The contest for Labour’s deputy leadership brings to mind Henry Kissinger’s remark about the Iran-Iraq war – that it was a pity they both couldn’t lose.
Has there ever been a more talentless, dispiriting, depressing election than the imminent face-off between Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and the former leader of the commons, Lucy Powell, kicked out of the Cabinet last week in Starmer’s reshuffle because she was so useless?
Labour MPs’ obsession with identity politics meant they decided to restrict their choice to women from the North, so this is where they have ended up. Then again, it’s not as if the other candidates set the pulses racing. If you’ve heard of Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Alison McGovern or Paula Barker then you’re most likely related to them. And Emily Thornberry, who some thought might make it through to the final members vote, is as Islington as they come, which ruled her out.
The contest might be between two varying degrees of awfulness, but it matters. Angela Rayner was widely regarded as a shoo-in to succeed Keir Starmer as leader until her forced resignation last week. If Bridget Phillipson succeeds Britain’s most unlikely property tycoon as deputy leader, she will become the favourite to run the party next. And if you thought Starmer and Rayner were bad…
Bridget Phillipson is ‘the most destructive education secretary in over 30 years,’ writes Stephen Pollard
Lucy Powell was fired as the House of Commons leader in Starmer’s reshuffle last week
Phillipson is certainly achieving much of what she set out to do when she became education secretary last year. The problem is that what she set out to achieve is ruinous. She is the most destructive education secretary in over 30 years, doing everything she can to undermine two of the most successful elements in British education – private schools and academy schools.
By viciously championing the imposition of VAT on fees, she has forced the closure of at least 54 independent schools, with more to come. These schools are nothing like Phillipson’s caricature of bastions of privilege. Middle and working class parents scrimped and saved to send their children to them. The closures also include specialist schools for pupils with additional needs.
Phillipson has repeatedly said the VAT levy would be used to hire 6,500 new teachers. That’s simply not true: there are now 400 fewer teachers than when she took office. And the money has had to be found to pay for the costs of over 11,000 pupils forced into the state sector.
For over 30 years, a cross-party consensus on education reform – placing value on the freedom and autonomy of school leaders and teachers – has transformed the sector. Those reforms have been consistently opposed by the teaching unions, the most malign force in education, but Phillipson has made it her mission to adopt their agenda of rolling the clock back. So, she is replacing the academy freedoms which have driven the increase in standards with a return to the centralisation of old.
As for Lucy Powell, the wonder is not that she was sacked last week by Keir Starmer, it’s that she was given a Cabinet job in the first place. Her record of ignominious failure includes her time as vice-chair of Labour’s disastrous 2015 election, a campaign widely regarded at the time as the party’s worst since 1983. But that did nothing to halt her rise, and she has been a regular spokeswoman in the media.
You may recall her appearance in May on the BBC’s Any Questions, days after a searing Channel 4 documentary on grooming gangs. Asked if she had seen it, she replied: ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now do we?’ and then, ‘let’s get that dog whistle out shall we?’ That attitude typifies not just Labour’s response to the scandal but Powell’s own mindset. Interviewed by Andrew Neil after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, she was asked as MP for Manchester Central how serious she thought the problem of Islamist radicalisation was in the city. Instead of dealing with what was clearly the key question, she attacked the veteran journalist for asking about it and for ‘pitting community against community’.
In one sense Powell and Phillipson are perfect for the job. Wrong-headed, vindictive and ruinously bad, they exemplify the past year of a Labour Government which has not only betrayed the hopes of the voters who gave it such a huge majority, but has shown itself to be unworthy of government.
