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

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said she would not accept free tickets to Oasis, because she is a Blur fan.

The Labour minister said she preferred the Gallagher brothers’ rival band from the 1990s.

Asked whether she would take a free ticket to one of the concerts, she said: “No, because I’m a Blur fan, you see. So I won’t be going to Oasis.”

The defence secretary John Healey is returning to London to chair a COBRA meeting on the crisis in the Middle East.

Mr Healey has already left Labour party conference in Liverpool and is on his way back to London, as reported by Sky News.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has told all British nationals in Lebanon to leave and has advised against all travel to the country.

Those responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster must face “criminal accountability”, the Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater said.

Joe Powell also argued that companies named in the Grenfell report should no longer receive contracts or public money from the government, and sporting organisations should revoke sponsorship deals.

Speaking at the Labour conference in Liverpool, he said: “A report from a public inquiry is not the same as justice, important though it is.

“So we do need to see criminal accountability for those responsible for what happened at Grenfell Tower.

“We need to ensure that all the companies named in that report do not receive public money, we need to ensure that sponsorship deals are ended by sporting organisations that still associate themselves with those companies.

“And we need to ensure that the remedial work on buildings up and down the country where tens of thousands of people are still going to sleep in unsafe buildings is sped up as quickly as possible.

“And we do need to make sure that the full recommendations from the report are considered and responded to by the government.”

Labour is doing “badly” in government, according to a damning new poll ahead of Sir Keir Starmer’s conference speech, Archie Mitchell writes from the Labour conference.

A word cloud published by More in Common shows “badly”, “poorly”, and “terrible” among the main ways people describe Sir Keir’s administration so far.

But also prominent are the words “good” and “well”, in some comfort for the PM.

Pat McFadden has criticised attempts to “draw equivalence” between the row over freebies and the Partygate scandal that engulfed the Tories.

Speaking at a fringe event, Labour’s campaign manager said: “I’m not going to pretend to anyone in this room that I’ve enjoyed some of the headlines and stories over the last week.

“But nor am I going to allow them to define the government or to create a sense of equivalence between this and billions of pounds lost in Covid waste and fraud and lockdown parties at No. 10 and all the rest of it, because there is an attempt to draw equivalence and say that politicians are all the same and not all the same.”

Keir Starmer will attempt to turn a corner with today’s speech at Labour’s conference in Liverpool.

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin writes from the Labour Party conference:

The prime minister has had a difficult week – battling rows over freebies, his chief of staff Sue Gray and anger over winter fuel allowance cuts.

But in his first party conference speech as Sir Keir will try to give as sense of hat he calls the “light at the end of the tunnel”.

He will pledge a “shared struggle” before the country gets there, however.

The phrase is reminiscent of David Cameron’s comment during the austerity days, that we were “all in it together”.

That famously blew up in his face, however, when the public felt that was not true. The PM will hope to escape a similar fate.

Lisa Nandy has renewed her committment to implement the Charter Review “to ensure the BBC survives and thrives well into the latter half of this century”.

The culture secretary told the conference: “And we’re working with the TV industry to make sure it becomes far more representative of the country, with decision-makers that hail from every nation and region.”

Ms Nandy added: “We will never accept that culture is just for the privileged few, to be hoarded in a few corners of the country, and we will never accept that there is a trade off between excellent and access.”

The Charter Review, conducted in 2016, introduced major reforms to provide greater external and independent scrutiny of the governance of the BBC.

Labour remained committed in its manifesto that it will “constructively” work with broadcasters around the country to ensure culture and the arts are more accessible as part of its industrial strategy.

The culture secretary is on the main stage delivering her speech on day three of the Labour Party conference.

She has vowed to put arts, sports and culture “back at the heart of our communities”.