Can Keir Starmer simply ignore a vote of Labour’s annual conference?

In theory, the annual conference is the Labour Party’s supreme authority. Less well-known is Clause VI, which declares: “The work of the party shall be under the direction and control of party conference.” That is not how it works in practice, however, because the leader has so much power – especially if he has the support of a majority of members of the National Executive Committee. For much of the party’s existence, this tension between theory and practice has fuelled factional conflict as supporters of Tony Benn and, later, Jeremy Corbyn tried to translate their majority among delegates into control of the party machine. But it wasn’t enough for the Bennites to control the votes at the party conference: what was critical was that they had a majority in the “Clause V” meeting. Thus it was that Labour fought the 1983 election on what Gerald Kaufman, shadow environment secretary, called the “longest suicide note in history” – and was crushed.