If I were advising the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, on how to make the most of the prime minister’s present discomfiture – and heaven knows she needs to take advice – I’d refer her to one of Tony Blair’s most memorable exchanges when he was doing her job 30 years ago. Yes, it really is that long.
Just as Keir Starmer is having trouble with his backbenchers now, so too was poor old John Major back then – over Europe, naturally. Blair bossed the prime minister by leaning across the despatch box with a nasty-looking sneer across his face and declared, with great theatrical skill and maximum disdain: “There is one very big difference – I lead my party, he follows his.”
Like Starmer now, Major, back then, was indeed struggling to control his party, and was engaged in constant battles with his rebel MPs, alternately punishing and appeasing them, neither with much success.
Blair’s line was doubly smart because it exploited the obvious division in the ranks of his opponent, but also sought to draw the sharp contrast with his own strong leadership and the changes he was making in his own party.
And today, the U-turns on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance and, now, the social security reforms – albeit less so the change of policy on the grooming gangs inquiry – do indeed show that Starmer is having to follow rather than lead his party. This dismays the public, even more than the policies themselves.
The whole point of the last general election, it may be recalled, was that the country responded to Labour’s artfully nebulous slogan of “change”.
The voters had indeed had enough of “chaos and confusion”, as Starmer called Conservative rule. So they gave him a mandate to get on with governing the country.
The parliamentary majority – albeit one that exaggerated the popular vote – was one of the largest since the Second World War, more than sufficient for a parliament, and to get any necessary legislation through. Except it wasn’t.
The government has found itself a hostage to its own backbenchers. The 2024 intake were universally assumed to be centrist, Starmer loyalists, with all the gratitude that should be expected of a social democrat winning some rural seat that had been reliably Tory since 1918 or something.
Instead, perhaps because they reached their personal political maturity – or, rather, immaturity – under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, they’ve reverted to type.
They’ve never seen a public spending cut they like, and they have suddenly realised the latent power that rests in their hands. And they’re enjoying themselves.
Obscure figures, very lucky to be MPs, pop up on panel discussions and news reports, on social media and podcasts, and are afforded the reverence they don’t quite deserve.
When they’re asked how they would try and do what Liz Kendall is doing, they suggest subcontracting the policy process to the disability rights groups. This, in fact, is precisely what now seems to be proposed.
Ahead of Tuesday’s second reading, the secretary of state for work and pensions will today lay out fresh details about the changes to the government’s welfare cuts, notably to personal independence payments (PIP). It will mark the moment that the prime minister no longer leads his party, but follows it.
One of Kendall’s ministers, Stephen Timms, will be “co-producing” a new system for assessing the needs of people with disabilities. This isn’t a bad thing entirely – the present system is dehumanising – but the idea that the Labour government’s policy is now subject to a dual veto – by the rights groups and the rebel Labour backbenchers – too easily recalls that famous political cliché: “In office but not in power.”
What’s more, when the rebels are asked where they’d find the money not lost to the Treasury – not a trivial matter – they give one of three unhelpful responses.
First is simply “elsewhere”: potential economies that have been lying around in the public sector, unnoticed by successive waves of austerity and arbitrary cuts to budgets made by Conservative chancellors.
Second – not so different – is “not my job, mate”.
Third, albeit confined to the more traditional left, is “a wealth tax of two per cent on assets exceeding £10m”, which could raise “up to” £24bn. Which is also not what Labour was elected to do.
Like a tiger that has lost its fear of man and acquired a taste for human flesh, the parliamentary Labour party has gone rogue.
Indeed, they are even gossiping about “regime change” in Downing Street – as if a new leader would be able to miraculously transform the economy and the public finances.
In broad policy terms, there isn’t an alternative to Starmer, nor to the long, hard, unpleasant slog that the Labour government will have to go through for lack of money.
They might want to sack Starmer but they can’t; and Starmer can’t take the whip off 50 or 100 MPs – he’d soon be leading a minority government. They’re stuck with each other.
And there’ll be much more of this, and Starmer will continue to follow his party.
Rather unforgivably, the Labour rebels have given the opposition a lucky break – Badenoch especially, but also Nigel Farage.
One day these Labour backbenchers will pay the price in the shape of a drastically foreshortened political career. Worse still, frankly – God help the people on PIP if the radical right get in next time.
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