Roll of Honour

Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse)

Richard Burgon (Leeds East)

Ian Byrne (Liverpool West Derby)

Imran Hussain (Bradford East)

Rebecca Long-Bailey (Salford and Eccles)

John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington)

Zarah Sultana (Coventry South)

Scrapping the two-child benefit cap is Labour Party policy. This non-legislative amendment called only for progress towards that. Yet support for that amendment has incurred suspension of the whip. They are better off without it. But even so.

"Don't have children unless you can afford them"? (I have none, by the way.) What if your circumstances changed? Redundancy, say? Or illness? That is why we have a Welfare State. Lifting the two-child benefit cap would cost only as much as we were already sending to Ukraine. Where has the money for that come from?

59 per cent of the families affected by the two-child benefit cap have at least one parent in work, and many have both. Why is there any such thing as in-work poverty? If you want to take down benefit scroungers, then look to the people who use the State to make up their refusal to pay their staff the rate for the job.

HS2 is back in the news. Someone has had the £700 million that it cost to send four volunteers to Rwanda, a scheme on which the eventual intention was to spend £10 billion. The Covid Corruption Commissioner will have more than enough to be getting on with. We have been paying £400 million per year to rent the Bibby Stockholm, a 48-year-old engineless barge that cannot be worth more than a few million pounds. Political kickbacks? What do you think? And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Let no one say that there is no money.

If unearned income were taxed at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, then it would be possible to abolish the two-child benefit cap, to restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which were in work, and to extend that uplift to disability benefits.

The Conservatives introduced the wretched two-child benefit cap, yet even they abstained rather than vote to keep it. So did Reform UK. All four stripes of Unionist from Northern Ireland voted to scrap it, as did the Alliance Party and the Liberal Democrats. To have voted to keep the cap was to be to the right of all of those. 361 Labour MPs were.

42 Labour MPs did not vote. Some, such as Keir Starmer, were obviously absent, but several were in the chamber, while at least two more were ill but would have voted the right way if they had been there. Over to them to resign the whip in solidarity. What are they waiting for? What could they possibly expect to get out of this Government? To wild applause, Ian Lavery denounced the two-child benefit cap from the platform of this month's Durham Miners' Gala. Over to him.