KEIR Starmer’s claim that scrapping the two-child benefit cap is his proudest moment from his time as Prime Minister is a vain attempt to re-write history.
In an almost 12-minute long video posted on Twitter/X on Saturday, the outgoing Labour leader listed his own personal highlights of his time in office.
Starmer insisted he had done a “huge amount” to deal with and reduce child poverty in the UK. In a crisp white shirt, his sleeves rolled up, he said in the clip: “Whether that's free school meals, free breakfast clubs, free child care, which is really important, and of course lifting the two-child benefit limit, so that children grow up with better prospects.”
But what the Prime Minister has completely neglected to mention is that he was dragged kicking and screaming into scrapping the incredibly unpopular policy brought in by the previous Conservative government.
Starmer had actually pledged to remove the two-child cap back in 2020, when he was running in the Labour leadership contest.
But by 2023, with the General Election looming, Starmer changed his position and said he was “not changing that policy”.
After winning the Westminster 2024 election, Starmer announced a task force to work on the Child Poverty Strategy on July 17, with a Child Poverty Unit set up in the Cabinet Office.
But just days later, he suspended seven MPs for backing the SNP’s calls to scrap the two-child benefit cap limit in an amendment to the King’s Speech.
Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Imran Hussain, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Zarah Sultana were all suspended for six months.
It was then widely briefed in September 2025 that Starmer would announce scrapping the two-child cap at Labour’s conference in Liverpool that year. It didn’t happen.
The same thing happened again in May.
“Because a Britain where no child is hungry, where no child is held back by poverty – that’s a Britain built for all,” was the only reference made to child poverty by the Prime Minister in his keynote speech.
Two weeks before this, a second SNP attempt to scrap the two-child cap in the House of Commons saw the majority of Labour MPs abstain from voting.
This included all of Scottish Labour’s MPs.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves would eventually announce that the policy would be scrapped at the Autumn Budget last year, but its removal didn’t come into force until April 2026. That’s almost two years from when Labour first came to power in Westminster.
At The National we have written extensively on Starmer's repeated U-turns on policies ranging from the Winter Fuel Payment, grooming gangs, transgender rights and the 10 pledges he made to Labour members that were dropped one by one the closer he got to getting the keys to Downing Street.
This latest futile attempt to re-write history in his favour is Starmer scrambling for a legacy.
Before he is exiled to the backbenches, to giving speeches and trading his wares based on only two years at the top of the UK Government, Starmer wants to ensure that his time in power stood for something.
But he will be remembered for a vacuum of vision. For bringing in harder immigration controls than the Tories and cowing to Reform’s hateful agenda, the biggest rollback in LGBT+ rights in a generation, and for deciding that giving Peter Mandelson, who let us not forget was known as the “Prince of Darkness”, with known ties to the most notorious paedophile in history, a top diplomatic job in a failed attempt to charm Donald Trump.
This is not an endless list, and that’s the point – Starmer has made more bad decisions than good ones.
While removing the two-child cap was the right thing to do – that it took him two years to do it, that he punished MPs for standing up against it, and that he repeatedly briefed he would do it before eventually signing it off because it would be a for once popular policy, gives us the measure of the man; one who will change his principles based on whatever will keep him in power.
And look how far that got him.
