Autumn is party conference season in the UK. Parliament goes into recess (rather too soon after a lengthy summer holiday for some voters’ liking) while the parties take it in turns to gather at one or other of the big conference centres around the country. These are costly events for the parties to stage, so why are they such fixtures on the political calendar?

Leading politicians - and lesser lights - come together with hundreds of delegates, members,affiliates, lobbyists and think tanks for three or four days to discuss and develop policies, raise revenue, grab the media spotlight (important especially for the smaller parties), rally support, network and socialise - sometimes a bit too enthusiastically. There are also many fringe events held by various organisations - debates, seminars, workshops and shindigs. The media pay close attention to conference attendance levels - e.g. the 2025 Conservative conference was noticeably sparse with plenty of empty chairs; and to new policy announcements - e.g. the Liberal Democrats declared that they would use the Civil Contingencies Act (emergency and wartime legislation) to set up ‘nightingale processing centres’ to clear the asylum backlog. With most of the parties, some or all members at conference can vote on motions and policies but those votes are nowadays rarely decisive or binding on the leadership. For example, this year’s Labour conference passed a motion calling for a wealth tax; the Chancellor will ignore this - as she did last year.

Memorable moments from the 2025 conferences

PM Starmer’s speech at the Labour conference was rather light on policy pronouncements,though he did ditch Tony Blair’s New Labour goal of 50% of young people going to university, in favour of ‘gold standard apprenticeships’. He listed some of his government’s achievements, including nationalising British Steel, banning fire-and-rehire practices and zero-hours contracts, introducing stronger protections for renters, rebuilding schools, extending votes to 16 and 17 year-olds and extending free school meals. He was sharply critical of Nigel Farage, calling him a ‘snake oil merchant’ and his immigration policies ‘racist’. He declared that the UK is at ‘a fork in the road’ and framed today’s UK politics as a choice between ‘Labour or Reform, decency or division, renewal or decline’. His speech was - for him - unusually rousing and combative, which settled the party’s nerves and, for the time being, silenced mutterings about a possible change of leadership.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch also gave what was widely seen as her best performance to date - which largely and pointedly ignored Nigel Farage. New policy proposals included the abolition of most business rates on high street shops and pubs, inheritance tax on some farmland, VAT on private school fees, stamp duty on main home purchases and the carbon tax on electricity, with the money to come instead from £47 billion cuts to welfare, foreign aid and the civil service. She also said the party would take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that they would repeal the Employment Rights Bill. In the following fortnight the party raised a heartening £460k in donations. Badenoch will surely now see the party through to the 2026 May elections.

At the Liberal Democrat conference, former leader Tim Farron draped himself in the union/England flag to ‘reclaim patriotism’ from the far right, to the strains of Land of Hope and Glory. Current leader Ed Davey gave a hard-hitting speech, condemning Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza, and calling Elon Musk a ‘criminal’ for inciting violence in the UK and ‘enabling child abuse and self-harm’ on his Twitter/X website. He also mentioned Farage 31times, deploying him as a recruiting sergeant for the Liberal Democrats who, he said, would negotiate a new customs union with the EU. Their flagship policy announcement was a windfall tax on banks to create an Energy Security Bank to help cut people’s energy bills.

At the Green Party conference, new leader Zack Polanski made his debut speech in his self-proclaimed ‘eco-populist’ style, which is fast winning thousands of new party members - now increased by 55% since his election. His party’s policies include a wealth tax, the introduction of a universal basic income, renationalisation of water companies, unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from Nato, electoral reform, ‘calling out the genocide in Gaza’ and rejoining the EU. Unlike the other main parties, the Green leadership only promotes the policies which have been voted on and decided by the membership.

The Reform UK conference controversially platformed Dr Aseem Malhotra, a vaccine sceptic who said that Covid vaccines were ‘a significant factor in the cancer of members of the royal family’. Lucy Connolly, recently imprisoned for inciting racial hatred and urging people to ‘set fire’ to hotels housing asylum seekers, was introduced as ‘Britain’s favourite political prisoner’. There were strong hints that the party would abandon its 2024 manifesto pledge of £90 billion in tax cuts. And recent Conservative defector Andrea Jenkyns - now a Reform mayor - took to the stage to sing a self-penned song called ‘Insomniac’, to the bafflement of most observers.

Back to work

The conferences tend to fade rapidly from public memory, if they registered much at all. Parliament has returned from recess and the parties have returned to their usual routines at Westminster and around the country. They will all now be looking to next May’s local and regional elections with varying degrees of anticipation or trepidation. UK party politics has become significantly more diverse and divided in recent years, and the smaller parties especially will be seeking to target their limited resources ruthlessly on winnable seats to make further gains in elections to come.