If you wanted an idea of where the noisiest opposition to Keir Starmer’s government will come, the list of amendments to the King’s Speech is pretty handy.
As I reported last week, there are a lot of amendments on the two-child benefit cap from different groups. The Greens have got one, independent MP Shockat Adam has tabled his own (also signed by the Greens and other independent MPs including Jeremy Corbyn), and the SNP have got theirs. Then there’s the amendment from within Labour, tabled by left-wing MP Kim Johnson. It currently has 29 signatures, of which 19 are Labour backbenchers. One of them, Rosie Duffield, created waves at the weekend by calling the two-child benefit cap ‘social cleansing’ – a term we haven’t heard since the last big row over benefits under the Conservatives.
The Speaker won’t select all of these amendments for a vote, but selecting the motion from Kim Johnson will make it much more difficult for other Labour backbenchers to vote against it. The government hoped last week that the Child Poverty Taskforce that Starmer announced would stave off a rebellion, and if just 19 Labour MPs do end up voting against the party whip on this, then that’s hardly a blow. It will get much harder if, by the autumn, there aren’t indications from Downing Street and the Treasury of a timetable for scrapping the cap.
There is also a motion on Gaza, also from Labour backbencher Zarah Sultana, and signed by left-leaning Labour MPs, independent MPs, the Greens and others. That calls for the UK government to suspend export licences for arms to Israel, and recognise the state of Palestine immediately, among other demands.
Unsurprisingly, the Tories aren’t in a position to mount much in the way of noisy difficulty when it comes to this King’s Speech. They are largely too busy trying to work out how to run a leadership contest. But they have tabled one very plaintive amendment about their own record. It comes from Rishi Sunak and is signed by a group of his frontbench colleagues – Oliver Dowden, Jeremy Hunt, Kemi Badenoch, Victoria Atkins and Laura Trott. The party is anxious that Labour is framing things in a way that could make the next general election quite difficult. The motion complains ‘that there is no mention in the Gracious Speech of the improved economic conditions the Government is inheriting, with the fastest recorded growth in the G7, inflation at the bank of England’s target for the second month in a row, and unemployment at half the rate that it was in 2010’. It also demands details on welfare savings, a commitment from the government not to raise taxes and to increase income tax thresholds so that the state pension isn’t taxed too.
That is the Tory strategy at the moment: a rather needy attempt to remind voters that things weren’t quite as bad as Rachel Reeves is now arguing they are, and some challenges on the gaps that still exist in Labour’s policies after the election.
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