New deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell addressed a party in crisis and delivered a de facto slapdown to Sir Keir Starmer in her first speech since taking the reins from Angela Rayner. She said Reform UK’s Nigel Farage had been able to run away with the “political megaphone” and said people believe the Labour Government has not been “bold enough” in delivering change since winning power last year.
Though cushioned with pledges to help the PM in his “fight”, this is a very public chastisement for a leader who has just watched the heartland seat of Caerphilly go to Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru, with Labour pushed into a humiliating third place behind Reform.
Her message was clear – Labour is in the “fight of our lives” for the “future of the country and democracy” and, despite having 401 of the 650 seats in Westminster, the Government has let Mr Farage’s insurgent party set the agenda. This is a clear chastisement.
If this was not hard enough for Sir Keir to hear, she delivered a warning against trying to park Labour tanks on Reform’s turf.
She said: “We won’t win by trying to out-Reform Reform but by building a broad progressive consensus.”
This will be seen as shot across Government bows, warning ministers not to try and drag Reform down in the polls by adopting ever-tougher positions on immigration. She said Mr Farage “wants to blame immigration for all the country’s problems” but “we reject that”.
It is not surprising that when Sir Keir took the stage after her he made a plea for unity.
“We must unite,” he said. “We must keep our focus on what is in my view the defining battle for the soul of our nation.”
He accused both Reform and the Conservatives of peddling “a politics of division and grievance that wants to take this great country to a very dark place,” adding: “Our job, whoever we are in this party, is to unite every single person in this country who is opposed to that politics and defeat it once and for all.”
This looked like the sketching out of Labour’s survival strategy: Bring together people who are tempted to vote for the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party and any other Left-wing rivals by telling them this is how you stop the country lurching to the hard Right.
It appears he has taken at least one lesson from the Caerphilly by-election for the Welsh Parliament. People will turn out to vote against Reform.
In this case they backed Plaid, which has presented itself as a Left-leaning alternative to Labour for decades. Sir Keir’s challenge is to persuade people who do not want Mr Farage to be Prime Minister that a vote for Labour is the best way of holding back the teal tide.
But if May’s Scottish, Welsh and English council elections are a catastrophe for Labour his days at the helm may come to an end. He can expect criticism which will not be as diplomatically measured as Ms Powell’s inaugural rebuke.
It is the PM who is in the fight of his life.
