Lucy Powell, the frontrunner for the Labour deputy leadership, has said voters are “sick” of the government “going on about Nigel Farage all the time”.
Speaking to party members at the Labour conference in Liverpool, Ms Powell also said Sir Keir Starmer’s government – from which she was sacked from last month – had made “big mistakes” since coming to office.
Her comments come after the prime minister and several cabinet ministers launched stinging attacks on Mr Farage, including branding his migration policy “racist”.
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The prime minister spent much of his hour-long speech on Tuesday drawing dividing lines with Mr Farage, calling on his party to “fight Reform with everything that this movement has”, and said that he himself will “fight with every breath I have, fight for working people, fight for the tolerant, decent, respectful Britain that I know”.
He declared Reform UK “the enemy of national renewal”, and hit out at Mr Farage’s “politics of grievance”, arguing that the country is at “a fork in the road” between “renewal” with Labour and “decline” with Reform UK.
But speaking at a hustings event three weeks before the ballot closes in the Labour deputy leadership contest, Ms Powell, the frontrunner, suggested that the prime minister’s strategy is wrong.
She said: “People are sick of us going on about Nigel Farage all the time.”
The former cabinet minister went on to say that Labour is “losing just as many votes, if not more, to the other side”, so “being tactical about it and trying to out-Reform Reform is not going to help us in those elections next May”.
She said the party has to “seize back the political megaphone in this country” from Reform UK, because they have “ceded it too long in recent months”.
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Cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson, who is the other contender for deputy leader, did not go as far as her opponent, telling party members: “We’ve got the fight of our lives in taking on Reform.
“Now, we can’t ape them – we have to take them on in a way that is consistent with our values, Labour values, that are also the values of the British people.”
‘We’ve made big mistakes’
Ms Powell also said Labour needs to accept that they have “got to do better because when we bring in policies that don’t show whose side we are on, and people aren’t really clear about whose side we are on, like the winter fuel payment, for example, that hits us particularly hard in our traditional Labour areas”.
She said they “all want this government to succeed”, but they have “got to do better”.
“We have made mistakes, and they’ve been big mistakes. Let’s not sugarcoat that. And that’s why we’re in the difficulty we are in in the polls at the moment,” Ms Powell said.
“And we’ve got to learn the right lessons. When you have a kind of increasing groupthink of fewer and fewer people taking decisions that are not connected to the communities that we represent, and are not hearing that feedback from the doorstep, from our workplaces, then we don’t make good decisions.”
She pledged to be the “feedback loop”, and said she would be prepared to have “difficult conversations” and “speak truth to power” if needed.
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Ms Phillipson vowed to be “campaigner-in-chief”, and added: “We’ve got to be honest about where we’ve got things wrong and where we’ve made mistakes.”
She said that during her time in government as education secretary, she had aimed to do things that the party could put on leaflets to make the case for Labour.
Asked what the government could have done better, Ms Phillipson: “I think we have to be honest about where we’ve got things wrong in the last year, and learn from that, whether that’s around welfare reform, or the winter fuel allowance – we have to learn and do things better.”
Why is there a deputy leadership contest?
The deputy leadership contest was triggered after Angela Rayner quit after admitting in an interview with our political editor Beth Rigby, on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, that she underpaid the taxes due on a new property near Brighton.
Any MPs who wanted to stand had to get at least 80 nominations from their fellow MPs, and Ms Powell and Ms Phillipson were the only two to clear that hurdle.
A poll of 704 Labour members taken a week ago by YouGov found that 35% would back Ms Powell and 28% would back Ms Phillipson, while 30% do not know and 5% will not vote. Excluding ‘don’t know’, this suggests Ms Powell is ahead of Ms Phillipson with 56% to 44% – a closer margin than some other pollsters.
Labour members will be able to vote from Wednesday 8 October, and the ballot will close at 12pm on Thursday 23 October, with the result set to be announced two days later.
Tap here to read more about how the contest works.
