Has Labour just lost the next election?

Will this be the party conference that loses Labour the next election? Buoyed by a modest bounce in the polls and finally having a leader who can actually string a sentence together, the Labour Party is throwing caution to the wind. While much of the noise coming from the Liverpool conference may be perfectly calibrated to tickle the party base, there seems to have been no consideration of what the general public might think.

From the UK prime minister downwards, Labour delegates have spent the past few days laying traps for themselves and handing ammunition to their opponents. One junior minister declared country pubs, labradors and warm ales ‘far right’. Another called for Britain to pay billions in ‘reparations’ to developing countries – only hours after chancellor John Healey warned that the country had run out of money.

In what one union boss has called an act of ‘electoral suicide’, Andy Burnham has used his conference speech to propose scrapping the triple lock on pensions. Has he already forgotten the fury his predecessor, Keir Starmer, prompted when proposing far less significant changes to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance?

Even this may not prove to be the most contentious policy to come out of Labour’s conference. Voters want the borders to be controlled, the numbers brought down and for migrants to contribute to the nation. But Burnham’s usually sensible home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has now flatly rejected these demands.

Yesterday, she announced plans to bring more asylum seekers to the UK from Afghanistan and Palestine, even as asylum seekers continue to pour in relentlessly from across the Channel. More significant still, she pledged to water down her own planned reforms that would have limited welfare spending on new migrants. Mahmood’s speech may have been cheered to the rafters in the conference hall, but what earns applause in Labour la-la-land is pretty repellent to British voters.

In May 2025, when Mahmood first proposed reforming ‘indefinite leave to remain’ (ILR), a form of permanent residency for migrants, she clearly understood that a fiscal disaster was looming. The 2.15million migrants who arrived between 2021 and the 2024 election – known as the ‘Boriswave’ after the PM who opened the borders – are slowly starting to become eligible for ILR and, crucially, entitled to claim benefits on the same terms as British citizens. What’s more, nearly 500,000 migrants who arrived specifically on a health-and-care worker visa will soon be eligible for ILR. Then, they will no longer be tied to that sector, despite its chronic staffing shortages. They can either seek work elsewhere or not work at all and claim benefits, which usually pays more than social-care work in any case.

Mahmood’s 2025 migration white paper proposed extending how long migrants would have to wait before obtaining ILR from five years to 10 years, and to 15 years in the case of care workers. Without her reforms, she argued back then, care workers and their dependents alone would cost up to £10 billion over their lifetimes. Reform UK estimates that, unless the system is changed, the lifetime costs of the roughly 1.6million migrants set to be granted ILR between 2026 and 2030 could amount to as much as £154 billion.

Whichever figure seems more plausible, the principle at stake is the same. Here is an unprecedentedly vast cohort of foreign workers, invited into the UK in defiance of repeated manifesto pledges to control immigration, who will soon have access to Britain’s suicidally generous welfare state. To ordinary Britons, this is a staggering injustice, a violation of the social contract. Yet to Labour activists, the ‘injustice’ here was that welfare benefits might have been made more difficult for non-citizens to access.

This is not a fringe view in today’s Labour Party, either. Former deputy PM Angela Rayner blasted Mahmood’s reforms as ‘unfair’ and ‘un-British’. It’s estimated around 100 MPs would have been prepared to rebel against tighter ILR rules. Hell, even Our Andy himself, in his previous life as Greater Manchester mayor, once called for Britain’s welfare state to be opened up to migrants immediately on arrival. It has become an article of faith, a matter of ‘fairness’, apparently, that the welfare state should extend to any and all comers.

No doubt Labour’s delegates will leave Liverpool feeling awfully pleased with themselves. The voters, on the other hand, are unlikely to share in the mood. For all Andy Burnham’s man-of-the-people schtick, Labour remains a party whose priorities will forever be at odds with the public.