By Alistair Smout and David Milliken
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s governing Labour Party on Saturday said Lucy Powell had won a vote of members to become the party’s deputy leader, a victory for a candidate whom Prime Minister Keir Starmer sacked as a government minister last month.
Powell defeated education minister Bridget Phillipson by a 54-46 margin on a low 17% turnout, and called on Starmer to stop courting voters tempted by right-wing immigration policies and instead focus on bolstering left-wing support.
“We won’t win by trying to out-Reform Reform, but by building a broad progressive consensus,” Powell said in her victory speech, saying the party needed to focus on its traditional values around reducing inequality.
Labour lost a seat in the Welsh parliament on Friday to the left-leaning Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, and was pushed into third place by former Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which is focused on cutting immigration.
The election of a new deputy Labour leader followed the resignation of Angela Rayner in September after she breached ministerial rules by mistakenly failing to pay the correct tax when buying a house.
Powell lost her job in Starmer’s government in a ministerial reshuffle after Rayner’s resignation. She has suggested she might have been sacked from her job overseeing the government’s legislative agenda for letting Starmer know that things such as planned welfare cuts were unpopular with the party.
Speaking on Saturday, Powell said the party’s leadership needed to change its culture to re-engage with members and lawmakers and drop a “command and control” approach.
Unlike Rayner, Powell will not serve as deputy prime minister as Starmer appointed justice minister David Lammy to that role after Rayner’s resignation.
Powell has promised to be “a strong independent voice”, after the party’s tough first year in government during which its popularity has decreased.
Responding to Powell’s victory speech, Starmer welcomed her election as “a proud defender of Labour values” and said Friday’s defeat in Wales highlighted the urgency of delivering visible improvements to voters.
(Reporting by Alistair Smout and David Milliken; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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