To Cap It All

There was one Conservative rebel, but Labour was the only party to vote to retain the two-child benefit cap, making it the most right-wing party in the House of Commons. The arguments being made by the Government's outriders are in favour of that cap in principle, backed by the false claim that its retention had been a Labour manifesto pledge.

It is also false to claim that the Magnificent Seven had voted against the King's Speech itself, or that Rebecca Long-Bailey had "challenged" Keir Starmer for the Labour Leadership in 2020 as if he had been the incumbent. It is inconceivable that the Seven might be permitted to stand as Labour candidates in 2029, so they should say now that they would not take the whip if it were offered.

Abstainers who have gone on record that the cap ought eventually to be lifted are already being told the same thing, that their cards have been marked. They, too, should act accordingly. Any performative leftishness that the Labour Party might still tolerate should be left to the likes of Clive Lewis, who went through all that palaver over the Oath before voting against a call for a measure that would immediately have lifted 300,000 children out of poverty while improving the circumstances of a further 700,000, giving one million in all.

The Government's taskforce on child poverty has no timetable, no terms of reference, and no membership beyond being co-chaired by Liz Kendall, which speaks for itself, and by Bridget Phillipson, who is at least a second generation figure of the right-wing Labour machine in the North East of England, making her a member of one of the great Brahmin castes of Europe. In 2015, if Andy Burnham had voted against the introduction of the two-child benefit cap rather than obeying Harriet Harman's order to abstain, then Jeremy Corbyn would not have become the Leader of the Labour Party. That cap is therefore totemic to the Labour Right, a tribal marker and absolutely sacrosanct.