Tuesday at the Labour party conference

Quote of the day

Tosh McDonald, Aslef president, on Margaret Thatcher: “I hated her. I wish I could be like Jeremy and rise above it but I can’t ... I did set my alarm clock an hour earlier than I needed just so I could hate her for an hour longer.”

Row of the day

Brexit. Steve Turner, an assistant general secretary of Unite, stepped on to the podium in the morning to slap down shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer over the party’s second referendum policy. Starmer had wowed delegates when he declared to the hall, “Nobody is ruling out remain as an option” – prompting the party’s most powerful union to hit back.

There was not so much applause for Turner, when he spoke an hour later, but there was no mistaking his intent. If Labour were to organise a second referendum “despite what Keir Starmer may have said”, it would be “a public vote, that’s a vote on terms of our departure”. That meant that the choice put before the electorate would be to endorse the deal negotiated by the government of the day – or no deal at all.

Debate of the day

Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, made a passionate and wide-ranging speech which was well-received on the conference floor and interpreted by some as a leadership pitch.

The MP pointedly compared antisemites within Labour to fascists, and said the party had to act now: “If we want to root out fascism and racism and hatred from our world, and from our country, then we must start, we must start, with rooting it out of our own party.”

Continuing the focus on the fight against fascism in the UK, Thornberry also highlighted Labour’s long history fighting the far right, arguing that there was no need to resurrect the Anti-Nazi League because Labour effectively was the anti-Nazi League.

On foreign affairs, Thornberry promised that, under Corbyn, the UK would “lead the world in promoting human rights, in reforming the arms trade, in pursuing an end to conflict, in supporting, not demonising, refugees, and in turning the promise of a nuclear-free world from an impossible dream to a concrete goal”.

Tweet of the day

A plan to create a second deputy leader position for a woman was unexpectedly shelved when the constituency party that had submitted the rule change, Wirral West, suddenly dropped the motion, almost certainly at the suggestion of the party’s leadership. A former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown speculated as to why:

Wednesday’s highlight

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at noon. Gone are the days when the leader’s speech was on Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a week-long conference, meaning that the rest of the week was something of an anti-climax. Now it is the final event: the early signs are that the Labour leader will seek to shift the agenda to the party’s offer to the country after a dismal summer in which the row about antisemitism dominated.