The coalition of members who elevated Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party has always been broad: The Blairite old guard, the moderate ‘soft-left’, even some Corbynites with pragmatic tendencies lent their support.
While some became disillusioned by the time of the last general election, there were those of us who stayed the course and remained loyal public defenders of the Starmer project.
We believed, time and again, that sacrifices had to be made, that pragmatism above all had to prevail. The reverse Faustian bargain was that we would see a radical improvement in the areas that matter to true-blood Labour members, even if we didn’t make a song and dance of it.
We expected to see an attack on poverty, our NHS renewed, and worker’s rights upheld and strengthened.
While the government has made great strides in two of these areas, its failure on the third has shaken even Keir Starmer’s most loyal followers to the core.
Whilst some were alarmed by winter fuel cuts, most within the party were more alarmed by the political cost rather than the actual socio-economic cost. The two-child cap was a much harder ask, though most were accepting with the knowledge that the government would aim to remove it “when fiscally possible”.
Where the line has to be drawn is when a Labour government makes the conscious choice to go after the sick and disabled. Here, even the most diehard Starmerite (if such a group has ever even existed) stops and thinks, “Is this what we fought so hard for?”
We all accept and understand that the welfare system is a slowly-ballooning problem, with the bill expected to rise to over £100 billion by the end of the decade, but is the Labour answer truly to fix this by slashing rates for the most vulnerable in society?
I’ve yet to speak to a single party member outside of government who supports the reforms in their current form.
It is an issue that branches across factions, regions and nations. Starmer and Liz Kendall simply do not have to do this. Helping the long-term sick and less severely disabled into work is a truly social democratic policy, taking away their lifeline whilst doing so is unnecessarily cruel.
Assuming these reforms pass the Commons (by no means guaranteed), Labour MPs are going to receive a pasting from their CLPs, and the Starmer leadership is going to have a very painful party conference in September.
It is calculated that over 200 Labour MPs have more PIP claimants in their seats than the size of their majorities, which alone should give us all pause.
This debacle threatens to undermine all the other fantastic progress this government has made so far and threatens to detach the Prime Minister from the very members who helped him sweep into office.
They want this government to succeed. They believe that Keir Starmer is the right man to lead it. But choices such as this start to create doubt.
I implore the government to think about the course it is on, and to alter it before it is too late. Reform has the tanks on our lawn, pushing more people into poverty, rather than into work, is not the answer to that threat.
