For As Long As It Takes

Minutes earlier, Keir Starmer and John Healey had insisted that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack. But whoever is the President of Ukraine, Starmer and Healey have promised the place three billion pounds per year, "for as long as it takes." That must be where the Magic Money Tree is. It is certainly not in the land of the two-child benefit cap.

Of the households affected by that cap, 59 per cent, three in five, include an adult who is in work. In any case, arguments about having only as many children as you could afford assume that you could never experience a reduction in circumstances. It says it all about both main parties that that assumption is axiomatic to them.

Following the King's Speech on 17 July, an amendment to the Humble Address should have called for legislation to tax unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, in order to abolish the two-child benefit cap, restore the £20 per week uplift to Universal Credit (two in five claimants of which are in work), and extend that uplift to disability benefits.

Across six parties, plus five Left Independents, at least 97 MPs ought to have signed that amendment. Moreover, Nigel Farage has expressed himself in favour of lifting the cap. Since he now led five MPs, that should have taken the total to 102. Suella Braverman is of the same view, and ought to have brought with her any MPs who supported her candidacy for Leader of the Conservative Party.

As it is, the initiative seems to have passed to Kim Johnson, and good for her. But for all that Starmer has entirely excluded the Labour Left from office and so must be expecting it to do something else instead, this Parliament would be better not starting with the exercise of leadership by that faction. The General Election result properly establishes that role elsewhere.

Thanks to expert manipulation of First Past the Post, the Liberal Democrats' proportion of the House of Commons now differs by only a fraction of one per cent from their share of the popular vote, so the Greens and Reform UK may expect scant support for Proportional Representation from the Lib Dems these days. But it is still not yet 10 years since that party was cheerfully in government with the same Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer who soon afterwards imposed the cap. If not quite to the same extent as those who, whatever their personal merits, had been elected on Starmer's ticket, the Lib Dems need to be led rather than leading for the foreseeable future.