Keir Starmer is discovering that politics is a rough trade in which you don’t get any thanks – not even from your own side, let alone the voters.
Labour MPs will mark the first anniversary of their leader’s general election victory next week by mounting their biggest challenge to his authority. Some 122 of them – more than enough to defeat the government’s working majority of 165 – have signed an amendment opposing the welfare bill’s proposed cuts to disability benefits. A funny way to say “Thanks for the landslide, Keir,” isn’t it?
Yet the prime minister only has himself to blame. He is belatedly making the case for welfare reform to his mutinous backbenchers, but everyone knows the bill is about £5bn of panicky, crude cuts to eligibility for disability and sickness benefits to enable Rachel Reeves to stick within her fiscal rules.
She scrambled the package together ahead of her spring statement in March. Her cover was blown when fiscal watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility refused to “score” some of the savings towards meeting her rules, and she had to make last-minute savings of £500m on universal credit. Crucially, ministers had not prepared the ground with Labour backbenchers.
Starmer insists that next Tuesday’s crunch vote will go ahead, but the government is in panic mode. Cabinet loyalists are ringing round the rebels, claiming the vote is an issue of confidence (which Starmer denied). But the frantic arm-twisting isn’t working. There is safety in numbers, and yesterday the number of Labour MPs who had signed a hostile amendment that would, in effect, kill the bill at its second reading rose from 108 to 122. They rightly sense the wind in their sails after forcing a U-turn on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.
Even some cabinet ministers think privately that Starmer will have to back down, or at the very least postpone next week’s vote to avoid a humiliating defeat. Downing Street was surprised when so many Labour backbenchers crossed a line from private grumbling to public dissent by signing the amendment. It shouldn’t have been, and now there’s a familiar blame game as No 10 and government whips point the finger at each other.
The mood among Labour backbenchers is black. They complain that the government’s efforts to sell the changes have been woeful. One told me: “It’s been shambolic, a presentational disaster. At one briefing for us, they didn’t say, ‘We will protect disabled people who will never be able to work.’ It should have been point one, not added as an afterthought.”
As I’ve pointed out, the £1bn of back-to-work support trumpeted by ministers is not what it seems, as it does not reach that amount until 2029-30 and is not yet fully funded.
Critics claim that No 10 strategists saw the cuts as a way to define Starmer against the hard left. But Starmer has broken rule one for Labour leaders: never unite the party’s soft and hard left factions against you. The rebels are not the disappointed former and ex-future ministers portrayed by some loyalists. Many opponents are rebelling for the first time, more out of sorrow than anger, and accept Starmer’s belatedly offered “moral case” that the party must reform a “broken” welfare system that traps one in 10 working-age adults on disability or sickness benefits.
About 40 rebels are 2024 newbies – carefully vetted for loyalty as parliamentary candidates by Team Starmer – who are prepared to sacrifice the hope of promotion. But many came into politics to oppose “Tory austerity”, including welfare cuts: it’s in their DNA, just as Euroscepticism was in the bloodstream of the Conservative MPs who destabilised successive leaders.
There are no easy options for Starmer. Backing down completely would look pusillanimous and be yet another U-turn. Reeves would have a £5bn hole in her spending plans, and the financial markets might wobble at a government that looked unable to take tough decisions to balance the books.
In theory, Starmer could try to rely on the votes of the Tory opposition to see off the Labour rebellion. But Kemi Badenoch is offering him a poisoned chalice: her party would support the government if Starmer promised he would not raise taxes in the autumn. It’s a rare “win-win” for the Tories: if Starmer relies on Tory backing, Labour’s divisions will deepen. If he rejects her offer, as he will, the Tories will shout that the Budget will raise taxes.
Starmer could postpone the vote, and speculation is rising at Westminster today that this will happen. He could try to come up with a compromise package by the autumn. The downside: a PM who seems to be running scared of his backbenchers. A nuclear option would be to make the savings part of the October Budget, which would formally make them a confidence issue. But that would create permanent enemies among Labour MPs.
If Starmer doesn’t make a tactical retreat, some ministers and ministerial aides will probably resign, deepening the crisis. A compromise of softening the impact of the cuts to personal independence payments might also look weak, and would inevitably be portrayed by Tory newspapers as a U-turn. But it’s the least bad option, and Starmer should take it.
