Seven Down (but not quite out?)

The politics of the votes on the Kings Speech two child cap ammendement and the leadership's reaction

The Two Child benefit cap is vile. It is pernicious. It is a major cause of increased child poverty in Britain.

This isn’t just my view. It is not just the view of those who voted for the SNP’s amendment to the King’s Speech. It is the view of every Labour politician in the UK up to and including Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.

So what happened this week with the vote and the suspensions? Why if - as I boldly claim - Starmer and Reeves hate the cap as much as the rest of us do, would they discipline those who voted to amend the King’s Speech so harshly (though - as I will come to - not as harshly as they might have)?

For the sake of brevity let us assume that I am right about the moral feeling around the two-child cap within the ranks of the PLP and the leadership of the Labour Party. I don’t think many - including the suspended MPs think otherwise, if I am honest. Sure, there will be a few lefty grifters desperately seeking social media attention who will find it commercially useful to claim that Reeves and Starmer love child poverty and are really just Thatcherites with red rosettes, but this narrative doesn’t work for any but the most hardcore who weren’t going to get on board with Starmer’s project under any circumstances.

But the reality of this vote and the choices made by all sides is that this has always been a question of sequencing, not morality; of posturing, not positioning; and of internal powerplay far more than it was about the issue at hand. And it is through these lenses that I want to assess how well the rebels and the government have played their respective hands.

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