Judging by the uproar that greeted Harriet Harman’s decision to support limiting future tax credit claims to just two children, Labour almost looks as though it is in a worse position as a party than it was in 2010. Labour’s interim leader has plenty of good reasons for picking this policy: she spoke to voters who talked about being unable to afford to have another child and who were aggrieved by the way benefits made this possible for others, she thinks her party lost because it didn’t seem to be listening to such voters, she’s the current leader and there are a lot of welfare cuts going through at present which the party needs to adopt some sort of position on if it is to work as a strong opposition.
Diane Abbott complained on the Today programme that the Labour leader wasn’t basing her policies on ‘the facts’. These ‘facts’ didn’t of course include the facts that Harman might list, including that Labour didn’t win the election. Abbott’s facts were ‘they are going to make life so much more difficult for struggling working families and they are going to force children into poverty’. Abbott complained that the ‘party has yet to have a proper debate as an entire party in which all voices are heard’. Some might dismiss Abbott’s complains by pointing out that she tends to exist in a party of her own most of the time, rather than adopting a collective position. But given three out of the four leadership contenders do not support Harman on tax credits and given all four contenders took the opposition position on the public sector pay freeze, it does seem as though policy is being set without thorough consultation of those candidates – something I have reported complaints about in the past.
The problem seems to be, as Harman hinted at in her Sunday Politics interview yesterday, that the leadership contenders are more nervous than Harman of provoking the party with a series of policy positions that may allow the party to be re-elected in 2020 and then set out its own direction, rather than fall into Tory traps designed to make it appear unelected. That is perhaps natural given Harman is only leading for a few months when whoever wins must run the party for just under five years. But either way, it looks as though whoever takes over from Harman will change the direction of the party quite considerably from the one she has set out over the past couple of months.
And in the meantime, Harman must find another way of fulfilling another of her aims as interim leader, which is to keep the party united. Tonight she speaks to the PLP in a bid to do that, though PLP meetings don’t always provide the best outlets for MPs’ frustrations.
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