Keir Starmer left scrambling to limit the size of a Labour revolt over welfare reforms as rebellion shows he has lost his grip (Pic: Flickr/ House of Commons)
It’s entirely typical that Keir Starmer should celebrate the first anniversary of Labour’s “landslide” election victory with the collapse of his government’s authority over its MPs.
As I write, his ministers are auctioning off concessions to rebels threatening to vote against Labour’s disability benefits bill. Remember, this is a government that last summer suspended seven Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two‑child cap on benefits.
According to the Sunday Times, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s thuggish chief of staff, wanted to deal with the present rebellion “by suspending 10 Labour rebels every hour until 50 had been reached. At which point McSweeney was said to have insisted the insurrection would be over”.
This kind of bullying tactic doesn’t work when over 120 Labour backbenchers are threatening to vote against the bill and deprive Starmer of his majority.
The government’s main concession — to apply the changes to the key Personal Independence Payment (Pip) only to new claimants — is a disgrace. Every child knows that denying equal treatment is a basic injustice.
This move has bought off some more senior MPs. But plenty of other backbenchers are holding out.
The Financial Times explains that Starmer’s closest aides — “the Starmtroopers” — had weeded out leftwing radicals from Labour’s candidates for the general election last year. Yet many of the new intake have a background in the charity sector or health, or have disabled friends or family members.
Starmer himself is in full retreat. Last week he apologised for saying Britain was becoming “an island of strangers” in his anti-migrant speech after the May local elections.
He told the Sunday Times he had been “distracted” by the attempted firebombing of his house in north London. And the disability benefits debacle? More distraction — “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East.”
This is like a schoolboy saying the dog ate his homework.
Starmer is the wooden and mediocre frontman for what one might call Continuity New Labour. The likes of McSweeney used him in their campaign to crush Jeremy Corbyn and restore the dominance of the Labour right.
The mess over disability benefits is typical of this hopeless government. Its policies can be summed up as Blairism on autopilot. Terrified of suffering the kind of hit from the bond market that destroyed Liz Truss, Starmer and Reeves stampeded to slash welfare. In foreign policy, they have outdone even Tony Blair in fawning over whoever occupies the White House, regardless of how awful they are.
New Labour enjoyed a degree of success during neoliberalism’s heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the 2007-8 financial crash ushered in a very different world. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has accentuated the global crisis of imperialism.
Faced with this, Starmer is clueless. Witness his decision to blow nearly £1 billion on buying 12 F-35A nuclear bombers from the US. But their nuclear weapons would still be owned and controlled by Washington. Starmer is tying Britain even closer to a rogue US imperialism.
It’s part of political lore that big backbench rebellions often happen under governments with large parliamentary majorities. MPs know they can vote against their government without risking its fall. But the rebels this time were willing to destroy a government bill. It is extremely unusual to see such defiance so early in a premiership.
The explanation is obvious enough. Starmer’s and Reeves’s bungling — starting with cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowance — caused Labour’s collapse in the opinion polls.
Reform UK has been consistently ahead in the polls. Hence Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech — a predictably unsuccessful attempt to out-bigot Reform.
This gives Labour MPs a strong incentive to rebel. Why stay loyal to a prime minister who’s on the way out? Maybe rebelling will force the government onto a better path? This is a vain hope. There aren’t the principles or the brains on the Labour front bench to be able to change course.
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