United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has won a key vote in Parliament on a signature plan to overhaul the country’s welfare system.
But the 335 to 260 House of Commons victory on Tuesday largely rang hollow, with Starmer forced to soften his promised cuts amid pushback from members of his own Labour Party, in what could represent a crisis for his leadership.
“Welfare reform, let’s be honest, is never easy, perhaps especially for Labour governments,” work and pensions minister Liz Kendall told Parliament on Tuesday, acknowledging the party infighting that had defined the debate.
Reporting from London, Al Jazeera’s Milena Veselinovic described the vote as a “victory in name only” for Starmer.
“His government was facing such a huge rebellion from his own Labour MPs that there was no chance that he could pass this bill in the form that it was originally laid out,” she said.
Starmer had ridden into office last year on the back of the largest parliamentary majority in UK history, currently holding 403 of 650 seats. That majority, he maintained, would help him avoid parliamentary dysfunction that had defined the body throughout years of Conservative rule.
But Starmer’s signature plan to trim down the UK’s ballooning welfare system soon ran into controversy, particularly when it came to disability benefits.
Starmer’s plan pitched raising the threshold for the benefits by requiring a higher threshold for physical or mental disability.
That prompted more than 120 Labour lawmakers to publicly say they would vote against the bill. They included Rachael Maskell, one of the leading opponents, who called the cuts “Dickensian” and said they “belong to a different era and a different party”.
In concessions to party members, the government backed down on implementing tougher eligibility rules for the payments until a wider review of the welfare system had been completed.
The government also pivoted to only have the reforms apply to future applicants, and not current claimants, as they initially sought.
While the government had at first hoped to save 5 billion pounds ($6.9bn) a year by 2030, the savings under the new plan is estimated to be closer to 2 billion pounds.
“This is a huge blow to the authority of Keir Starmer,” Al Jazeera’s Veselinovic said, “a prime minister who came into power on the back of a massive electoral landslide, who is now unable to pass what his government called flagship legislation without stripping it of nearly all its meaning.”
