis, a broadcast journalist and presenter, formerly at BBC Radio Surrey who is now freelance; Richard Brooks, who writes “In The Back” for Private Eye; the much-admired Karl Flinders of…

ANDREW FISHER has spent the week at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool, where the new Prime Minister continued to confound political editors and expert pundits A Blairite, a Brownite a…

A report obtained by The New Arab documents Israel’s systematic destruction of southern Lebanese towns, including Bint Jbeil, and the displacement of residents.

Mark Perryman recalls the role of Phil Piratin in stopping Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Phil Piratin was a Communist Party activist and organiser in Stepney, East London, who played a key role in the Cable Street people's blockade which successfully stopped Sir Oswald Mosley leading his British Union of Fascists (BUF) marching through the East End ninety years ago, 4th October 1936. In his autobiographical account Our Flag Stays Red, first published in 1948, Piratin details the community campaigning that not only built the blockade but was to break the support for the BUF in East London which by the march numbered 4,000 paid-up members and countless thousands more supporters.

The fourth in a series of articles by Carl Rowlands on the impact of technology on society and politics. Palantir, in many ways, have become a bogeyman, a corporation which popularly represents the second Trump era. Clive Lewis MP has perfectly encapsulated the public disgust at their growing influence and seemingly unstoppable growth across the British state, from the Metropolitan Police to the NHS and Department of Work and Pensions and beyond. Palantir is a company, incubated by some of the most right-wing characters who struck big in Silicon Valley in the 1990s and 2000s, among them Peter Thiel.

By Jeff Slee I’m reserving judgement on Andy Burnham’s government for now, until we see what they come up with in the rest of this year. But the most interesting parts of Andy Burnham’s speech to Labour’s Conference weren’t the policy proposals on pensions, or housing, or the EU, or electoral reform. They were his attempt to make Labour a party of social democracy, instead of neo-liberalism - even though he didn’t use those words. They were his rejection of the way British society has gone over the last 40 years – his rejection of Thatcherism, and by implication his rejection also of the 1997 – 2010 New Labour government’s continuation of Thatcherism.

Ministers must prepare an Emergency Heat Tariff to cap the cost of heating this winter, the End Fuel Poverty Coalition says, with gas prices already rising 27% year on year from 1st October and fresh forecasts pointing to a further spike in January. Ofgem has set gas at a maximum 7.97p per kilowatt hour for households on the Standard Variable Tariff from 1st October and while predictions for January prices vary, some forecasts show that it could reach the level at which the last government set the Energy Price Guarantee.

The Coalition urges residents to join the International Day of Action Against Palantir, today, Thursday 1st October After a year of campaigning, the Hackney Coalition Against Palantir (HCAP) has welcomed an assurance that Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has no current plans to use the controversial NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Deputy Chief Executive Tom Nettel outlined the Trust’s position when presenting its digital strategy to Hackney Council’s Adults Health and Integration Scrutiny Commission on 22nd September 2026, according to Coalition representatives who attended. The FDP is an NHS data platform supplied through a contract led by US technology company Palantir.

As predicted, Andy Burnham’s speech to the Labour Party Conference yesterday was full of content, with the proposed National Care Service getting most of the headlines. But the Prime Minister also said he would not rest until there was no homelessness, promising council homes and democratic control of the housing stock. He called water a symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain and pledged legislation to scrap the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies. He announced a new government body to invest in Britain's electricity grid and he called for a new relationship with the EU, ruling nothing out.

The Socialist Health Association’s Esther Giles responds to Chancellor John Healey’s Labour Party Conference speech. When one strips away the warm rhetoric about red ties and miners’ lamps, the overriding message from John Healey’s speech this week was that “fiscal discipline” was first and foremost in his priorities. And that “fiscal discipline” meant adhering to former Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Treasury rules. He said that the October budget would be based on “fiscal discipline” in order to provide businesses with Breathing Space and to Give Hope. Healey confirmed that the Government would invest in three maritime projects to strengthen national security and drive growth.

Four parties backed a ban on headscarves for girls under 14, and a child pays the price.

Jamie Driscoll’s bold plan should be widely read. Hostage Nation: Britain’s Escape Plan is a new report by Jamie Driscoll. It’s billed as “a comprehensive plan for how we can build – and pay for – …

"Israeli officials are now condemning settler terror, but the state itself is backing this violence."

The Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs is today launching a new pamphlet at Labour Party Conference setting out the policies it believes Andy Burnham should adopt to rebuild Labour’s support after the failures of the Starmer leadership and to deliver on his pledge to reverse 40 years of neoliberalism. The pamphlet, The Socialist Policies We Need, includes proposals for a new economic settlement; bringing public services back into public hands; tax reforms to raise billions for social and economic investment; strengthening workers’ rights; fixing Britain’s housing and social security systems; strengthening the NHS; and transforming social care.

Jamie Driscoll’s bold plan should be widely read. Hostage Nation: Britain’s Escape Plan is a new report by Jamie Driscoll. It’s billed as “a comprehensive plan for how we can build – and pay for – clean energy, 100,000 council homes a year, integrated public transport and retrofit every home in the country, and create all the secure jobs that go with it.” From 2019 until 2024, Jamie Driscoll was the elected mayor of the North of Tyne Combined Authority. In 2023, he was barred by the Labour Party apparatus on factionally motivated grounds from standing for re-election.

Palantir has a £330m contract to process the UK's National Health Service data

Andy Burnham must Introduce Immediate relief and end Food Insecurity, say campaigners. The Right to Food Commission is, this week, at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, publishing its sobering and hard-hitting findings into food insecurity and calling on PM Andy Burnham to have the courage of his convictions and end the scourge of hunger across the UK. The Commission describes how people are feeling insecure about feeding themselves and their families, caused by low incomes and rising costs of essentials, like energy and housing as well as food, as the embodiment of the state failure that the PM recognised, and promised to tackle, when taking office.

An alternative economic strategy which prioritises infrastructure based on human need and wellbeing is needed to tackle AI, argues Carl Rowlands, in the third of his series of articles. How do we handle AI? The problem for socialists is that AI represents concentration: a concentration of money, processing power - hence the term “hyperscale data centres” - and energy. Its use of training materials also represents a huge concentration. AI models have absorbed large swathes of the internet and huge amounts of printed materials. With its speculative circular financing and its dependence upon venture capital, this is not something that could form the basis of a nationalised industry.

DOWNLOAD THE BULLETIN AS A PDF HERE In this week’s bulletin: Who gets sent to war/ Will Russia go further?/ “Resist invasion or accept occupation”/ Research on human rights in Ukraine/ Evidence of …

By Dave Levy The critical task for the Party’s disciplinary process is to restore trust in its fairness. The rules and their enforcement must offer dignity, respect and make the promises of membership rights, including a right to fair process under C2.2.8 of the Party rulebook a reality. The Forde Report identified the risk that the disciplinary process could be used factionally; the reforms since the EHRC report have not removed that risk nor rebuilt a culture of trust. The events from earlier this year leading to the resignation of Morgan McSweeney show the factional nature of Labour’s processes and the weakness of its processes in holding its leadership accountable to its policy, values, and rules.

We reproduce Matt Willgress’s speech to the Labour & Palestine fringe meeting ‘Justice for Palestine: Defend International Law, Sanctions Now!’ in Liverpool yesterday on the eve of Labour Party Conference. For those of you who are new to Arise – a Festival of Left Ideas, we are a cross-party, movement-led socialist events platform, both online and in person. And we are co-hosting three other important events this week you can find information about it in your packs. Other speakers will concentrate on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, so I am going to use my short time to focus attention on the crimes unfolding in the West Bank.

Carole Concha Bell marks the passing earlier this month of a great director and screenwriter. Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 to a middle-class family in Santiago, Chile. Because his architect father’s work kept the family constantly on the move, Guzmán’s childhood was scattered across various schools between the capital and the coastal city of Valparaíso. Guzman’s path to becoming Chile’s greatest documentary historian, however, was far from linear. In 1960, he enrolled at the University of Chile for a multidisciplinary arts course covering theatre, acting, and production. He pivoted to history in his second year, and later transitioned to philosophy, before a severe lack of funds forced him to cut his university education short in 1962.

Ten trade unions call on the British government to end its military support for Saudi Arabia.

Today is the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. We are a very long way from that, argues Carol Turner. “The threat of nuclear catastrophe is immediate and growing… rising tensions, deepening mistrust, expanding military competition and the modernisation of nuclear arsenals cast a dangerous shadow over our common future.” - UN Secretary-General António Guterres Just about everyone is aware that military spending is soaring in Britain and worldwide. Did you know the same goes for spending on nuclear weapons? In the past five years, nine nuclear weapons states – the US, China, UK, Russia, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – have spent almost half a trillion dollars ‘improving’ their nuclear arsenals.

By Rathi Guhadasan The Socialist Health Association's proposed rule change on ‘Cash for Influence’ has been ruled out of order and will not be debated at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool next week. We initially learned of the potential disappearance of our rule change second-hand through the left NEC CLP reps’ report on Labour Hub and elsewhere. We wrote repeatedly over the past almost two months to ask whether the rule change had definitely been ruled out as reported, on what grounds, and whether we could appeal or resubmit. None of those enquiries were answered until two days ago, when we were informed that the reason for the ruling was that the referencing was unclear.

On the latest episode of the Labour Left Podcast our presenter Bryn Griffiths interviews Clive Lewis MP to consider the new balance of forces within Andy Burnham’s Labour Party.  The summer break is over; the 2026 conference season is upon us and if we are going to beat Reform and save our Party we need a reset. But is a radical party reset underway? In a candid and wide-ranging interview, Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, explores how far Andy Burnham has moved us on from Labour Together’s…

By Sandra Wyman According to a recent National Police Chiefs’ Council report, violence against women and girls (VAWG) now adds up to twenty percent of all crime and is seen by police as a national emergency. In response, Labour under Keir Starmer committed to halving the instances of VAWG in the next ten years via changes to policing. In addition there will be support for policies to educate young people about healthy relationships. This is an improvement on what happened in the past. My mother was abused by my stepfather: police suggested she might try being nicer to him (in those days they were unlikely to intervene in something regarded as ‘only a domestic’ and it was considered acceptable for husbands to ‘chastise’ their wives for disobedience including physically).

By Ben Studd On 4th October, Brazil votes. President Lula, seeking a fourth term, is neck-and-neck in the polls with Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump's chosen candidate. If nobody wins outright, it goes to a runoff on 25th October. Jair Bolsonaro governed Brazil from 2019 to 2023. His government privatised public assets and cut welfare, hitting the poorest hardest. It gutted environmental enforcement, and Amazon deforestation accelerated as agribusiness and mining interests moved in with impunity. Violence against Indigenous communities defending their land rose.

Mark Perryman's annual selection this year ranges from Eric Hobsbawm to Rocking against Racism. Emile Chabal - The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian In the October 1983 edition of the magazine Marxism Today, Eric Hobsbawm described Labour's landslide defeat in that year's General Election as Labour's Lost Millions. It was this essay, combined with Eric's September 1978 essay The Forward March of Labour Halted, also published by Marxism Today, that resulted in him being dubbed “Neil Kinnock's favourite Marxist”. The pair of them celebrated this apparent intellectual togetherness at the 1983 Labour Conference by speaking at a Fabian Society Fringe Meeting.

The Government is refusing to introduce private sector rent controls, but they can save public funds and increase tenants’ usable income

Barnham campaigners are learning from Piddington’s publicity success, but its experience offers warnings as well as lessons

Concerns that Environment Agency hasn't properly accounted for the environmental and health risks associated with this project

Ahead of speaking at the Arise meeting, A Fork in the Road Moment: For an Irreversible shift in the Balance of Power and Wealth, John McDonnell MP shares his thoughts on the subject. There has undoubtedly been a change of culture in the Labour Party with the arrival of Andy Burnham to the leadership. Unfettered open political discussion has been restored. We have no illusions about this. We don’t know for how long, how far it extends and whether that debate will result in influence for the left and change in action.

A Constitutional Convention to reset the relationship between the different nations of the UK is long overdue, argues Mick Antoniw. The UK is slowly but assuredly fragmenting and its democratic structures are slowly disintegrating. The rise of nationalisms in all four countries is proof of that . Andy Burnham has identified the need for change but it is not yet clear whether this aspiration can become a reality. It is a challenge for both Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru to break out of the constitutional straitjacket they have created for themselves: one is a centralist sovereignty control mantra and the other is a romanticised national independence vision, both outdated and both running contrary and with disregard to the evidence of the numerous commissions and think tanks over the past two decades.

Mike Phipps reviews Power and the People: A History of British Energy, by Arthur Downing, published by Verso. This is a timely book, appearing as Shell’s and BP’s quarterly profits more than doubled and Centrica added a further £497 million to its adjusted operating profits, taking the total made by British Gas and its successor company to more than £56 billion in operating profits in the forty years since privatisation. Meanwhile, as the author pointed out recently, Britain has some of the highest electricity prices in the world. Yet “Britain’s political class remains unified in its belief that energy infrastructure must be owned by the private sector.”

A Labour conference motion calling for the public ownership of water has been ruled out of scope, prompting an appeal from campaigners.

Following yesterday’s round-up of universities facing strike action due to staff cuts, George Binette reports on a dispute in southeast London. Located in Lewisham, Goldsmiths, an affiliate of the University of London, has gained an international reputation for its music and visual art programmes with alumni including the likes of Oscar and Turner prize winner Steve McQueen. Goldsmiths has also featured strong programmes in anthropology, sociology and education studies. In recent years, it has become a battleground between lecturers and senior management. This spring members of the University & Colleges Union (UCU) at Goldsmiths voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action - more than 91% in favour on a turnout of 63% in a postal ballot.

Former Hackney councillor and health scrutiny member Claudia Turbet-Delof warns that patients could lose a vital democratic voice without consultation or any clear replacement proposals to date. As a Public Governor at East London’s Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, I am raising the alarm with fellow governors, public-health cabinet members, health scrutiny committees, mayors and healthcare organisations in London and across the country over the proposed abolition of NHS Councils of Governors. I am genuinely shocked by the speed at which this proposal under the Ten-Year Health Plan appears to be advancing.

By Simon Pirani The disastrous failure of the government’s ECO4 scheme – which was supposed to retrofit homes with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels – is “the next Post Office scandal”, Imogen Thomas of Fuel Poverty Action warned last week. “It’s that level of outrageous,” Imogen told the campaign’s Make Green Fair conference in Manchester on Saturday. Homes wrecked by incompetent or fraudulent contractors are facing their fourth winter without heating. People claiming compensation are given the run-around. The retrofit measures – that could and should help tackle climate change, while making people’s lives better – have made them worse.