MP Reed caps off his high-profile week with a flood of protest

CONFERENCE NOTEBOOK: Bringing Croydon’s trains back into public ownership and putting more emphasis on apprenticeships are among some of the announcements made by Labour figures in Liverpool, where ANDREW FISHER, pictured left, was checking out the queues for Steve Reed’s MAGA-style hats

Steve Reed, the Labour MP for Streatham and Croydon North, was an ubiquitous presence in the first days of the 2025 Labour Party conference here in Liverpool.

The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government spent much of the first day of conference at an event, sponsored by lobbyists Arden Strategies, signing MAGA-style red baseball caps emblazoned with his new slogan “Build, baby, build”.

Among those queuing up for the embarrassing Trumpian attire was a very active Croydon Labour activist who is to be a council candidate in next May’s local elections. No prizes for guessing who (your answers in the Comments section below, please).

Whether the hats will be standard issue for Labour canvassers on the streets of Croydon or Lambeth in the months through to the local elections next May remains to be seen…

The investment in Reed has gone beyond cringeworthy headwear, however. Big new policy announcements have been bestowed upon him, with the “Pride in Place” funding unveiled in the week before conference – a sort of replacement of the Levelling Up fund under Boris Johnson that was widely seen as a slush fund for Tory MPs’ re-election campaigns. Not that that worked very well.

Reed insisted these multi-million-pound funds – New Addington is to get £20million over 10 years – would be devolved for local leaders to spend on local priorities and targeted at the most deprived areas.

And on the eve of conference 12 “new” towns were announced in what was described as an expansion of the housebuilding programme. However, this was immediately thrown into doubt when council leaders in some areas appeared blindsided that their areas would soon be turned into a “new” town.

David Sutton, parish council chairman in Tempsford, a village of 600 residents in Bedfordshire, told The i Paper: “Nobody has ever come and talked about it with us. They haven’t once spoke to us about the changes we are due to face.”

He also suggested that much of the development would be on a floodplain…

McSweeney on manoeuvres

Reed’s promotion to a more prominent brief, and the authorisation for this raft of announcements by the former leader of Lambeth Council, started tongues wagging among the estimated 20,000 attendees in the “conference zone” at ACC Liverpool that he is being lined up by Morgan McSweeney, his former chief aide at Brixton Town Hall and colleague at the dodgily-funded Labour Together, to be a contender in a possibly imminent leadership contest to succeed Keir Starmer.

The previous golden boy of the Labour right, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, looks destined to lose his Ilford seat to an independent come the next election, and so has been unceremoniously dropped as the heir to the throne.

But there is bad news for the newly anointed Reed.

A YouGov poll found Andy Burnham is streets ahead of all other contenders for Labour’s top job, with 54% of members would favouring the current Mayor of Manchesterto be the next leader. Angela Rayner is a distant second choice, on 10%, with Wes Streeting third on 7%. Steve Reed did not figure.

Train in vain?

The Transport Secretary had some good news for Croydon commuters – on May 31 next year, Thameslink, Great Northern, Gatwick Express and Southern will all be restored to public ownership.

Heidi Alexander, a former deputy mayor in London under Sadiq Khan and now Secretary of State for Transport, said “for too long our railways have been run in the interests of private profit… We are returning our railways to the service of passengers”.

As well as criticising the “soaring profits” of overseas-owned rail companies, Alexander criticised their record of delays and cancellations. But what was missing from the rhetoric was any commitment to cheaper or more reliable services under public ownership (the DoT, after all, approves the rail franchisees’ annual fare hikes).

The case for public ownership is that the government can forgo profits and reinvest that money in cheaper fares. If Labour wants to gain a polling bounce from this policy, it needs to show how it will benefit passengers.

Trump’s night mayor

During Labour conference, Sir Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor, announced that “violent crime resulting in injury has fallen across all 32 London boroughs over the past year”, and added that, “London’s homicide rate is also lower than in other major European capitals, including Paris, Berlin and Madrid.”

Donald Trump, the fascist US President, in a speech at the United Nations last month peddled some barely coherent Islamophobic tripe that the “terrible… terrible” Mayor of London wanted to “go to Sharia law” in the capital.

Addressing Labour’s Jamaica night party, hosted by Brent MP Dawn Butler, Khan called the multicultural gathering “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”, adding that London’s diversity was its strength.

Education, education, education

In his Leader’s speech to a packed audience of flag-wavers yesterday, which rightly called out Reform UK for the racist chancers and grifters that they are, Keir Starmer also made an interesting point about valuing manual work – from shipbuilding to care work.

To reflect this, he has torn up the target that 50% of young people should go to university, and replaced it with a new target that two-thirds of young people should either go to university or get what he called a “gold standard” apprenticeship (clarified as Level 4+ apprenticeship).

With many universities on the brink of bankruptcy, and adult education having suffered a decade and a half of deep cuts, it remains to be seen if the autumn Budget delivers the funding required to make this ambition real. No doubt Croydon College and London South Bank University, with its Croydon campus, will be monitoring closely.

Another policy announced was the restoration of grants for working-class students. But there was no detail on who would qualify, when grants would be re-introduced, or what the thresholds would be to get them. That is more an aspiration than a policy, but at least it’s a good one.

From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn

Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes

As well as his column, Andrew is also conducting podcast interviews, in-depth and informed, with specialists and national figures, sharing their expertise with Croydon. They include an exclusive with Jeremy Corbyn, which revealed how Labour’s former leader was expelled from the party with a note suggesting he might contact the Samaritans.

It’s available now on Inside Croydon’s Spotify channel

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

Labour’s scandals and dramas reflected in Croydon politics

After the riots, survey finds we are not an ‘island of strangers’

You can take Steve Reed to water, but you can’t make him think

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