Britain’s Labour members pick sacked minister as deputy, defying Keir Starmer

LONDON – Mr Keir Starmer’s Labour elected Ms Lucy Powell as deputy leader, highlighting internal dissatisfaction with the governing party’s direction amid dire opinion poll ratings.

Ms Powell won 54 per cent of the vote in the 6-week contest, beating her opponent, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who secured 46 per cent, according to results announced on Oct 25 by Labour.

She replaces Ms Angela Rayner, who resigned in a tax scandal in September. 

“People feel that this government is not being bold enough in delivering the kind of change we promised,” Ms Powell said in her victory speech on Oct 25, adding that the stakes were high when it came to challenging Mr Nigel Farage’s Reform.

As a member of the Cabinet, Ms Phillipson was viewed as Mr Starmer’s preferred candidate who wouldn’t challenge the leadership, even as Labour languishes in the polls, trailing Reform since April.

Ms Powell, by contrast, was sacked from the Cabinet by the premier just days before nominations opened for the deputy’s contest, and she ran on a platform calling for Labour to change its approach by pandering less to the anti-immigration vote that’s core to Mr Farage’s support.

“Being tactical about it and trying to ‘out-Reform’ Reform is not going to help us,”Ms Powell said at a hustings event on the last day of Labour’s annual conference earlier in October.

“We’ve got to seize back the political megaphone in this country, because let’s be honest, we’ve ceded it too long in recent months.”

Ms Powell’s win is a message to Britain’s prime minister that the wider party is increasingly disillusioned with its approach on everything from migration to attempts to cut welfare benefits that they see as departing from traditional Labour values.

The turnout for the election was only 16.6 per cent.

Many on the left argue that by seeking to fend off Mr Farage on the right, Labour risks losing support on the left to a range of threats including the Greens, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party” outfit, the Liberal Democrats and nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland. 

That threat was on display in a by-election for the Welsh Parliament – known as the Senedd – this week when the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru won in Caerphilly, where Labour hadn’t lost a vote for either the House of Commons or Senedd in more than a century.

Even Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth acknowledged that tactical voters had lent his party support in order to keep Reform out. 

Labour Senedd member Alun Davies said his party’s language on immigration had fed into its disastrous defeat in Caerphilly.

“We shouldn’t be using the language of Reform when we talk about human beings who are fleeing war and looking for a better life,” he said.

Mr Starmer in May warned Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” as he announced a crackdown on immigration.

While he’s since expressed regret at using the phrase, it drew criticism from within Labour at the time, as well as comparisons with an infamous intervention on immigration in 1968 by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell that’s become known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech.

Those on the left in Labour have also expressed concern about moves by Mr Starmer’s government to cut winter fuel payments to most pensioners and to curb welfare benefits – forcing expensive U-turns on both measures, despite the wide majority the governing party enjoys in the House of Commons.

The deputy leader isn’t automatically entitled to the post of deputy prime minister, which Mr Starmer handed to Justice Secretary David Lammy in the Cabinet reshuffle that followed Ms Rayner’s resignation.

Ms Powell – one of only two ministers other than Ms Rayner to lose her Cabinet post in that shakeup – has said she views the deputy leader’s role as a “party job, not a government one.” 

“I’ll be without the constraints of running a department but working alongside the government, inside every constituency, every community, every council,” she said in a final appeal to voters published by the LabourList website this week.

“We all know that we must change how we are doing things to turn things around – more in touch with our movement, and the communities and workplaces we represent, more principled and strategic, less tactical, and strongly guided by our values.” BLOOMBERG