Cutting Through

When the House of Commons passes the cuts to sickness and disability benefits, then there will be no excuse for anyone to carry on pretending that this was the most left-wing Parliament ever, or that there were 500 progressive MPs, or that the 2024 Labour intake had been made up largely of people who had cut their political teeth as anti-austerity activists a decade earlier.

There were always a few such activists on the fringes of the Labour Party, but most of them had no reason to join it, and therefore did not do so, until the Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. In both categories, most of them have since left it, voluntarily or otherwise. To do things like making these cuts is exactly why most Labour MPs went into politics.

As on the two-child benefit cap and the Winter Fuel Payment, those voting against these cuts may include the Conservative Party, and will certainly include the Liberal Democrats, who were the more pro-austerity party to the Coalition, as well as Reform UK, Rupert Lowe, and the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the Commons. Any of those could already claim to be more left-wing or progressive than the Labour Party. Not that that would be saying very much.