Nigel Farage has predicted he can win the next general election at a packed Reform UK conference that announced a new structure for the party but also leaned heavily into hard-right tropes and occasional conspiracy theories.

“We can win the next general election just with the numbers of people that agree with our principles,” Farage told cheering supporters in Birmingham.

“What we have to do is to be credible. What we have to do is be on the ground everywhere. What we have to do is to show that we can bring success after success after success. If we do those things, we genuinely can.”

At the gathering – which included repeated attacks on immigration, diversity and green policies, and calls to “put British people first” – Farage promised to professionalise the party and end its status as a company majority-owned by him.

Instead, he said, it would become a mass-owned non-profit organisation with “significant” control by members – although he did not set out what this would entail.

Ahead of the start of Labour’s conference on Sunday, Farage later said that the governing party was Reform’s prime target, referring to a recent poll suggesting 26% of Labour voters would seriously consider or consider voting for Reform in future.

“I think these big themes around family, community, country appeal very much to an old Labour target,” he told journalists.

The first proper conference for the successor to the Brexit party, which won the third-biggest vote share in July’s general election, attracted about 4,000 people to the National Exhibition Centre.

The second day of the event, Saturday, is aimed at helping to organise new branches, while Friday was devoted almost entirely to speeches from the main conference arena, with Farage completing a lineup of all five Reform MPs elected on 4 July.

A sequence of the speeches took on a populist and hard-right tone, with some echoing far-right conspiracies. Policies set out included the mass deportation of all overseas nationals in UK jails, an end to foreign aid and the scrapping of diversity-related jobs in the public sector.

While Farage launched attacks on Labour and the Conservatives and echoed attacks on government “sleaze” – including by brandishing a pair of glasses – much of his address was aimed at rallying Reform members to join the professionalisation process and campaign in the local elections across England next May.

Farage, who walked on to the stage to the song Without Me by Eminem, said the aim was to win “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of councillors, as a bridgehead for future general election success, saying this would be modelled on the Liberal Democrats.

Later, he told journalists that Reform had expected to poll more than it did in the general election in July, saying that the last week of the campaign was a “disaster” for his party against the backdrop of candidates who had not been vetted properly.

“It was just a disaster. We had expected the poll 5% more than we did, and the electorate punished us. The electorate punished us, for having these bad apples in there,” he added.

In earlier speeches, Rupert Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP, attacked organisations including the UN, World Economic Forum and “Bilderbergers”, whom he said were trying to subvert the UK.

He condemned government actions, including “inflicting an experimental jab on millions of people” during the Covid pandemic, and said the Equality Act had allowed minorities to “impose their will and views on the majority”.

Another Reform MP, Lee Anderson, reiterated some of the comments about Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, which caused him to lose the Conservative whip, saying of Khan: “In my opinion he has given our capital city away and he should be thoroughly ashamed of it.”

Anderson also ripped up a letter telling him to pay his TV licence fee, to cheers from the crowd.

On Friday morning, the conference loudly applauded a speech from the former soldier and reality TV star Ant Middleton, who warned that mass civil unrest was imminent because the British identity was being “eradicated”.

Middleton, who formerly appeared on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, also said that unnamed forces were trying to distract people from the country’s problems, so “they can control you”.

“What’s British identity? British culture. British history,” he said. “Why is that being eradicated? Why is that being trampled over?”

This process, he said, would lead to frustration, then anger and finally violence: “We are at a very important and crucial stage before it teeters into civil unrest. We’ve all seen it. I don’t need to mention what it is. We’ve all seen it.”

From the railway station, you take the emergency stairs down to the perimeter road. Walk half a mile round the back of the vast hangars of the Birmingham NEC. Get to a fork. To the right, the Bear Grylls Adventure. To the left, the Reform party conference. Decisions, decisions. A day out being macho and talking the Alpha course with Russell Brand. Or having reality twisted with Nigel Farage and his crew. Come to think of it, there’s not much difference.

The queue for Reform snakes back 100 yards from the entrance more than an hour before the start. Fair to say neither Labour nor the Tories will get a crowd this big for their conferences over the next 10 days or so. Inside, the merchandise stall is doing brisk business in Reform coffee mugs. No one seems that interested in the Richard Tice turquoise ties. Strange. Looking like the sales rep for a sunbed company is very much on brand for the upper echelons of the party.

Near the entrance to the auditorium are two stalls. One for the TaxPayers’ Alliance. The other for the Free Speech Union. Even the Institute of Economic Affairs has stayed away. I speak to a delegate. He explains how he used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist party before he realised there were too many immigrants. What he really wants to talk to me about, though, is that John Lennon was killed by an assassin acting on the direct orders of George HW Bush.

Inside the hall, the 4,000 members get to their feet as Nige takes his place in the front row, surrounded by minders and snappers. A chant of “Nigel, Nigel” bounces off the walls. It’s a curious mix of a Billy Graham revivalist meeting and a Nuremberg rally. This is a party that has come to party. It may have been playing the same tunes for the last 10 years as Ukip was followed by the Brexit party and now Reform, but its supporters are ever hopeful. They believe their time is coming.

The suspiciously tanned David Bull gets proceedings under way. No one knows exactly what Dave does but he acts like one of the chosen ones. The inner circle. He runs through a few old favourites. Immigrants. Loud boos from the audience. Keir Starmer taking freebies. More loud boos. Just wait till they all find out how many freebies Nige has taken in his career. This is rapidly turning into a pantomime act. Brexit has been stolen from them. No one here is taking any responsibility for the Brexit they campaigned for.

Then James McMurdock. The Reform MP who only got elected because he signed the wrong papers. He thought he was joining the party when in reality he was applying to become a candidate. He had been in the party less than two months when he became an MP.

“I guess I should introduce myself,” he says. Good. Maybe he was about to reveal how he was imprisoned for domestic violence. On second thoughts, maybe not. The truth is mutable for Reform. Bewilderingly, he concludes by saying that if you vote Reform, then you get honest and skilled MPs. He is exhibit No 1, I guess.

Next we were promised one of the most famous people in the country. Instead we got Ann Widdecombe. A woman too unpleasant even for the Tory party. Imagine. She doesn’t even try to keep her hatred of immigrants in check. Sink the boats. Do whatever you like. They aren’t real people to her. Imprison them in rat-infested squalor. Send them to any old country. As long as they aren’t here. She has no idea how to achieve any of this. Nor any interest in international law. But neither has the audience. They all believe that foreigners belong anywhere but here. She gets a standing ovation.

Believe it or not, Ann was comparatively sane compared with Ant Middleton, who followed her. The kindest thing to say about him is that he’s not very bright. Only capable of a stream of unconsciousness. Since being thrown off SAS: Who Dares Wins for being a total dick, Ant has come to believe he’s the Messiah. He specialises in confessional, motivational speeches which are complete and utter bollocks. Maybe he thought he was at the Bear Grylls centre.

“They are out to get you,” he confided from the front of the stage. We never got to find out who the “they” were. But it sounded like the establishment. In which case, beware of Nige and Dicky Tice. They are more establishment than most of the government. And beware all foreigners. He loved his country and it was being stolen from him. British culture was Christianity. Any unbelievers had to be eradicated. This was too much even for some of the audience. Imagine being too out there for Reform.

During the lunch break, the professionally grumpy became even grumpier as half the food concessions were closed and some of the queues were 200 or so punters deep. Then we settled in for the afternoon. Basically a long list of grumpiness. Everything was broken and everything was someone else’s fault. No ideas how to fix it, other than Nige would come up with something sooner or later.

MP Rupert Lowe sounded like a golf-club bore as he listed his pet hates. Rainbow lanyards, Covid vaccinations, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the BBC, taxes that affected wealthy people like himself. He even confessed to hating democracy. Lee Anderson continued along the same theme. Vegans, net zero, Sadiq Khan, Black Lives Matter. All evil. The only person he did like was Jim Davidson. He got a standing ovation for ripping up his TV licence reminder. Free the 30p Lee.

It was all getting a bit tedious. Repetitive. Worse was to follow with the personality-free Dicky Tice. A man desperate to be loved but so hard to trust. He took the afternoon by storm by insisting Britain was dominated by the three cults. At least he meant to say three cults. He actually said something much more Anglo-Saxon. It’s a view, I suppose. Zia Yusuf came and went in a sea of indifference. He didn’t seem to realise that the Battle of Arnhem had been a historic disaster.

Finally – to a soundtrack of Eminem and fireworks – the man himself. Big Nige. The rock’n’roll politician. Allegedly. Only for much of the time it felt as though he was just phoning it in. A greatest hits compilation of reality-bending dishonesty. Everyone to blame for Brexit but himself. He was exempt from changing the country for the worse.

Farage went on about the need to democratise and professionalise the party. But he felt distracted. As if his heart wasn’t in it. He tried to sound engaged, but it was as though he was bored. He’d made this speech hundreds of times before and even he had had enough of it. Imagine. Maybe he had reached peak narcissism and could take no more. Can see through his own bullshit even if others can’t.

After half of an hour of mindless talking, he checked the time and wound it up after going through his pet grievances. NatWest. The Tories useless. Labour useless. Nothing positive to add. No vision to add. Just him at the centre of the universe. Cue more fireworks and some balloons. Just to remind people they had been in the presence of greatness. Apparently.

The UK’s first pro-Palestine national march to be staged outside London is expected by organisers to attract tens of thousands of people on the periphery of the Labour party conference in Liverpool.

The 19th “national march for Palestine” will start at midday on Saturday near Lime Street railway station and end near King’s Dock, where Keir Starmer’s party is gathering this weekend.

Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), said demonstrators would call for an immediate arms embargo rather than what he described as the “inadequate partial suspension” of arms export licenses to Israel that was announced this month.

He said: “The Labour government knows that Israel is committing crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. But instead of honouring its obligations under international law, it is still seeking to shield Israel from accountability.”

Organisers, including the PSC, Stop the War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa and Palestinian Forum in Britain, said they expected tens of thousands of people to march on Saturday.

The marches started in London in the aftermath of the attack by Hamas militants on Israel on 7 October, when about 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage. Israel responded to the attack with a military offensive in the Gaza Strip during which an estimated 41,000 people have been killed so far, according to Gaza health authorities, with the majority of them civilians.

Organisers claimed the largest march, on Armistice Day, was attended by 800,000 people although the police put it at closer to 300,000.

The PSC said it had been supported by constituency Labour parties and trade unions in an attempt to secure a motion for debate on Palestine at the conference, which begins on Sunday. Motions calling for international law to be upheld and a complete stop to arms exports to Israel are on the conference agenda, but it has not yet been decided whether they will be debated.

The PSC said it was concerned “factions linked to the party leadership will seek to push the motions off the agenda to avoid embarrassment to the government, and avoid any discussions that are critical of Israel’s actions or call for its government to be held to account”.

Fringe meetings have been organised at the conference but the PSC complained it had not been allowed to use the words “genocide” or “apartheid” in its description of their events in the official guide.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) passed a motion at its annual conference demanding all UK arms trading with Israel be ended immediately but it was criticised in some quarters for failing to mention Hamas or the 7 October massacre.

Jamal said: “The wider labour movement, as demonstrated by the motion passed unanimously by the TUC at its recent congress, is calling for action to hold Israel to account including a full arms embargo.

“Opinion polls show that these demands are supported by members in the Labour party and by the wider public. This is a moral test for Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership. They need to stand up for the implementation of international law and be bold in confronting those who undermine it, no matter who they are.”

Sir Keir Starmer has been prime minister for less than three months, yet Labour begins its annual conference this weekend already weighed down by incumbency. Rows over gifts from wealthy donors and tickets to football games as well as squabbling about his chief of staff’s pay are feeding into public disquiet. These come when the burden of government in difficult economic circumstances and in an age of low public trust would have shortened any political honeymoon period. But Downing Street also set out with the explicit objective of dampening expectations of how soon change might come. That mission has been accomplished with a needless surplus of gloom.

Sir Keir’s urgent task in Liverpool is to recalibrate the mood with a sense of optimism and purpose. He needs to give the country reasons to be glad of a Labour government in ways that go beyond relief at no longer being ruled by Tories. New governments often come to power blaming the last. Sir Keir has given the nation an unvarnished account of the dismal legacy he has inherited. That bleak audit covers a record of political and financial maladministration.

Conservative ministers, driven by ideological fanaticism and self-serving cynicism, squandered energy and resources on ill-conceived, unworkable policies, while starving public services of vital resources. Sir Keir has a difficult job because the country is in a terrible state. Putting things right will take time. But that morose message has been soured by a performance of fiscal discipline, delivered without a hint of uplifting accompaniment.

The prime minister says things will get worse before they get better. The chancellor, citing “black holes” in the budget, withdraws winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners and pledges more pain to come. Rachel Reeves’ argument is that government departments would outspend budgets by £22bn more than previously disclosed and that cuts were needed to compensate. This is a self-imposed restriction that stems from ill-advised fiscal rules. The force of that constraint, and the zeal with which it is applied as austerity across Whitehall, is also a matter of political choice.

Downing Street strategists argue that adherence to Tory spending limits was a non-negotiable condition of persuading the public that Labour could be trusted on the economy. Maybe so, maybe not. There is no way to test the counterfactual scenario, where Ms Reeves fought the election with a wider range of tax-raising options still open. However, the decision to lean into unpopularity so hard, so fast and without a countervailing narrative of hope looks like poor strategic judgment.

Labour’s election manifesto contained plenty of reasons to expect a substantial departure from a grim status quo. A marked progressive shift was promised in the areas of workers’ rights, a robust commitment to net zero, improved relations with the rest of Europe and, perhaps most significantly, readiness to embrace a more interventionist model of economic management, including public ownership of utilities.

The Starmerite script contains rather too much fiscal conservatism, but the hope is that there is a social democratic framework at its core. It expresses the opposite of the Tory conviction that government’s main function is to facilitate market supremacy and then get out of the way. Many of the activists and MPs gathering in Liverpool feel unsure which of the two strands – cringing continuity or bold departure – will dominate. Sir Keir’s task is to answer in terms that give hope of meaningful change to come.