The dangerous idiocy of Lucy Powell

A woman from the north. That, apparently, is the full extent of the job description in this far-from-gripping contest to select the Labour Party’s next deputy leader.

Following the departure of Stockport-born Angela Rayner, after revelations of some creative accounting to avoid paying stamp duty on her second home, a consensus has formed that her successor must also hail from the party’s former northern heartlands.

You could call it centrist identity politics, if it wasn’t so transparently self-serving. Prime minister Keir Starmer’s pick is education secretary and loyalist Bridget Phillipson, who also happens to be from Sunderland. Meanwhile, Labour’s self-styled northern king over the water, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, has given the royal nod to Lucy Powell, MP for Manchester Central, who could be a useful thorn in Starmer’s side, following her ejection from the cabinet at the recent reshuffle.

Still, if you wanted a neat demonstration of how immutable characteristics alone do not qualify someone for a job, or qualify them to speak on behalf of those who share those characteristics, this otherwise bloodless political face-off is rather instructive.

Phillipson and Powell are typical of this Labour Party. Like so many politicians today, both left the real world aged 18 and never really looked back. Both went to Oxford, followed by a spell in the third sector or political communications, before a career in the party beckoned.

You’ll be surprised to learn that both backed Remain, and then a second Brexit referendum – after the public let them down by daring to vote for Leave. Beyond that, it is impossible to discern what either really believes in, beyond being ‘nicer’ than those horrible right-wingers.

But for our purposes here, let’s focus on Powell – who combines a comic ineptitude with a psychotic contempt for the concerns of the people she is meant to represent.

Powell is a veteran of Ed Miliband’s successful bid to be Labour leader in 2010, and his catastrophic bid to be prime minister in 2015. She was the brains behind his election interview with Russell Brand – which seemed to impress Owen Jones and no one else. She even went out on the airwaves to defend the ridiculous EdStone, conceding on BBC Radio 5 Live that Miliband’s decision to carve his election pledges on a giant limestone tablet was still no guarantee he wouldn’t break them.

But it is her wilful blindness to Islamism, grooming gangs and the discontents of multiculturalism that most marks her out. Of course wilful blindness to Islamism, grooming gangs and the discontents of multiculturalism pervades the entire Labour Party. But rarely has an MP been sufficiently low-wattage to express it so explicitly.

Many will remember her comments on BBC Radio 4 a few months back, when she accused Reform-backing commentator Tim Montgomerie of ‘dog-whistling’ after he raised the issue of the rape gangs – the industrial-scale abuse of poor girls by gangs of disproportionately Pakistani Muslim men, covered up for decades because of a cowardly dismissal of victims, dressed up in the language of political correctness.

Powell’s area of Greater Manchester was particularly scarred by this double evil: of monsters drugging and raping girls, and of local authorities turning a blind eye for fear of stirring up ‘racial tensions’. A 2019 review into the horrific case of Victoria Agoglia – a 15-year-old girl in care who was drugged and raped by groups of men, before being killed by a fatal dose of heroin, injected by a 50-year-old man – concluded that her ‘exposure to sexual exploitation by adult males was known to police and social services’. Is that a ‘dog whistle’, too, Lucy?

Fewer may remember Powell’s turn on BBC Two’s Daily Politics, just after jihadist Salman Abedi blew up 22 people, many of them young girls, and injured 1,000 more at the Manchester Arena, within her own constituency. Andrew Neil asked her how serious the problem of ‘Islamist radicalisation’ is in Manchester. She all but told him off. ‘I don’t even want to ascribe what has happened to the Islam faith’, she said. She didn’t even seem to understand what the term Islamism meant, nor recognise how repulsive it was to be tone policing at a time when those bodies were barely cold.

So Lucy Powell dismissed the rape gangs as a racist talking point, even though they had haunted her own city. She downplayed the threat of Islamism, even though it inflicted the worst terror attack on Manchester in its history.

A woman from the north? Powell is the walking, talking rebuttal to the notion that where you were born, and the bits you were born with, qualify you to serve your party, constituency or country.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater