A veteran London Labour MP has called for a grassroots challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
John McDonnell, who was suspended from the party last year for voting to scrap the two child benefit cap, accused the Prime Minister of “callousness and political incompetence”.
The Hayes and Harlington MP said the Labour leadership had launched a “brutal attack” on the “benefits of disabled people” and criticised the hesitance to lift the two child benefit cap.
In an opinion piece for the Guardian, the former shadow chancellor warned that party members, unions and MPs should “stand up and assert themselves to take back control of our party” or risk losing it.
“What I didn’t appreciate was that once elected, the Starmer government wouldn’t just be an administration of timid reform, but would rapidly instigate a series of policies that drove a knife into the heart of what I believed Labour stood for when I joined the party. Labour was founded to eliminate poverty and secure equality,” Mr McDonnell wrote.
“After the first king’s speech, the government didn’t just fail to address the major cause of child poverty in Britain at the moment – the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap – but demanded that Labour MPs vote against its abolition.
“This was the first time the political incompetence and callousness of the new administration’s decision-makers were put on display.”
Mr McDonnell was among seven Labour MPs who had the whip suspended in July 2024 for voting to end the two-child limit on child benefit, a move he claimed “showed a remarkable combination of arrogance and lack of judgment”.
The policy, along with the partial U-turn on means testing the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and cuts to disability benefits, has remained contentious. Next month, the government will unveil its spending review outlining funding for public service.
There is pressure from Labour backbenchers and trade unions to introduce a wealth tax and reverse the planned welfare cuts, but the leadership has resisted those calls.
Mr McDonnell’s intervention is likely to be read as a call for Sir Keir to be ousted unless he does not undo some of the planned reforms.
“Unless the party members, our affiliated unions and members of the parliamentary Labour party stand up and assert themselves to take back control of our party, in the next period, in the Labour party’s history we may not just lose a government, we could lose a party”, Mr McDonnell said.
