aStarmer’s honeymoon gifts were mostly chocolates and flowers. Within 10 days of taking office, the new Prime Minister Personal Poll Ratingthe NATO summit and a rare burst of national optimism as England reach the Euros final.
But on Wednesday, watch out for the first marital spat, when Labour MP Kim Johnson delivers her government’s inaugural speech. Putting leadership to the test: An amendment seeking to eliminate the benefit limit for a second child.
The policy was conspicuously absent from the party’s election manifesto and Mr Starmer is under increasing pressure to reverse the cuts made in 2017. Figures released last week put the number of children affected by the policy at a record 1.6 million – a staggering figure. 93% of affected parents are unable to cover food costs.
Of course, the amendment itself will not succeed: with a majority of 174, the new government can easily vote down any measures it wants. Instead, the move will highlight the rifts within the Labour party that will shape Britain for the next five years. On the one hand, there is the leadership, who believe that “hard spending rules”, adopted to dispel the notion that the party cannot be trusted with public money, are preventing it from reversing Conservative austerity policies. On the other, MPs, trade unions and party members are calling for increased funding for dysfunctional public services and tackling soaring poverty.
Finance Minister Rachel Reeves will reportedly use Wednesday to enact “fiscal rules” on borrowing into law, plans widely seen as arbitrary at best and pointless at worst that will only deepen the rifts. The message to restless MPs is clear: there is no room in the King’s Speech for promising to feed hungry children, and there is plenty of rules to make it harder to raise the money to do so.
Labour’s adamant stance on the two-child limit in many ways illustrates the strangling grip that “fiscal responsibility” has on future policy. At this point, the doctrine seems more like a cult than a useful discipline; a cold slogan that increasingly clouds the common sense of its leaders. Under this extreme restraint, even highly cost-effective measures that would immediately lift hundreds of thousands of children above the poverty line are rejected. What remains is a shallow mindlessness, a “child poverty” strategy that refuses to abolish the main causes of child poverty.
Last week, Health Minister Wes Streeting said:Ending the culture of beggingHe excavated a “rift” between the NHS and the Treasury, speaking like Mr Bumble berating greedy nurses for “more”. This is portrayed as a kind of performative frugality, spending to cure the country’s many ills as childish and ignoring it as adult behaviour.
From failed local councils to NHS waiting lists to overcrowded prisons, Labour is effectively in a state of cognitive dissonance. The party recognises the scale of the crisis it inherited from the Conservatives and positions itself as a problem solver, but stops short of promising to spend the money needed to do so. Starmer’s recent pledge to provide Ukraine with £3 billion a year for “as long as it takes” shows that if the government wants money, it’s available. Not all spending is treated equally. For some, spending money on more health and welfare is a waste, while putting money into defence is sensible.
Instead of cash injections, the Labour Party is shunning workers’ rights. Deregulation of housing construction And an emphasis on preventive care. That’s fine, but in politics, as in life, there are real problems that can only be solved by writing a check.
Voters who are fed up with a country where nothing seems to be working seem to understand this better than the people they elected. A new Ipsos poll shows that of those who voted for Labour this month: More than three-quarters want the government to spend more on public servicesIt can also improve the living standards of low-income groups.
The odd thing about Starmer’s majority is that there is both a strong sense of confidence and a total lack of real confidence. The manifesto, designed to be as unintimidating and ambiguous as possible, was effectively a Rorschach test: voters saw what they wanted to see; many non-voters saw nothing. As prime minister, Starmer has been administrative, efficient and proudly non-ideological, a politically blank canvas, a mood board onto which the public projected their various expectations. Just because hope is limited and scepticism strong does not mean there isn’t a deep desire for change. Few people voted for more food banks.
In the coming months, as people lose patience and the honeymoon period draws to an end, Starmer will be forced to accept taxing the super-rich, borrowing, or both. Failing to do so will leave us with a rudderless society trapped forever in the ashes of Conservative decline, and Labour losing increasingly alienated voters to the Greens, independents and Reform. It is one thing to get power, but quite another to know what to do with it once you have it.
