In these most unpredictable of times, we can be sure of one thing. In the coming months and years the small rebellion we saw this week against Keir Starmer in the House of Commons will grow ten and twenty-fold. The entire organised labour movement is in favour of the abolition of the pernicious two-child limit on family welfare benefits and the fact that the parliamentary leadership appears to have no current plan to abolish it, shows their complete isolation from the social base of their support.
When it came to an amendment to the King’s Speech, tabled by the SNP, only seven Labour MPs voted for it and these have now been booted out of the parliamentary Labour party for six months. The seven include John McDonnell, former shadow Chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, former shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon, and shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey. The group also includes Zarah Sultana, an MP who already has considerable standing in the labour movement, with half a million followers on TikTok and eight million likes for her videos. Diane Abbott, former shadow Home Secretary, was absent for the vote, but she has said she would have voted for the amendment as well.
If the leadership believe that by this action they have nipped any opposition in the bud, then they are in for a big surprise. Former leader Jeremy Corbyn has formed a loose parliamentary grouping with the four MPs who won as independents on the issue of Gaza. Like this group, the seven suspended Labour MPs will be a permanent thorn in the side of the Prime Minister. Every Tory-lite policy that comes out of the new government, will be greeted by a chorus of loud criticism from this opposition to their left.
Two-child limit was a cruel and spiteful measure
The government’s decision to create a ‘task force’ to deal with poverty is little more than a smoke screen. It will no doubt discover what is blindingly obvious: that poverty is caused by families having too little money, and paying too much for rent, energy, food or transport. Too many working families are simply not paid enough to get by, and many of those are employed by the government in the public sector.
The Tories’ imposition of the limit of two children per family for benefits was a cruel and spiteful act, described at the time by Angela Raynor as an “obscene” policy. It has been the most significant driver of the rise in child poverty and according to date from the DWP, up to April this year, it was affecting 1.6mn children, up from 1.5mn the previous year. Poverty charities have argued that its removal would immediately assist the families of over 400,000 children currently in poverty.
What is disgraceful is not that seven Labour MPs rebelled, but that hundreds more didn’t. Over forty Labour MPs did not vote and while some of them may have been away on legitimate parliamentary business, there were still a number of left Labour MPs, including members of the Campaign Group, who ought to have supported their seven colleagues.
Labour is a “broad church” but with no pews for “principled nonconformists”
Even the Guardian – hardly a journal of the far-left, condemned the immediate suspension of the seven MPs. “The Labour party”, it said in an editorial, “is a ‘broad church’, but there’s little space on its pews at the moment for principled nonconformists…If the events of Tuesday night were the Labour leadership’s attempt to set a precedent to avoid dissent, it would be profoundly wrong and undemocratic”.
Keir Starmer’s ruthlessness is all the more evident when his actions are compared to those of his idol, Tony Blair, in 1997. Shortly after being elected, that Labour government suffered an even greater rebellion over cuts to benefits for single-parent families. Forty-seven Labour MPs voted against the Government, then and around 100 abstained, yet no MPs were suspended from the parliamentary party.
What is different now comparied to 1997? It is not that Keir Starmer is more right wing or more ruthless than Tony Blair, who after all, removed Clause IV from Labour’s constitution. The difference is this: that despite Keir Starmer’s massive support among his MPs – the big majority of whom were not selected by local Labour Parties, but were hand-picked by the right-wing faction of the party, supported by Labour apparachiks – the leadership is completely out of touch with almost the entire labour movement on this single issue. It may be a sign of ruthlessness, therefore, but it is also a mark of Starmer’s isolation and weakness, that he has felt it necessary to discipline these seven MPs – seven out of a parliamentary party numbering 412.
Ten union general secretaries called for the MPs’ reinstatement
No fewer than ten trade union general secretaries have written to Keir Starmer, calling for the seven MPs to be reinstated immediately and calling for the removal of the two-child benefit limit. They include Jo Grady (UCU), Matt Wrack, (FBU and currently TUC president), Mick Lynch (RMT), Daniel Kebede (NEU), Steve Gillan (POA), Fran Heathcote (PCS), Sarah Woolley (BFAWU), Michelle Stanistreet (NUJ), Paul Fleming (Equity) and Bob Monks (URTU).
It is a great pity that some of the other general secretaries of unions affiliated to the Party – Unite, UNISON, GMB, USDAW – apparently did not see fit to sign this letter, although previous statements, conference resolutions and even submissions to the government show that their ‘official’ policy – and their members – support the lifting of the benefit cap. One would have hoped that they ought to be a louder voice on this issue, given that so many of their own members are low paid public sector workers.
There have been some hints and suggestions that the government is looking at ways to remove the two-child benefit cap, which would cost the Exchequer only £3.4 bn a year. But even if that is the case – and it is far from certain – the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves is laying it on thick that “hard choices” will have to be made in her first budget and that the government’s financial position is dire.
Yet, as even right-wing former MP, Margaret Hodge wrote in the Guardian only a few months ago, tax-dodging by the rich is rife and if there was the political will to do it, this ‘tax gap’ could be got rid of. “We know”, she wrote, “that £36bn is a very conservative estimate of the gap between what the exchequer does collect and what is due…many wealthy individuals hide their assets in secret trusts they set up overseas in British tax havens – and they pay no tax on that hidden wealth”.
Fundamental levers of the economy should be publicly-owned
But as Left Horizons has argued, it is not a question of taxing the rich – although no worker would oppose a re-balancing of taxation to benefit the least-well off, or high taxes on wealth and capital gains – but of putting forward socialist policies that challenge the private ownership of industry, the banks, land, infrastructure and all the major national assets that underlie any modern economy. The fundamental levers of the economy should be publicly-owned, and democratically managed in the interests of all. A national plan of production and service provision is the answer to falling living standards, collapsing public services and social decay.
Any attempts by Reeves to shore up a failing British capitalism can only be effected by increasing the profits of big business, and that will inevitably mean that her “hard choices” will fall on the shoulders of working class people. No matter how ruthlessly Keir Starmer deals with rebellions by Labour MPs – and there will be more – he will not be able to prevent a crescendo of opposition to Labour-imposed austerity, no matter the guise in which it comes. That opposition will manifest itself chiefly in the trade unions to begin with, as their members press for real change in their interests, but it will find an echo at a later stage in the Labour Party grassroots.
The seven MPs should organise rallies around the country
As for the seven MPs, their principled stand against child poverty should be applauded and Labour Party and trade union meetings should pass resolutions in their support and calling for their reinstatement. For their part, they have nothing to lose being outside of the PLP for six months – and possibly longer – so they should use their stand as a launching pad for a campaign across the labour movement.
Social media and online meetings are all well and good, and we can expect well-supported fringe meetings with the seven in attendance at TUC and Labour conferences later this year. But the seven should also be planning a series of face-to-face rallies and meetings, going to the labour movement in every corner of the country, and calling for socialist policies to meet the economic crisis.
This week’s rebellion of Labour MPs might seem a small event in the scale of things. But it is a harbinger of the splits that are coming in the labour movement in the coming months and years, divisions that will be on a much greater scale.
This MPs’ revolt and the issue upon which it arose offer in microcosm a picture of the titanic struggles that will take place in the labour movement in the future. Those battles will be between those who advance policies that are based on the ‘stabilisation’ of capitalism – which will fail – and those who base themselves above all on the need to bring about fundamental change in the interests of the working class.
