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This disaster bill won’t pass on Tuesday. The dangerous obduracy of the prime minister and chancellor confirms precisely what Labour MPs say: they haven’t listened, they aren’t listening and the fear is they won’t learn to listen. Even if the bill squeezed through with some softening, it will be a pyrrhic victory. Why take such a risk for so little? U-turns are better than crashes, but best not left to the last nanosecond.
Senior ministers, some of whom have already spoken up in cabinet, will put their feet down firmly to insist on radical alteration, or better still that it’s withdrawn and rethought to avoid what they call “this catastrophe”. If niceties of parliamentary practice escape some, understand how extraordinary this rebellion is. Read their “reasoned amendment” with its crushing reasons why.
Voting for this amendment kills the bill stone-dead, as it means the bill will not have a second reading. Finito. Who put the amendment forward? Grandee of the chamber Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the powerful Treasury select committee. She’s so respected for her chairing of the public accounts committee that, unusually, she was elected unopposed. She also chairs the liaison committee, the grand committee of all chairs that regularly grills the prime minister. Ten – and counting – Labour committee chairs join her among the 126 signers, backed by the London mayor.
Keir Starmer unwisely dismissed them as the usual “noises off”, but they are noise he needs to hear. A few are his longtime opponents but, for most, mutiny is a mortally serious matter. That’s not from fear of whips’ retribution or expulsion (there’s safety in numbers), but because they know how destructive this is to their government less than a year in power, after aeons in the wilderness. As a parliamentary candidate, each Labour MP signed a pledge to support their party in parliament in exchange for wearing the Labour rosette: they owe the party everything. Taking this drastic step, they are motivated by the serious harm this bill does to all on disability benefits in their constituencies, but they also do it to save the government from seriously damaging itself.
A bad bill, hastily put together, propels 250,000 people with disabilities into poverty, along with 50,000 children (maybe more when all assessments are in). The initial rationale sounds convincing: claims for personal independence payments (Pip) can’t keep growing at 1,000 a day. But “moral” pleas for the fate of disabled people “trapped” on benefits who want to work but lack support fail to sound anything but disingenuous. Taking a crude machete to benefits because the Office for Budget Responsibility suddenly found a £5bn gap in Treasury accounts is no way to solve it. Nor was it the plan of Liz Kendall and Alison McGovern, who have long talked up employment support into good jobs with new work coaches plus their youth guarantee, not expecting this last-minute thunderclap from the Treasury.
It’s unsellable, try as they might, even to British voters who tend to be ungenerous: welfare and foreign aid vie for unpopularity. But an axe to funds for disabled people? Polling from More in Common finds 44% of Britons think that welfare reforms are too harsh and only 10% too lenient (Kemi Badenoch’s forlorn position). A majority think this is purely cost-cutting, not motivated by support for vulnerable people. Cabinet ministers have been sent out, like lambs to the slaughter, to defend it on the airwaves and each has a list of MPs to call. Any success, I ask a senior one? “No, none, not one, even at my most persuasive.” What’s more, they report that many Labour MPs not signing the amendment are as strongly opposed to the bill as the signers. Talking to MPs, I find less anger than an ache for the error.
Here’s the tragedy for Labour supporters. Broadcasters have taken to referring to the cuts as “Labour’s flagship bill”, which of course it isn’t. But it risks defining the government, instead of its far more significant actions. I observed Rachel Reeves on Tuesday as she visited Elaine primary school in Rochester, Kent, to talk about free school meals and Labour policies for poor children, both now and to come. She joined the dinner ladies handing out meat, roast potatoes, cabbage and carrots with lashings of gravy, plus chocolate brownies.
The chancellor was also handing out her message to local TV reporters, rattling it off impressively in one interview after another. Free school meals, when rolled out to all on universal credit, will lift 100,000 children out of poverty, saving parents £500 per child each year. New uniform rules cut costs. Of course Labour will fulfil its manifesto promise to raise many more children out of poverty in this parliament: wait for the autumn child poverty review. The national living wage rose by 7%. Investment post-austerity means £20bn to expand the schools building programme over the next decade. NHS waiting lists are falling. This week the prime minister announced £150 off energy bills for an extra 2.7m households.
There’s plenty more in Labour’s good record. Reeves raised £40bn in tax from businesses and the rich – far bolder, in worse circumstances, than Blair and Brown’s first year. She gave the NHS most, early-years education gets a boost and her spending review’s better borrowing rules open the gates to huge capital investment, especially on green energy and nuclear reactors. Some rail is nationalised with steel potentially to follow. But a new trade strategy on Thursday, along with this week’s excellent industrial strategy, sink under the weight of this obstinate error.
To steal a phrase, the evil this government does gets emblazoned on front pages, the good is oft interred on page 93. That’s because its actions fail to coalesce into an identity, risking the government being defined by others and by its own errors. The qualities of no-drama Starmer and iron chancellor Reeves were the essential sober stabilisers in recovery from Corbynism, but now they need political theatrics to explain what they are about. Last time, on winter fuel allowances, they didn’t move until far too late. This last-minute swerve suggests no lessons learned.
In Reeves’s chat with Rochester children, one asked: “Do you like raising taxes?” In effect, her answer was yes, as she explained what good things taxes pay for. But I doubt she would be pleased that you can now hear senior ministers wanting more of them, flying kites for more radicalism, pondering why the highly paid haven’t been asked for more, and ways wealth taxes might work. Pressing ahead is folly, but even now, that seems the intention. Running towards a brick wall. How many times?
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
