Five party conferences reveal different visions for how government should work

Beginning with Nigel Farage’s high energy Reform UK rally in Birmingham, via Ed Davey’s sun-soaked Liberal Democrat jamboree in Bournemouth, through Keir Starmer’s introspective Labour gathering in Liverpool, back to Bournemouth for Zack Polanski’s Green debut, I now find myself on the train home from Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to create Conservative cut through in Manchester. After a whirlwind month, what have we learned about our political classes and their views of the state of UK government?

Government is hard

A stark theme of both the Labour and Conservative conferences was the sheer difficulty of governing. For Labour this has been an emergent realisation over the course of its first year in government. Last year’s surprisingly downbeat gathering, also in Liverpool, had started to come to terms with the gravity of the fiscal context ministers had inherited. Now the reality that not being the Conservative Party has not – in itself – been enough to accelerate growth, has become plain. While Starmer and his cabinet were keen to talk up their early achievements – which they feel have been insufficiently acknowledged – many fringes reflected the mirrored frustrations of activists who had hoped for swifter action on their various causes, and ministers who had hoped for a more responsive government machine that would have delivered more quickly.

Last year in Birmingham, the Conservatives’ surprisingly upbeat conference was consumed by the drama of a leadership election (complete with competing merch from all four candidates). Former ministers and advisers revelled in schadenfreude: gleeful that Labour had inherited many of the problems they had battled for years to solve. 

One year on in Manchester, Kemi Badenoch and her party are coming to terms with the unfortunate realities of opposition: the difficulty of no longer setting the agenda, attempting to resist being forced into a reactive posture by a government that controls the media narrative and struggling to achieve cut through for proactive policy proposals while being outflanked by an insurgent party willing to win headlines first and work out policy details later. In this context, while Badenoch’s eye-catching stamp duty announcement won’t necessarily make it into the next Conservative election manifesto, it is her most successful attempt so far to wrest the policy headlines away from Nigel Farage.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ very recent experience of government is both a blessing and a curse: former ministers and advisers have detailed knowledge of government which should enable them to develop plausible policy proposals, but are still suffering from the credibility gap inherent in having either created or failed to solve the problems their new policies are designed to address, when they were in power. Some Conservative shadow ministers showed a commendable willingness to confront their failures in government and the challenges facing any future government, with a particularly interesting discussion in our event on public services. 

However, such humility was harder to discern in the keynote speeches of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. Badenoch’s bullishness on the economy, which saw her launch a new ‘golden rule’ designed to signal the Conservatives’ fiscal responsibility, may stem from new polling which sees the Conservatives scoring relatively well on economic credibility, despite the continued fall-out from the Liz Truss mini-budget. 

For the Liberal Democrats, the passage of time has largely solved the problem of having to deal with their governing legacy, although the reappearance of Nick Clegg at an IfG fringe in Bournemouth after a 10-year absence from party gatherings was a sharp reminder of triumphs and disasters of a rare third-party foray into government. For now, Ed Davey was happy to bat away questions about future coalitions – but the policy red lines that would shape any future coalition negotiation could well become a theme of Lib Dem conferences as the next general election approaches.

Meanwhile, the agendas of the conferences of the smaller parties – Reform and the Greens – were relatively untroubled by experience of the realities of delivering in government. The posters adorning the Green conference calling to “Abolish Landlords” raised so many policy and implementation questions I felt my head might explode. Reform’s Conservative defector – former secretary of state Nadine Dorries – acknowledged herself that her speech had brought down the triumphant mood of the party’s American-style rally – precisely because she moved beyond bold headline commitments and came close to admitting the complexities of delivery in modern government. 

This awareness is inevitably now dawning for Reform UK – having won two mayoralties and controlling 10 councils – as our fringe conversation with Reform’s new leader of Kent County Council, Linden Kemkoran, demonstrated. She reflected on the challenges of transitioning from opposition to government, and the steep learning curve which is the universal experience of new political leaders taking office (which our IfG Academy works to smooth). And reporting since of the likelihood that – despite Reform’s vaunted efforts to identify DOGE-style efficiencies – Kent will likely raise its council tax by the maximum 5% this year, demonstrates that Reform is also recognising the severity of the fiscal constraints on local government. As the IfG’s Performance Tracker report has long documented, growing demand for the services that local councils must deliver as a matter of statutory responsibility, including adult and children’s social care, means that in most local authorities, efficiencies have long since been made. What is left are unpalatable policy choices – to further cut back library services or children’s centres for example – rather than efficiencies.

Take back control

A second common theme across the Conservative and Labour conferences was a desire to take back control, a word Keir Starmer mentioned no fewer than 14 times in his conference speech. While the prime minister’s language seems intended to persuade the public that the government is going to get a grip on the problems of ‘broken Britain’, it was notable how much discussion at the conferences centred on the difficulty for politicians of controlling the activity of government.

Both Labour and Conservative politicians appear to have independently reached the conclusion that too many decisions in UK government have been outsourced by ministers to arms-length bodies and regulators, while accountability for their consequences has stuck with elected politicians. “Quango” is now a dirty word across the political spectrum, with particular criticism levelled by Labour delegates at the OBR (for the way its forecasts constrain Rachel Reeves’ room for manoeuvre) and Conservative conference goers at Ofgem (for failing to tackle the escalation of energy prices) and Natural England (for slowing down planning). After home secretary Shabana Mahmood placed restrictions on the Sentencing Council, Robert Jenrick went further still in his conference speech by promising to abolish the body altogether. 

While politicians are understandably keen to bring the levers of government closer under their control – given the public will blame them for problems regardless of where decisions are made – they need to remember that there can be very good reasons – of effectiveness, independence and cost-efficiency – for some quangos to exist. They should also avoid falling into the trap of blaming unpopular public bodies for implementing legislation the government is too timid to amend. In the end, what is much more important than the precise structure of a government body is the clarity of the remit it is given by ministers and how it is held to account for delivering it. While some quangos undoubtedly fail to deliver the benefits they were originally set up to provide, it is too simplistic to dismiss arms-length bodies as the problem when closer examination should instead be given to how they are set up, run and held to account. 

The Conservatives and Reform UK have also concluded that it is not only quangos that would constrain their ability to deliver the outcomes their voters want to see but also the legislation passed by previous governments. Both parties have decided that the UK should leave the ECHR, and Kemi Badenoch has promised to repeal the Climate Change Act. These legal instruments – intended by previous generations of politicians to signal the UK’s commitment to international norms and institutions, or to create incentives to shape the behaviour of their successors – are now seen by these parties as intolerably constraining. 

Naturally, no parliament can actually bind its successors when it comes to legislation, but all the parties must be cautious about telling the public that legislative changes offer a quick fix to the problems they see. This is illustrated by Lord Wolfson’s review, commissioned by Kemi Badenoch to examine the implications of repealing the ECHR, which articulates the numerous potential knock-on consequences of this policy – in terms of the UK’s wider statute book and international relations. Badenoch has decided to pursue the policy nonetheless, but with an awareness of the time and effort that would be involved in doing so.

Reform is key

The most marked theme of all the party conferences was the unavoidable presence of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. While Reform UK’s own conference was overshadowed by the resignation of Angela Rayner and Starmer’s subsequent cabinet reshuffle, the remarkable success of Farage’s party in the polls was a preoccupation for the entire political class. 

Ed Davey’s uncharacteristically foreboding speech highlighted the risk of Reform UK turning the UK into a Trump-esque authoritarian state, while Zack Polanski positioned the Greens as a pro-immigration party against the policies of Farage. Keir Starmer made only a single, joking reference to the Conservative Party while seeking to characterise UK politics as a binary fight between Labour and Reform UK. In contrast, Kemi Badenoch’s speech largely avoided the Reform UK threat, perhaps in recognition of the drift of Conservative supporters towards Farage’s party. She will be quietly relieved there were not more high-profile defections from her party, but despite attempting to position the Conservatives as the leading challenger to Labour, she still faces an uphill battle not to succumb to the Labour-Reform squeeze.  

Party conferences are about bringing together party members, making three or four days of headlines, and creating a vibe. And at this distance from a general election, it can feel somewhat surreal to be hearing grand plans for government, not least from parties whose poll ratings suggest power is a distant dream. But the volatility of British politics today means no one should ignore the clues that emerge from party conferences about how political parties would govern if handed the reins of power. What is clear from 2025’s round of party gatherings is that today’s politicians are increasingly focused not just on what policies they would pursue, but on how to ensure the government machine actually delivers those policies.