“We have to seize back the political megaphone, set the agenda more strongly and show that Labour is making a difference to people’s lives.” In her acceptance speech after winning Labour’s deputy leadership contest, Lucy Powell wasted no time in saying where she thinks her party has gone wrong.
Powell was recently sacked from her cabinet post as Leader of the House of Commons, and has suggested it might have been because she had given “feedback people didn’t want to hear”. Now, the Manchester Central MP has the power and profile to push Keir Starmer towards her vision of “bold policies, rooted in progressive Labour values”.
Powell has “long been seen as more of a challenger to the current status quo” than her rival for the deputy leadership, Bridget Phillipson, said The Independent’s political correspondent Millie Cooke.
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The contest was hardly a ringing endorsement of either candidate, with turnout at just over 16%. But Powell’s victory is being seen as “a call from the Labour membership for a new direction amid growing unhappiness” with Keir Starmer’s government.
“Openly critical” of the government’s “unforced errors” on welfare reform and the winter fuel payment, Powell has also called for an end to the two-child benefit cap and taken issue with the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance on trans issues. These clear points of policy contention “mean she is likely, at least at first, to be a thorn in Sir Keir’s side.”
Her campaign was “shrewdly calibrated”, said The Observer’s associate editor Andrew Rawnsley. “Rather than throw bricks and bottles at everything the government has done”, she has made the case that Starmer “needs a ‘course correction’ and that too much ‘group-think’ at the top has led to electorally disastrous decisions”.
While the prime minister clearly favoured Phillipson for the role, he quickly claimed to be “delighted” to work with Powell. And there may be room to turn potential “peril” into “opportunity”. Powell could be deployed as a “punchy advocate of the party’s values and achievements and a facilitator of constructively critical conversation about where it is going wrong”. She has said she wants to “speak truth to power” but “her chances of being heard greatly depend on whether power is willing to listen”.
What next?
Powell is expected to remain on the backbenches, from where she will adopt a “submarine approach” to interventions around government policy, “rather than offering a running commentary”, said Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby. Choosing her battles carefully will make her “harder to ignore”. But she could, in time, “become a lightning rod for discontent should the party’s fortunes remain as parlous as they are now”.
Next May’s elections for the Welsh Senedd are already being seen as a moment of maximum danger for Starmer, and the point when Powell’s influence could really matter.
If Labour loses its century-long dominance in Wales, then Starmer, “already a beleaguered figure, will undoubtedly face some calls to stand down”, said Morgan Jones in The Guardian. “It’s hard to picture Powell as the smiler with the knife – but equally difficult to imagine her being hugely energetic in any endeavours to keep Starmer in No. 10.”
