Labour’s new deputy leader says party must pay more heed to its members
Labour’s new deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has said the government must listen to its members instead of being guided by a “narrow group of voices” as it battles to stave off electoral disaster in next May’s local elections.Powell defeated the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, in the deputy leadership contest, which concluded on Saturday.She said she had been given “a clear mandate that members want their voice to be heard at the top of the party”.The Manchester Central MP won 54% of the vote, polling 87,407 votes, while Phillipson received 73,536.Turnout was just 16.
6%, which some Labour insiders say points to widespread disillusionment within the party.The result was announced on Saturday against the backdrop of Labour’s catastrophic byelection performance in Caerphilly.The party came third, behind Plaid Cymru and Reform, polling just 11% of the vote in a previously safe seat that had been held by Labour since the creation of the Welsh Senedd in 1999.Both Labour deputy leadership candidates spoke in favour of scrapping the two-child benefit cap, something believed to be unpopular with members.Speaking to the Guardian, Powell said: “I think we often feel like our members and elected representatives are something we need to stand against or not value.
They are our strengths.“They connect us to the national conversation.Instead of just telling people what we want them to do, we need to respect, value and include them more, and recognise that debate is not division or dissent, and recognise you have to take people with you and hear from broader voices, not just a narrower group of voices.“They haven’t felt they have been included and connected as they should in recent months, and that’s what often happens when you go into government.“I’m going to really help to do that, to re-engage with the party, and make them feel part of the conversation again.
I’ll do that through working with Keir [Starmer], working with government, working right across the party in the leadership roles that I will have.”Powell, who was sacked as Commons leader by Starmer in September, said she would get to work “straight away” to shore up Labour’s support before local elections next May.She said the party needed to be clearer about its successes in office.She said: “I’m not writing off any elections next year.These are important elections in Wales, in Scotland, in London, and right around the country.
“I’m going to get to work straight away on how we can mobilise for these elections and how we can rebuild our voter coalition and recognise there is a progressive alliance in this country.We need to be the leaders of it and not out-Reform Reform because that just doesn’t work.“It’s not that long.I think we’ve got to seize back the agenda – we’ve ceded too much in recent months.“We’ve got loads of great things we’ve done, I think we can all agree on that, from giving workers more rights, to pay rises, to more hospital appointments, to free school meals, to breakfast clubs.
“I think we just need to bring them all together in a stronger way – our agenda on how we are working in the interests of the many and not the few.”On Saturday evening the health secretary, Wes Streeting, compared the Caerphilly byelection result with the 2021 Hartlepool byelection, which left Starmer considering quitting as Labour leader.Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionStreeting told the Sunday Times: “When we were in opposition, we were shocked that Hartlepool – a town that had always been loyal to Labour – rejected us at the ballot box.“Keir Starmer not only took that result on the chin, he took it to heart.And he used Hartlepool and the experience of Hartlepool to drive through the change in the Labour party necessary to make it electable and capable of winning a general election that no one thought we would win.
“I have no doubt that, having done that before, Keir can do that again.”One ally of Phillipson, widely perceived as Downing Street’s favoured candidate, said it was “always going to be hard to assuage the anger of members, who have shown how unhappy they are through this result”.They added: “Bridget stood out of loyalty to Keir.She believed that standing was the right thing to do when it was clear no one else from cabinet was prepared to stand.”Starmer congratulated Powell on her victory.
He said the Conservatives and Reform wanted to take Britain to a “dark place” – prompting one strategist to suggest he was leaning into a more progressive brand of politics.The prime minister referenced comments made by the Conservative MP Katie Lam, touted as a possible future party leader.She said she believed “a large number of people” living legally in the UK should have their right to stay revoked and be forced to “go home” in order to create a “culturally coherent group of people” in the UK.Starmer said: “Our job, whoever we are in this party, is to unite every single person in this country who is opposed to that politics, and to defeat it, once and for all.”
Trump sanctions have swift impact but will world stop buying Russian oil and gas?
Donald Trump’s stated mission to broker peace in Ukraine could come down to this simple question: can the US president convince the world to stop buying Russia’s fossil fuels?Last week, Trump imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, in an effort to damage Moscow’s ability to fund its war machine.Tom Keatinge, the founding director of the Centre for Finance and Security (CFS) at the defence thinktank Rusi, said: “The US has been more effective in 24 hours than the EU has been in the last six months. Trump is willing to say what many others are too timid or too diplomatic to say out loud. For the longest time people have been calling for Trump to pull out the sanctions hammer. It could be very significant
Peer trying to derail UK smoking ban discussed bill with relative at tobacco firm
A member of the House of Lords who is trying to derail the generational ban on tobacco sales discussed the legislation with a family member who is “very high up” at British American Tobacco (BAT).Lord Strathcarron is proposing amendments that would scrap the central provision of the tobacco and vapes bill, originally proposed by Rishi Sunak’s government.If the bill is passed in its original form, the UK would become only the second country to implement a so-called generational smoking ban, making it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born after 2008.Strathcarron’s proposal is to simply raise the legal purchase age from 18 to 21.The change proposed by the peer, who in a recent speech in the Lords described cigars as “harmless”, mirrors BAT’s lobbying position
Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows
Executives at world’s biggest datacenter owner grappled with disclosing information about water used to help power facilitiesAmazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true extent of its datacentres’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals.The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.Amazon defends its approach and has taken steps to manage how efficient its water use is, but it has faced criticism over transparency. Microsoft and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms consume
AI models may be developing their own ‘survival drive’, researchers say
When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive.Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.In an update this week, Palisade, which is part of a niche ecosystem of companies trying to evaluate the possibility of AI developing dangerous capabilities, described scenarios it ran in which leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down
England beat New Zealand by eight wickets: Women’s Cricket World Cup – as it hapened
Righto, that’s all from us today. England progress in style and New Zealand legend Sophie Devine bows out. We’ll be back to bring you all the action from the semi-finals and final in the coming week. Enjoy your Sunday – goodbye!Here’s England captain Nat Sciver-Brunt:“We really wanted to put in a performance today. The way that we’ve gone about cricket in this tournament has been largely successful and so we’re happy to put in that performance and take some confidence into the semi-final
Mitchell steers New Zealand home with Brook’s 135 not enough to save England
A chaotically entertaining game characterised by batting that was either sensational or – more frequently – shambolic was settled by Daryl Mitchell’s ability to find serenity amid the calamity.Mitchell’s sober 78 not out, most notably assisted by Michael Bracewell (51), took a side floundering at 24 for three in pursuit of a superficially straightforward target and set them on the path to victory, wrapped up by four wickets and with 13.2 overs to spare.But if England were eclipsed it was their captain, Harry Brook, who shone brightest in compiling a century of phenomenal skill and judgment. His knock of 135 could not save his side from defeat, but it did rescue them from humiliation
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