Labour accused of ‘stitch-up’ over deputy leadership contest, as Louise Haigh joins debate with call for ‘economic reset’
Good morning. The Labour party has had 18 deputy leaders in its history, but only two of them have also served as deputy PM and one of those, Angela Rayner, resigned last week. In the reshuffle that started on Friday, Keir Starmer in effect decoupled those posts, appointing David Lammy as deputy PM (as well as justice secretary). Labour said there would be an election for a new deputy leader to replace Rayner and today the timetable for that election will be set. There is no guarantee that the winner will even have a job in government.
Elections are, by definition, divisive, and the easiest option for Keir Starmer would be for Labour MPs to coalesce behind one consensus candidate. Under the rules, an MP needs the support of 20% of the PLP (80 MPs) to be nominated and so it is possible that this could happen. Anyone perceived as a “rebel” candidate might struggle to reach this threshold. Ministers, and cabinet ministers, are free to enter the contest. If Lammy were to stand, and win, he could re-unite the deputy PM and deputy leader jobs, but there is a strong sense in the party that the deputy leader should be a woman, and should represent a seat outside London, and Lammy does not seem interested anyway. At this point there is no obvious favourite, but Annabelle Dickson and Bethany Dawson have a good guide to potential candidates in their London Playbook for Politico.
Already, there is a row about process. Here are the key developments this morning.
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Deputy leadership candidates will only have four days to collect the 80 MP nominations they need, it is being reported. Labour’s national executive committee will reportedly set 5pm on Thursday as the deadline for nominations, with the ballot taking place between 8 and 23 October – with the election over well before the budget, which is taking place on 26 November.
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Richard Burgon, one of the leading figures in the leftwing Socialist Campaign group in parliament, and a candidate for deputy leader in 2020, has accused the party of a stitch-up. In a post on social media last night, he said:
I’ve been warning about attempts to fix the deputy leadership election – and what I’ve heard is now being proposed is the mother of all stitch-ups. Just a couple of days to secure MPs’ nominations!
This is a desperate move to keep Labour members’ voices out of this race and to dodge serious discussion on what’s gone wrong over the last year – from the positions on disability benefits cuts, on winter fuel payments, on Gaza and more. This outrageous timetable shows a leadership that’s unwilling to listen and to learn the lessons needed if we’re to rebuild support and stop Nigel Farage.
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Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary and a potential candidate for the deputy leadership, has published on the New Statesman’s website what amounts to a pitch for the job, demanding “an economic reset” and “a decisive break with the fiscal rules and institutional constraints that hold back renewal”. It is a serious intervention, and, by implication, a damning critique of Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. Here is an extract.
There is a democratic argument at the heart of this as well. A Labour government with a landslide majority in parliament cannot – and should not – be stopped from delivering the change we clearly set out in our manifesto simply because of assumptions made by the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility]. If we let unelected institutions dictate the limits of change, we betray the people and communities who put their trust in us.
And if mainstream politics can’t deliver proper renewal, populists like Nigel Farage will fill the void. Britain’s economy is broken not just in outcomes but in architecture. Unless we rewrite the rules, we risk managed decline dressed up as moderation.
I am devastated by the departure of Angela Rayner last week, who consistently offered a challenge to the establishment orthodoxy. Her absence is a real loss to those of us who want to see bold, radical thinking at the heart of government. The reshuffle has been billed as a political reset, but if we are serious about delivering on our priorities, it must offer more than a change of personnel around the Cabinet table. What the country needs now is an economic reset: a decisive break with the fiscal rules and institutional constraints that hold back renewal. Only then can Labour turn its democratic mandate into the transformation Britain so urgently needs.
Haigh would have difficulty winning a deputy leadership contest, because of her resignation last year over a 10-year-old conviction relating to mobile phone fraud, but a lot of Labour members will probably agree with the argument in her New Statesman article. I will post more from it soon.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Paul Nowak, TUC general secretary, speaks at the TUC conference in Brighton. The delegates are debating motions relating to the economy and public services in the morning, and workers’ rights in the afternoon.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Noon: Labour’s national executive committee meets to decide the timetable for the deputy leadership election.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
3pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, speaks at an event to launch the children’s plan.
6pm: Starmer speaks to Labour MPs at a private meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP).
And at some point today Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, is chairing a meeting the Five Eyes security alliance.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Migration expert says there’s ‘increasing evidence of Brexit effect’ leading to small boat arrival numbers going up
Aside from the need to replace Angela Rayner, it seems the key aim of last week’s cabinet reshuffe was Keir Starmer’s desire to replace Yvette Cooper as home secretary with Shabana Mahmood. Starmer reportedly thinks she will adopt a more muscular approach to addressing the small boats problem.
With this in mind, the Today programme broadcast an interview early this morning with Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, an Oxford University migration thinktank. When asked to explain why the small boat arrival numbers are at a record level, Walsh said Brexit was one factor. He explained:
If we look at the powerful geopolitical push factors, they’re things like regime change. We think Afghanistan, war, civil conflict. And when we look at people crossing in small boats, where do they come from? Well, the top nationalities: Afghan, Eritrea, Iranian, Syrian, Sudanese – just those five nationalities account for almost two thirds of all small boat arrivals, and these individuals are from some of the most chaotic parts of the world.
But there are also some pull factors, and the question is, why not claim asylum in France, why come to the UK? A number of reasons recur there when we speak with asylum seekers. It’s the presence of family members, the English language.
But there’s also increasing evidence of a Brexit effect. We speak with asylum seekers now, and often they’ve claimed asylum in the EU country, sometimes been refused, but they understand that because the UK is no longer a part of the EU, and no longer party to the EU’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers, if they can get to the UK, they have another bite of the cherry and another chance to secure asylum status and remain in Europe.
Walsh said, that for people like this, if the UK was still in the EU their chances of being granted asylum here would be “much diminished”. He said:
In those circumstances, typically, flagged upon the system, the UK government would be able to issue a speedy refuse refusal and try and effect removal.
As it is, people arrive, we don’t have that record, so we don’t know who they are.
And also, even if we were [in that database], we wouldn’t be able to return them, because we’re no longer party to that Dublin system that allowed for the transfer of asylum seekers back to countries of first entry.
Dawn Butler, who like Richard Burgon (see 8.52am) was also a candidate in the 2020 deputy leadership contest, has posted this on social media hinting she is still interested.
This is an important time for MPs to get together to discuss who our next Deputy Leader will be. Unfortunately, there’s a tube strike, and it’s a very very short deadline. We must never be afraid of a fair process.
Pic – just a teaser 😉 pic.twitter.com/O5BoRUsCAh
— Dawn Butler ✊🏾💙 (@DawnButlerBrent) September 8, 2025
Haigh attacks ‘unaccountable orthodoxy’ of OBR, as she says Labour not giving UK ‘full transformation’ it needs
Here is a summary of the main points in Louise Haigh’s New Statesman article published today under the heading “The fiscal straighjacket facing Labour must be broken”. (See 8.52am.) Although Haigh includes a line saying Labour should be “shouting from the rooftops” about its achievements, the article is mostly a critique of Rachel Reeves’s fiscal orthodoxy, combined with a general call for more radicalism from the government.
Labour was elected in 2024 to rebuild Britain – not to steady the ship, but to remake it completely.
This is an implicit criticism not just of Keir Starmer’s record, but of his election strategy too. Starmer promised “change”, but he also defined change in terms of economic stability, which he described as an improvement on Tory chaos.
One year on, our mission of renewal is under threat. Economic circumstances and excessive deference to independent institutions are frustrating the democratic demand for change …
Yet the damage wasn’t just financial. It was institutional. The Conservatives embedded a model of governance where opaque watchdogs outrank democratic choice. Labour now runs the risk of exacerbating these issues.
Many Labour members would agree. But this also echoes arguments deployed by Reform UK.
Originally created to provide an independent check on economic forecasts and help policymaking, [the OBR] has morphed into a gatekeeper of orthodoxy. Its models often underestimate the long-term returns of public investment and ignore the wider benefits of progressive taxation or public ownership.
We now know that Sure Start centres, for example, delivered £2 of savings for every pound spent – yet their closure under Osborne was never flagged as a fiscal risk. Nor does the OBR’s sustainability report warn that childhood poverty today will mean higher costs tomorrow.
Worse, its forecasting cycle entrenches short-termism: two fiscal events a year, judged against a five-year horizon. We plan defence, housing, and climate investment in decades, yet the watchdog looks only five years ahead. In my view, the OBR should publish supplementary long-term assessments so markets can see the real savings from social investment. Without that, governments are forced into short-term fixes even though the bond market itself takes a longer view.
Haigh suggested part of the reason for the failure of the government’s Pip reforms was the inability of the OBR to make allowance for the proposed policies producing savings over the long term. And she also criticised the accuracy of OBR forecasts (a complaint also made regularly by the Tories).
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Haigh said the OBR should revise its growth forecasts only once a year, not twice a year as it is required to do now under law passed by the Tories. She said this would “give ministers the space to design serious, long-term reforms – not scramble for short-term fixes to meet arbitrary fiscal targets”. It is thought that Starmer thinks this too. But the government has been nervous about changing the way the OBR operates in case that gets interpreted as a weakening of fiscal discipline.
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Haigh criticised the “quantitive tightening” policy being followed by the Bank of England. She said this was a result of the way George Osborne introduced quantitive easing when he was chancellor. The IPPR, a leftwing thinktank, has made the same argument.
It is beyond comprehension that we have not already reformed our approach to the payment of interest on reserves held in the Bank of England reserves. Commercial banks are earning near-Bank Rate on hundreds of billions in deposits costing the taxpayer roughly £40bn a year.
This is a view shared by various economists, and Reform UK has been making this argument for at least a year. Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is due to discuss the issue with the Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, at a meeting soon.
Zack Polanski, the new, leftwing leader of the Green party, will be speaking at the TUC conference, later today, Sky News reports.
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
Ian Murray, the former Scotland secretary unceremoniously sacked by Keir Starmer on Friday, is back in government after an apparent revolt by his Scottish Labour allies and backbench MPs.
Murray, said to be “furious” about his sacking, was unexpectedly made a junior minister in both the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on Saturday night, as Starmer’s reshuffle continued.
On Sunday, Douglas Alexander, his replacement in the Scotland Office, spoke to Murray’s popularity in an interview with BBC Scotland when he was asked about his colleague’s sacking.
He nodded at Murray’s survival as the Labour’s only Scottish MP following the rout in the 2015 general election at the hands of the Scottish National party – when Alexander lost his previous seat of Paisley and Renfrewshire South. He said:
I’m somewhat biased. He’s both a friend as well as a colleague. I’ve campaigned with him, for him, and we owe him, as the Labour movement in Scotland, an immense debt of gratitude. In 2015, in the immediate aftermath after the referendum, he literally kept the flag flying for Scottish Labour in the really tough times. He showed extraordinary resilience as well as abilities, and in that sense I’m delighted that he’s back in government.
Alexander confirmed he would be playing a senior role in Scottish Labour’s campaign to oust the SNP from power in next May’s Holyrood election as a deputy campaign chair alongside Jackie Baillie, the Scottish party’s deputy leader.
It is widely thought Alexander was brought in to help rescue the party: recent opinion polls show its support is plummeting, with Reform UK nearly level, very largely due to Labour’s unpopularity at UK level.
Alexander told the Sunday Show on BBC Scotland his job was to help defeat the SNP.
Our responsibility in the coming months is to do what we did just a couple of weeks ago in Barrhead [winning a council byelection], do what we did a couple of months ago in Hamilton [winning a Holyrood byelection], which is to take our case to the Scottish public and then disprove the critics and the cynics.
Challenged about the polls suggesting the SNP only a few seats short of winning an overall majority at Holyrood in May, which the SNP argues would be a mandate for a second referendum, Alexander said:
To continue the earlier football analogy, I’m not really going to engage in post-match analysis when the game hasn’t even begun, never mind finished.
I’m not really interested in anticipating our defeat as Scottish Labour. I’m way more interested in contributing to Scottish Labour’s victory. And that’s what each and every one of my colleagues as Scottish representatives at Westminster for the Labour party, and indeed my friends and colleagues in Holyrood are determined to deliver between now and May.
New home secretary Shabana Mahmood chairs meeting of Five Eyes security alliance
Shabana Mahmood has met counterparts from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance for talks on international efforts to tackle smuggling gangs, PA Media reports. PA says:
In her first major engagement as home secretary,Mahmood hosted counterparts from the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in London after the number of small boat crossings reached more than 30,000 in 2025.
Ministers are examining using military bases to house asylum seekers in “temporary but adequate” accommodation as Sir Keir Starmer tries to get a grip on the migrants crisis.
Some 1,097 people arrived in the UK in 17 boats on Saturday, bringing the total in 2025 so far to 30,100 – a record for this point in a year.
The figure is 37% up on this point last year (22,028) and also 37% higher than at this stage in 2023 (21,918), according to PA news agency analysis.
Mahmood said the numbers were “utterly unacceptable” and that she expected migrant returns under a deal agreed last month with France to begin “imminently”.
Ahead of Monday’s meeting, she said the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact would “agree new measures to protect our border, hitting people smugglers hard”.
She was joined at the talks by US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, Canadian public safety minister Gary Anandasangaree, Australian home affairs minister Tony Burke and New Zealand minister Judith Collins.
The group was also discussing new measures to tackle child sexual abuse online and the spread of deadly synthetic opioids.
Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
Labour must improve workers’ rights to fulfil promise to voters, says Unite’s Sharon Graham
Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, has issued a warning to the government, saying it should enact full reforms of workers’ rights in order to fulfil a “promise to the British people”, Jessica Elgot reports.
Labour’s new deputy leader should be a woman, not from London, and not ‘oppositional’, Harriet Harman says
Harriet Harman, who served as deputy Labour leader under Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband (although Brown never made her deputy PM), has said the party should not let the deputy leadership contest become a debate about the case for a “new direction”. She was speaking in an interview on the Today programme. Here are are main points.
An election for the deputy leadership when Labour is in government, just shortly after our first year of government, is very different than a deputy leadership election when you’re trying to set out a new direction for the party, rebuild the party after an election defeat.
And what I think we need is … somebody who is not a counterpoint to the leader, but is complementary to the leader, will broaden the reach of the leader and galvanise the party …
The role of the deputy leader is not to provide an alternative, oppositional voice. It’s to be part of a team. The clue is in the name.
I think that, in terms of extending the breadth of the leadership, it probably needs to be somebody from outside London, and it definitely needs to be a woman. But there are 185 Labour women MPs, many very talented …
With a prime minister and a deputy prime minister representing London constituencies, the party might well think that the extending of the reach that the deputy provides should be somebody from outside London, but definitely a woman. I don’t think we can have a male prime minister, a man as deputy prime minister and a male deputy leader of the party.
If Labour MPs agree with Harman, and they want a deputy leader loyal to Keir Starmer, then Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, would all fit the bill. But they have all got quite important jobs already, and so may not be interested.
Non-cabinet ministers who would meet the Harmen criteria include Jess Phillips and Alison McGovern.
Labour accused of ‘stitch-up’ over deputy leadership contest, as Louise Haigh joins debate with call for ‘economic reset’
Good morning. The Labour party has had 18 deputy leaders in its history, but only two of them have also served as deputy PM and one of those, Angela Rayner, resigned last week. In the reshuffle that started on Friday, Keir Starmer in effect decoupled those posts, appointing David Lammy as deputy PM (as well as justice secretary). Labour said there would be an election for a new deputy leader to replace Rayner and today the timetable for that election will be set. There is no guarantee that the winner will even have a job in government.
Elections are, by definition, divisive, and the easiest option for Keir Starmer would be for Labour MPs to coalesce behind one consensus candidate. Under the rules, an MP needs the support of 20% of the PLP (80 MPs) to be nominated and so it is possible that this could happen. Anyone perceived as a “rebel” candidate might struggle to reach this threshold. Ministers, and cabinet ministers, are free to enter the contest. If Lammy were to stand, and win, he could re-unite the deputy PM and deputy leader jobs, but there is a strong sense in the party that the deputy leader should be a woman, and should represent a seat outside London, and Lammy does not seem interested anyway. At this point there is no obvious favourite, but Annabelle Dickson and Bethany Dawson have a good guide to potential candidates in their London Playbook for Politico.
Already, there is a row about process. Here are the key developments this morning.
-
Deputy leadership candidates will only have four days to collect the 80 MP nominations they need, it is being reported. Labour’s national executive committee will reportedly set 5pm on Thursday as the deadline for nominations, with the ballot taking place between 8 and 23 October – with the election over well before the budget, which is taking place on 26 November.
-
Richard Burgon, one of the leading figures in the leftwing Socialist Campaign group in parliament, and a candidate for deputy leader in 2020, has accused the party of a stitch-up. In a post on social media last night, he said:
I’ve been warning about attempts to fix the deputy leadership election – and what I’ve heard is now being proposed is the mother of all stitch-ups. Just a couple of days to secure MPs’ nominations!
This is a desperate move to keep Labour members’ voices out of this race and to dodge serious discussion on what’s gone wrong over the last year – from the positions on disability benefits cuts, on winter fuel payments, on Gaza and more. This outrageous timetable shows a leadership that’s unwilling to listen and to learn the lessons needed if we’re to rebuild support and stop Nigel Farage.
-
Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary and a potential candidate for the deputy leadership, has published on the New Statesman’s website what amounts to a pitch for the job, demanding “an economic reset” and “a decisive break with the fiscal rules and institutional constraints that hold back renewal”. It is a serious intervention, and, by implication, a damning critique of Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. Here is an extract.
There is a democratic argument at the heart of this as well. A Labour government with a landslide majority in parliament cannot – and should not – be stopped from delivering the change we clearly set out in our manifesto simply because of assumptions made by the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility]. If we let unelected institutions dictate the limits of change, we betray the people and communities who put their trust in us.
And if mainstream politics can’t deliver proper renewal, populists like Nigel Farage will fill the void. Britain’s economy is broken not just in outcomes but in architecture. Unless we rewrite the rules, we risk managed decline dressed up as moderation.
I am devastated by the departure of Angela Rayner last week, who consistently offered a challenge to the establishment orthodoxy. Her absence is a real loss to those of us who want to see bold, radical thinking at the heart of government. The reshuffle has been billed as a political reset, but if we are serious about delivering on our priorities, it must offer more than a change of personnel around the Cabinet table. What the country needs now is an economic reset: a decisive break with the fiscal rules and institutional constraints that hold back renewal. Only then can Labour turn its democratic mandate into the transformation Britain so urgently needs.
Haigh would have difficulty winning a deputy leadership contest, because of her resignation last year over a 10-year-old conviction relating to mobile phone fraud, but a lot of Labour members will probably agree with the argument in her New Statesman article. I will post more from it soon.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Paul Nowak, TUC general secretary, speaks at the TUC conference in Brighton. The delegates are debating motions relating to the economy and public services in the morning, and workers’ rights in the afternoon.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Noon: Labour’s national executive committee meets to decide the timetable for the deputy leadership election.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
3pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, speaks at an event to launch the children’s plan.
6pm: Starmer speaks to Labour MPs at a private meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP).
And at some point today Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, is chairing a meeting the Five Eyes security alliance.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.