Labour members feel “disconnected” from the government and risk losing motivation, Lucy Powell has argued as she and her rival for the party’s deputy leadership, Bridget Phillipson, answered questions at its annual conference.
Powell, who was sacked from the cabinet in a reshuffle last month, has presented herself as an independent “shop steward” for members, a balance to what she has called a sometimes isolated leadership.
Phillipson, the education secretary, who is seen as the favoured candidate of Keir Starmer and his allies, said picking Powell could result in the government being derailed by “division and disunity”.
“I want us to turn this government around, not to turn on each other,” Phillipson told the hustings. “Change is on the ballot at this election. The choice is: what kind of change? You can choose to push our government to be bolder, to go further, to do more, with me as your voice at the cabinet table. Or you can choose division and disunity that fills the pages of the rightwing papers and puts us back on the road to opposition.”
Powell, the MP for Manchester Central, countered this by saying she did not seek dissent, “but an important conversation about how we can be better, because we need to be. The stakes are too high.” She added: “I won’t shy away from the difficult conversations, but I won’t snipe from the sidelines.”
Asked what the government had got wrong, Phillipson, the MP for Houghton and Sunderland South, identified controversies over winter fuel payments and welfare policy, but said it was important to focus also on what had gone right.
Powell blamed mistakes on “fewer and fewer people taking decisions that are not connected to the communities that we represent, and not hearing that feedback from the doorstep, from our workplaces”, saying this was having an impact on activists.
“We’ve all seen what’s happening,” Powell said. “People are feeling frustrated, they are feeling demotivated. They are being disconnected from the conversation at the top of the party and in government. I think there’s a real virtue to having this job as a full-time party role outside government, so that I can be in every constituency, in every community, in every council, and bring that really strong feedback to what is happening at the top.”
Polls suggest Powell has more support in the lead-up to a ballot of party members that runs from 8-23 October. The duo were the only two of six initial candidates to reach the required support threshold of at least 80 Labour MPs in a contest triggered by the resignation of Angela Rayner over the underpayment of stamp duty on a flat she owns.
