Poor Liz Kendall. No doubt Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had irresistible reasons of state for not being on the front bench to support her during the second reading of her Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. But their absence rather underlined the loneliness of her task of beginning the very debate that posed the biggest challenge to the prime minister’s and his chancellor’s authority since they came to office a year ago: welfare cuts.
Nor was it that surprising that the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pulled rank on her own work and pensions shadow secretary, Helen Whately, by leading for the opposition herself. Hers was hardly one of the great parliamentary performances, to put it mildly.
But sensing an easy wicket, Badenoch made a reasonable job of navigating between the (in reality, irreconcilable) goals of joining the Labour rebels in opposition to the welfare bill, and the fact that all her instincts would be for something far more draconian than even this government has so far contemplated.
Even if Badenoch’s crack at the “ambitious backbench bootlickers” – who had gone on the airwaves to support the original unamended bill and had now “been hung out to dry” after the eleventh-hour concessions designed to prevent a government defeat – did not strike a chord on the benches opposite, her self-evident proposition that the bill was rushed job to fill a hole in Reeves’s fiscal figures certainly would have done.
Alas, it was neither Kendall nor Badenoch, but Labour’s Rachael Maskell (never less than courteous but the polar opposite of a “bootlicking” backbencher) who stole the show.
It must have seemed to Kendall an age before Meg Hillier – who had originally been a rebel, but was now persuaded by the concession to back the government – gallantly rode to what Kendall could only hope would be her rescue.
But Maskell, who proposed the “reasoned amendment” designed to stop the bill in its tracks, doesn’t do jargon or hollow leftist rhetoric. Indeed, it was almost in passing that she made the wholly reasonable point that if the government can afford not to introduce a wealth tax, or equalise capital gains tax with income tax, then it could surely afford to pay personal income payments (PIP) to disabled Britons.
Her argument that these “Dickensian cuts belong to a different era and a different party” seemed to sum up what is surely the greatest of several mistakes made by a government, which applied so little of the expertise it showed in winning a mandate to planning properly what to do with it.
Starmer explained to The Sunday Times last weekend that he had his eye off the ball in the run-up to the debate because of his preoccupation with international affairs: “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East all weekend. From the moment I got back from the G7, I went straight into a Cobra meeting. My full attention really bore down on this [last] Thursday. At that point, we were able to move relatively quickly.”
Though ready to be corrected by more erudite readers, I can’t remember a previous prime minister using such an excuse for a domestic snafu like this. Not Thatcher or Blair, surely – both of whom had a few foreign policy challenges to deal with.
But even if that were justified, Starmer was explaining away his failure to understand how the rebellion he unwisely called the “noises off” were spreading like wildfire; and not the failures inherent in the original bill itself.
And in the end, the buck for legislation stops not at the works and pensions secretary, who, by all accounts, did at least try to create support for bringing claimants into jobs a higher priority in the bill; nor even with the chancellor – but the prime minister and first lord of the Treasury himself.
Of course, the huge costs of the welfare state have been a headache for every government. And maybe Starmer thought he was being politically “brave” by trying to radically transform social security as none of his predecessors had done.
However, while casualties are inevitable with any kind of reform, it needn’t have disproportionately affected disabled people on the lowest incomes, who are already struggling with a cost of living crisis.
What would have genuinely been brave is if the prime minister – to cite just one example – risked losing the support of asset-rich and frequently high-income homeowners at the top of the scale, by reforming hopelessly outdated and inequitable council tax bands.
But while this has been seriously damaging to Starmer’s authority, it’s not all bad.
As an exercise, this has been good for democracy. For the rebellion, which forced the government into concessions (still not enough for many backbenchers) was rooted mainly not in ideology or factionalism, but its sense of fairness and in what MPs were being told by their constituents. And that in the end, that is what the parliamentary system should be – but all too often isn’t – about.
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