Keir Starmer speech live: PM faces austerity critics as Labour minister chairs urgent Middle East COBRA call

Sir Keir Starmer will deliver his headline speech today where he is expected to promise a “light at the end of tunnel” for the country.

It will be the prime minister’s first conference speech since Labour’s election victory in July. The conference has returned to Liverpool for a third year in a row.

Sir Keir’s conference speech is expected to start at 2pm.

It is today’s main event, and one of the most important across all four days, with delegates likely to fill up ACC Liverpool’s main conference hall.

It is a significant occasion, marking the first time in 15 years that a Labour leader has addressed conference as prime minister.

To watch the full speech follow The Independent’s live stream.

The government will not scrap the single person council tax discount, Pat McFadden has indicated.

The move has been rumoured in the run up to next month’s budget as the government looks to save more money to fill the reported £22 billion black hole in the public finances.

Speaking to Good Morning Britain, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said: “If that’s been briefed by the Treasury, that will be the case. They write the budget, the Labour chancellor writes the budget, and the chancellor will put all this together over the next few weeks.

“If that’s what the Treasury has said, of course I can confirm it. I don’t see every briefing that goes out. I don’t think there’s any plans to do that, that’s for the Treasury. If that’s what they’ve said, that’ll be right.”

Former Labour MP and Jeremy Corbyn ally John McDonnell hit out at Labour claiming that listening to their narrative was like “George Osborne speaking again in 2010”.

Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has now responded to the criticism.

He told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme that he “understands the nature of the government’s inheritance” and that “difficult things” had to be done to fill the black hole in public finances.

Mr Burnham added: “But I was really encouraged to hear Rachel Reeves say clearly yesterday, in her speech, no return to austerity, and that’s what we wanted to hear.”

Polling guru Sir John Curtice has been speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme to offer his opinion about Sir Keir Starmer’s speech this afternoon.

The expert said the prime minister has “never been a popular leader” and has “two weaknesses”.

He said: “He’s never been very successful at doing what George Bush called the vision thing.

“What is the Labour Party for, what his government trying to achieve, what kind of Britain does he want. That lack of narrative is being exposed.”

Mr Curtice also said the PM has “not always had a strong political antenna, and that’s been exposed in the last week or two”.

Despite the criticism, he said it is still too early to call off a second Labour term at the next general election. But insisted “what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is perhaps not surprising”.

Labour has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian activists at its party conference after ordering a group to remove the words “genocide” and “apartheid” from the listing for an event about Israel’s war in Gaza.

The party was condemned by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) for refusing to promote its fringe event titled “Justice for Palestine: Confronting genocide and ending apartheid”.

The event has been listed in the brochure as simply “Justice for Palestine”.

Our political correspondent Archie Mitchell reports:

Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins has been speaking to Kay Burley on Sky News as part of the media round this morning.

Unsurprisingly, the Tory MP has criticised Labour after nurses in England rejected the government’s 5.5 per cent pay offer.

She said: “The Labour government has lost control of the independent public sector pay process.”

Ms Atkins insisted she was warned about an “impact across the workforce” of awarding “inflation-busting pay rises” to one part of the health sector.

She added: “Is it any wonder that having given this inflation-busting pay rise with no reform, no productivity improvements, for junior doctors in the summer, that nurses and other health care professionals are now asking why they are not valued in the same way.”

Pat McFadden has said that everybody in the Middle East needs to be able to live in peace, after the death toll from Israeli strikes on Lebanon has risen to nearly 500 people.

The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster told LBC: “What needs to happen in the long run is that everybody in this region can live in security. We tend to focus on the immediate hostilities, the immediate outbreak, and I understand in a news sense why we do that.

“But if you’re asking me about the longer term, we want everybody in that particular part where all this shelling is going on at the moment to be able to return home in peace.

“There’s 60,000 Israelis who have not been able to live in their homes for the best part of a year now because of this back and forth shelling from Hezbollah and southern Lebanon, but also the people in southern Lebanon to be able to live in peace without this threat of constant war back and forth over the border.”

He later added: “Right now it is the most dangerous situation that I can remember in the Middle East for a long, long time.”

You can follow our Lebanon live blog with the latest updates about the conflict here