Labour Party Conference

The Labour Party Conference, or annual national conference of the Labour Party, is formally the supreme decision-making body of the Party. The conference is traditionally held on the final week in September after the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats have held their conferences. Labour is one of few British parties to use their annual gathering for voting and policy resolution. The conference opens on a Sunday and finishes the following Wednesday usually with an address for the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party but some exceptions including 2016 have been made. This means that the Leader's address is usually held on the Tuesday before hand.

In the United Kingdom, each major political party holds an annual party conference during the party conference season. In the Labour Party, Conference is the supreme body, although the party leadership has made clear, particularly in recent years, that it will ignore the conference's decisions where it does not agree; constitutionally, a British government must be free to make decisions on behalf of the whole population and cannot be bound by any private body.

Delegates to the conference are elected by Constituency Labour Parties, affiliated trade unions and socialist societies. Currently, affiliated trade unions hold 50% of the votes at the conference – down from 80% in the era before Tony Blair. Some 40% of the votes are wielded by the three largest trade unions (Unite, GMB, UNISON).

Resolutions for debate are put forward by CLPs and unions before the conference begins. In recent years, party members have had less say in what is debated at the annual conference, as the party leadership has tried to move policy-making increasingly into the new National Policy Forums, which meet in private.

The National Executive Committee leads the conference (although the details of the conference, including what is debated, are managed by the Conference Arrangements Committee) and if it does not agree with a resolution, the committee may put pressure on the backers to withdraw or remit it. Remittance means that the resolution's backers agree to "send back" the resolution to the National Executive so that it can consider the matter in more detail; this is viewed by some as a mere delaying tactic. The resolutions voted upon are normally composites, meaning that they have been compiled by combining several resolutions put forward by different bodies into a single wording agreed beforehand.

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