3 October 2025
The city of Liverpool is rightly famous for many things.
The Beatles, Anfield, the Royal Albert Dock …
… and the Labour Party Conference!
Okay, I admit it. That last one might not always be on everybody’s radar!
But it should be – because what was announced at this year’s conference will change our country for the better.
Not that you’ll hear much about it in the media and online, but in just over a year in office, we’ve rebuilt the foundations of the broken country we inherited.
We’ve delivered 5 million extra NHS appointments, raised the state pension and the National Minimum Wage, put more police on our streets, provided more families with funded childcare, and much, much more.
Yet we must go further, and we will. It’s not enough just to rebuild – we’ve got to revitalise and renew our country. And that’s where the announcements made at the Labour Conference come in.
Let’s start with our NHS. The Prime Minister unveiled NHS Online: a new digital service that will catapult the NHS into the twenty-first century. It’ll allow patients to be triaged more quickly at home using the NHS App, and it’ll deliver 8.5 million extra appointments in its first three years.
The Chancellor announced our Youth Employment Guarantee: a promise of paid work placements for unemployed young people. That means real experience, real wages, and real hope. It’s about giving every young person a fair shot.
The Chancellor also committed to making sure every primary school has its own library. Every child deserves access to books, stories, and the chance to fall in love with learning. That’s exactly what they’ll get with Labour.
An NHS fit for the digital age, guaranteed work experience for young people, and better opportunities for our children. In other words, the hope of a brighter future – that’s what we offer.
Not every party conference this year was about hope.
The Reform conference wasn’t about helping working families or rebuilding public services. It was about anti-vax conspiracy theories, recycling ex-Tories, and – even more depressingly – division.
Let’s be clear: politicians from different parties have always argued with one another. That’s not news, that’s democracy.
But most of us want the country to succeed even when we’re not in charge. We want to win the argument by offering a better future, not by hoping things fall apart.
Reform are different.
They don’t want to win by putting the hard work in. They want Britain to fail. They want to drive us apart.
That’s not public service – it’s self-service.
And frankly, it’s as unpatriotic as it gets.
True patriotism isn’t about talking our country down. It’s about working tirelessly each and every day to deliver for the British people. That’s what we have been doing, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
I’ll be playing my full part. Because like all the Labour Party members I met at Liverpool, and all those I know in Barnsley, I’m a proper patriot, not a plastic one.