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”.
