Ever since Labour started having to respond to Tory policy announcements, there have been little fissures in the party over what sort of stance it should take on welfare. When Harriet Harman announced that the party was ‘sympathetic’ to lowering the £26,000 welfare cap for workless households, one leadership campaign told me it was no consulted before that policy changed and that ‘nothing Harriet does now is set (or written) in stone’. Now, as Brendan Carlin reports in the Mail on Sunday, those behind-the-scenes mutterings are becoming a little more serious, with the party’s interim leader issuing what sounds like a stinging rebuke to the man who may well take over from her in a few weeks’ time, Andy Burnham, for questioning the party’s position on cuts.
Harman is clearly keen to plough ahead, regardless of any voices of dissent from leadership candidates, today telling the Sunday Politics that Labour would not ‘do blanket opposition’ and therefore it wouldn’t oppose the Welfare Bill: ‘We won’t oppose the household benefit cap,’ she said, adding: ‘I mean for example what they brought forward in relation to restricting benefits and tax credits for people with three or more children.’
The party’s interim leader said she had met women during the election campaign who said they could not afford to have another child. She said that ‘we have to listen to that, we can’t simply say to the public you were wrong, we are going to carry on saying what we said before the election; we have to listen to that.’
It’s worth noting also that the official Labour position on Wednesday was that it supported the public sector pay freeze, but this will be reversed by 12 September given all four candidates have since said they oppose it.
Do these differences in opinion matter, when Labour just needs to hold some sort of position until the leader is elected? Well, they make it much easier for the Tories to mock the Opposition for having no clue about why it lost the election. If Burnham as leader reverses Harman’s ‘sympathy’ for those benefit cuts, then the Tories can say he is running scared of the Left and in turn causing the wider electorate to run scared of Labour.
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