James Heale has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Keir Starmer’s appearance before Labour MPs on Monday was a crowded affair. Such was the level of excitement that organisers set up an overspill room in parliament. A fortnight after a dire set of local election results, the Prime Minister promised to fight the next election ‘as Labour’. Yet his troops seem increasingly divided as to what that actually means.
More than two dozen MPs spoke at that meeting, criticising Starmer’s Gaza policy, migration speech and welfare cuts. It is those benefit changes that are causing the most immediate grief to the whips. Ministers want to restrict the eligibility requirements for disability payments, meaning only those with the most serious conditions can claim support. The hope is this will save £5 billion a year by 2030.
Some, like the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, argue that there is simply no alternative. Before Covid, there were 35,000 new claims for personal independence payments a month; there are now 70,000. ‘We are grasping the nettle of welfare reform,’ she said this week. ‘Not for the sake of it, but to save it.’ The welfare bill currently stands at £313 billion. It is forecast to reach £375 billion by the end of the decade.
Downing Street is trying to sell these reforms as a ‘Labour cause’: getting people back into work. Yet many within the party are sceptical. ‘If the Tories couldn’t do it, we will struggle,’ says one minister. A vote on the cuts is scheduled next month: it is widely expected to be the biggest Labour rebellion of the year.
Anger is not confined to the left or right of the party and already some 42 MPs have publicly said that the package is ‘impossible to support’. A further 100 backbenchers have privately written to No. 10 suggesting the policy be abandoned. Among them are committed Starmer loyalists. ‘The rebels are coming from everywhere,’ admits an aide.
Every party has its great causes: noble principles that stir rebellion in the heart of even the most lickspittle loyalist. Under Tory governments, they often revolved around freedom and the nation state: see the revolts on Covid, China, Europe and Rwanda. But for many in Labour, the party’s great motivator is the welfare state: expanding it, not cutting it.
The diminished ranks on the Tory benches are a reminder of what happens if you lose sight of principles
Older rebels claim the mantle of Attlee, Wilson and Blair, citing their various efforts to increase social services. Many of Starmer’s younger MPs had their politics forged in the anti-austerity battles of the 2010s. Having been elected on a message of ‘change’, they are instinctively twitchy about anything that resembles a continuation of Tory welfare reforms.
Even if the revolt is smaller than No. 10 fears, the risk is that with each rebellion, the habit of internal opposition becomes more ingrained. Keeping 250-plus backbenchers happy was always going to be a difficult task; tighter fiscal constraints risk making it impossible.
Half of Starmer’s MPs were elected last summer, creating tensions. Long-marchers complain of being passed over while thrusting subalterns jostle to make a name for themselves. Each week seems to bring a new caucus or WhatsApp group. Some of these – like the ‘Make Work Pay’ outriders – are clearly helpful to No. 10; others less so. It was striking that while only two Labour MPs criticised Starmer’s EU reset, one of them was Jo White, the chair of the newly formed Red Wall Group.
Naturally, the whips – led by the wily Alan Campbell – will work to buy off waverers. The Labour party is certainly Keynesian in one element: job creation. From ‘mission champions’ and ‘business champions’, to committee reps and trade envoys, all manner of exciting non-jobs can be dangled before impressionable new MPs.
Ministers hope to placate potential rebels with changes to other aspects of welfare policy. Starmer confirmed at PMQs this week that the winter fuel cut will be partially reversed in the coming months. Concessions are expected on the two-child benefit cap too. Doing both will still cost much less than the £5 billion saved by the disability cuts.
Those within the government urge caution. ‘We can listen,’ says one senior MP. ‘But that’s not the same as changing course. There needs to be a sense of expectation management.’ For older heads, it is a question of keeping cool. Stick to the plan, they argue, and reap the rewards of a fiscally prudent party in four years’ time. Much like Arsenal fans with their manager Mikel Arteta, they urge doubters to ‘trust the process’.
There is, however, growing worry about Starmer’s direction. For some Labour MPs, the welfare row is just the most obvious instance of the intellectual barrenness of the Starmer project. ‘We risk governing like the Treasury party, not the Labour party,’ warns one MP. Such grumblings are not confined to survivors of the Labour left. Moderates confess to feeling a lack of animating purpose too. As Progress – the house journal of the Blairite wing of the party – mournfully admitted this month: ‘However hard it feels, this is what governing is.’
While MPs fret in parliament, outside a storm is brewing. In the coming weeks, Nigel Farage will make several speeches lambasting Labour’s record in office. The aim is to present him as the ‘Mr Fixit’ of British politics. His focus is not the Commons, but the country. While others squabble, Reform intends to show that it knows what it stands for and that it can deliver.
The ambiguity over what constitutes ‘Labour values’ carries an obvious electoral risk. In an increasingly fractured politics, parties need to cling to their core vote – or else risk extinction. The diminished ranks on the Tory benches are a reminder to Starmer’s MPs of what happens when a party loses sight of its principles.
In opposition, Starmer used to quote Harold Wilson’s dictum approvingly. ‘The Labour party is a moral crusade – or it is nothing.’ For some in the fold, it’s starting to look like the latter.
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