The Politics of Dividing Lines

Morgan McSweeney is still there. Alastair Campbell and Dominic Cummings both went for less, and McSweeney is hardly in their league. What a shower this Government is. All power to the arm of Gordon Brown, who is making himself the nemesis of Peter Mandelson, not only for his own sake, but also for the honour of the memory of my distant cousin, Alistair Darling.

Brown's great political cause has always been the fight against child poverty, and it must be said that this evening the House of Commons gave Second Reading to the Bill to abolish the two child benefit cap. Three of the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist MP voted in favour of that measure, while Jim Allister was not there, but Reform UK split three ways, with five votes against (including the supposedly natalist Danny Kruger, who has now voted for the cap as a member of two different parties), two in favour, and the abstention of Nigel Farage.

The line from Reform is that Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick "accidentally" voted in the wrong lobby, but Braverman had long opposed the cap, and she voted accordingly. To mask the division, the Leader did not vote at all, despite having just announced a policy of restoring the cap in order to cut the price of a pint of beer by all of five pence. Those are his own figures. And even accepting them, whose vote has this gained? Who approves of this policy but had not already been determined to vote Reform?

Braverman did not sign up for that, so she found herself voting with people to whom, like the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, the retention of the cap had been absolutely sacrosanct until it wasn't. Seven Labour MPs lost the whip because they had voted for nothing more than an amendment to the Humble Address after the King's Speech, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted for that Address. But Braverman and Jenrick have now rebelled on legislation in this area. Will Lee Anderson be withdrawing the whip from them? It takes something to bring out sympathy for Braverman, but there is the combination of this and of the fact that when she was sacked as Home Secretary the first time, then it was because she had forwarded her Ministerial emails to her personal account. Think on.