Morning Call: Labour’s vicious blame game
As Rachel Reeves and Morgan McSweeney are targeted, some MPs single out Keir Starmer himself.
Good morning, it’s George here.
As the government struggles to avoid defeat over its welfare bill, Labour has come to resemble a circular firing squad. Below I explore the political fallout.
Next week marks the first anniversary of Labour entering government – though you could be forgiven for forgetting. Not just because of the distracting spectre of World War Three but because this now bears little resemblance to a one-year administration.
The mood is instead reminiscent of the dark days of Rishi Sunak’s government – when the prime minister struggled to impose his will on a quarrelsome party – or of late-era Tony Blair when three-figure rebellions became the norm. Despite frantic phone calls by cabinet ministers, 126 Labour MPs have signed a wrecking amendment to the welfare bill (including 71 of the new intake, once depicted as comically loyal “Starmtroopers”). Threats of deselection have proven no deterrent to MPs who already expect to lose their seats and “want to leave the Commons standing tall and proud” in the words of one rebel.
The scale of the revolt has stunned plenty in Westminster but the warning signs have been clear for months. From the moment the government announced its intention to cut health and disability benefits by £5bn, outrage and upset spread far beyond the “usual suspects” (as ministers refer to the likes of the Socialist Campaign Group).
“Too many of the proposals have been driven by the need for short-term savings to meet fiscal rules, rather than long-term reform,” warned the Resolution Foundation, the body previously led by Labour minister Torsten Bell, back in March. “The result risks being a major income shock for millions of low-income households.”
Here is precisely why so many Labour MPs have revolted (370,000 current Personal Independence Payment claimants and 430,000 future ones would lose an average of £4,500 per year). Government officials now identify the failure to make a “moral” case for the bill as the defining problem. And the cuts were transparently driven by the desire for savings. As one Labour MP puts it, “the magician’s cloak fell” when Rachel Reeves added an extra £500m of cuts just a day before her Spring Statement (after a worse-than-expected OBR forecast).
But the problem is not simply that the moral argument was not made – it is that Labour rebels don’t believe any such case exists. Indeed, attempts by ministers to convince them to the contrary have only stiffened their resolve. A party that often defines its moral purpose as reducing poverty cannot accept a bill forecast to achieve the opposite (an additional 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, would be left in relative poverty).
No 10 is now planning concessions to avert a government defeat when parliament votes next Tuesday (83 Labour rebels would be enough to deny Starmer victory). “There will be a ladder for people to climb down,” one cabinet minister tells me.
In the meantime, a vicious internal blame game has begun. Reeves and No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney are those often singled out by critics – the two figures who Starmer outsourced economic and political strategy to.
Reeves is accused of “lacking political antennae” and of failing to learn the lessons of the winter fuel debacle (when Labour similarly underestimated the revolt that benefit cuts would unleash). “Don’t be surprised if she’s gone at the next cabinet reshuffle,” one senior party figure remarks (though Starmer has so far remained conspicuously loyal).
McSweeney, critics say, has pursued a Reform-focused electoral strategy that has alienated Labour from once-loyal supporters – with a “forgotten flank” defecting to the Greens and the Lib Dems – and has adopted an “imperious” party management style that has created a deep disconnect between No 10 and backbenchers.
There is a well-established pattern in British politics of blaming the courtiers rather than the king – and it is one that some in Labour inveigh against. “How many heads have to roll before people remember who the PM is?” one previously loyal MP asks (it was once Sue Gray who was identified as the root of the government’s woes). “People have got to start laying the lack of leadership at Keir’s feet.”
By this account, Labour’s routine stumbles and ever more frequent U-turns are symptoms of a far deeper malaise – a Prime Minister who has lacked direction from the moment he entered Downing Street. In one year, Starmer has managed to use up an impressive number of his political lives. The question even some cabinet ministers are already asking is how many he has left.
George’s picks
Freddie interviews left-wing Democratic congressman and presidential contender Ro Khanna who calls the UK tech industry a “yawn” and says he “laughed” when Rishi Sunak announced an Artificial Intelligence summit.
Ben Walker asks whether the hype around a new left-wing party is justified.
Anoosh reports on how overcrowded housing is tearing communities apart.
Lamorna Ash on the pro-Palestine movement’s alternative campus.
Mailshot
Standard: Starmer seeks welfare concessions
Politico: What Zohran means
Times: Reform UK would be largest party if general election held today
BBC: CIA director says Iran’s nuclear sites “severely damaged”
Sun: British migrant crisis fuelled by Putin’s plot to destabilise UK
Reuters: Europe placates Trump with Nato pledges it can’t afford
Martin Kettle: Why fall at Trump’s feet?
Roger Boyes: Khamenei is sunk without Putin
Vikram Murthi: Seth Rogen’s toothless Hollywood satire
And with that…
Let me know what you think about today’s Morning Call by hitting reply. My thanks to Zoë Huxford and George Monaghan. Have a good day, Will will be with you tomorrow.
George — @georgeeaton
McSweeney: no concept of the public good; still playing cynical election politics. Reeves: patently second-rate chancellor with all the stubbornness of economic ignorance allied to inexperience. Starmer: unlike Blair & Brown, who prepared properly with some intellectual rigour, won an election with no plan how to govern and no clear loadstar policies or principles.
It's always a good idea when confronted with a primordial political problem, to go back the old electoral veterans, the ones who know the game so well.
Take Peter Mandelson, for instance, who pointed out that "For too long, decisions have been taken behind closed doors - tablets of stone have simply been past down to people without bothering to involve people, listen to their views or give them information about what we are doing and why."
Of course, Blair, Campbell and Mandelson continued doing exactly that and Starmer/Reeves are just following this ancient Labour tradition.
He also helpfully pointed out "The last thing we need is to turn in on ourselves rather than face us up to what we have to do in the world." Just as internal revolts became a New Labour 'thing', now the new Labour MPs have begun them already because they know damn well what the next election holds...
Labour won in 2024 because people had come to loathe the Tories, not come to like Labour - "Labour’s vote share was 1.6 percentage points up on 2019. It received a lower vote share than any party forming a post–war majority government."
In 2017, of course, before the 'Labour antisemitism fraud' was used as a weapon by the hard right of Labour and the Conservatives and the UK media attacked him en masse, Corbyn achieved a "gain of 30 seats with 40.0% (its highest vote share since 2001 and its highest increase in vote share between two general elections since 1945)". Such a shame that it took an act of gratuitous electoral fraud and a complete betrayal of democracy to bring him down..
And now we're brought to the apotheosis of right-wing Labour fraud, on the back of a monumental parliamentary majority. Keir is going to find out how wrong Mandelson was when he said to Peter Hain - 'your preoccupation with the working class is wrong. They've got nowhere else to go'.
They have. They've got Deform and its Blueshirts, to accompany they Glasmanite Blueshirts in Labour.
Who d'you think they'll pick? As no-one in the UK can bear voting for the supporters of genocide any more, will it be “Votez l'escroc, pas le facho” (Vote for the thief, not the fascist) as in France?
And, how d'you tell who is the thief and who is the fascist?