A minority of MPs in the ruling Labour Party are feeling mutinous — but there’s a sharp divide among its newest members.
LONDON — Few Labour MPs got into politics to cut social security. But with a cash-strapped center-left government promising sweeping reform, they’re facing a major test of loyalty to the man whose victory guided them back into power.
Eight months after Keir Starmer won a landslide in part on a promise to break with 14 years of austere Conservative rule, Britain’s prime minister is planning a fresh overhaul of the country’s ballooning welfare budget — including slashing benefits for the disabled.
Starmer told Labour MPs on Monday that the bill for working age sickness benefits is due to hit £70 billion by the end of the decade. “That’s unsustainable, it’s indefensible and it is unfair,” he said.
Ministers are yet to publish the specifics of their plans. But they have not denied reports that proposals to impose more stringent terms for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) — designed to help people with extra costs incurred by disability — are on the table.
One reported option, not denied, is to freeze PIP rather than raising it with inflation. But officials believe primary legislation would almost certainly be needed to enact this — meaning MPs, and members of the House of Lords including bishops, would have a vote on the plan
It comes amid a tricky backdrop for Labour MPs. Britain’s foreign aid pot is being diverted amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for increased defense spending. And it follows a decision last year to cut winter fuel payments for most pensioners — and maintain a Conservative-era two-child cap on benefits, which prevents British parents from claiming welfare benefits for more than two children.
Some MPs in the ruling Labour Party are already feeling mutinous — although how far they will go to show their anger towards a government with a thumping House of Commons majority is another matter entirely.
“I’m absolutely appalled at the prospect of what is going to be coming,” Brian Leishman, the new Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth said. “It is completely not Labour Party values, it’s not why I joined the party, it’s not why I was a Labour councillor, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing that I want to be doing as a Labour MP.”
Further cuts to welfare will prove “self-defeating” when it comes to the next election, a second Labour MP — granted anonymity like others in this article to speak candidly — said.
A third said of the two-child benefit cap: “What’s the point of being an MP if we can’t end injustices like this?”
Owing Keir
Rebellions in the House of Commons are always hard to read. Potential rebels and the government side both play expectation management games in the media, beefing up or downplaying numbers ahead of any votes to control the narrative.
That said, it seems likely that any backlash will be limited, given the energy Starmer’s operation has devoted to selecting loyal candidates and imposing discipline since entering government.
Michael Crick, a journalist who closely studied Labour candidate selections ahead of last year’s general election, points to a “ruthless” operation by aides loyal to Starmer to put his supporters in winnable seats.
“The message was very, very clear. If you stepped out of line, you were in danger. That has carried on beyond the election,” Crick said.
Starmer suspended seven MPs who voted against the government on a motion about child poverty last year. Whips insist that all Labour MPs turn up for every vote, despite the government’s towering majority.
Fear of repercussions is certainly seen as an obstacle to a significant rebellion, according to a fourthMP who has been in parliament for almost a decade.
“People talk big,” they said, but walking past party enforcers, known as whips, is nerve-wracking. MPs cast votes by physically walking down one of two corridors on either side of the main House of Commons chamber.
The MP also described how potential rebels could face the wrath of their colleagues on messaging groups — but also pointed out digital communications can create a “snowball effect” in favor of a rebellion. “It takes that one person to say ‘I’m breaking the whip,’ and the others will go, ‘are you?’ It becomes self-reinforcing.”
The prime minister has already been bolstered by 36 Labour MPs who signed a letter of support for welfare reform, and insisting there is a “moral duty” to tackle the bill.
“The loyalty is very strong” and most MPs are waiting to see what comes in the government’s upcoming spring statement before taking firm positions, a fifth Labour MP said.
Ministers in the work and pensions department with long experience of scrutinizing the system — including Stephen Timms and Alison McGovern — are “popular and trusted” in the parliamentary Labour party,explained the fifth MP, who said most colleagues want to give them a chance to unveil their plans.
‘Arse-crawling’
But opponents of the plans are more skeptical about the wider sentiment. A sixthLabour MP said colleagues are not speaking out publicly — believing doing so is “pointless” because there are so many “arse-crawling” new MPs who are too loyal, and in search of a job, to criticize the leadership.
A Labour aide complained of “the inevitable hypocrisy of MPs who had their photographs taken at drop-ins for disability rights charities, etc., who’ll now be making their own constituents worse-off because they’re scared of the whips.”
While there are exceptions among the new intake who do hold misgivings about the cuts, others are sanguine.
Another new Labour MP, the seventh quoted, who spoke of coming from a disadvantaged background, said that as long as ministers promised more engagement with disability benefits recipients, the changes would have their backing.
An eighth MP, who represents a northern rust belt seat, said their constituents “love” the prospect of welfare cuts — and also support increased defense spending.
Defying the whips
If Starmer does manage to execute his reforms without a serious threat to his authority, it will be particularly impressive given the personal significance of welfare to many in his party.
Several prominent members of his Cabinet, notably Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Health Secretary Wes Streeting, have spoken movingly about the state support they received growing up in the 1990s.
Many of the new intake of MPs in their 30s, who came of age in the early 2000s, first became involved in political activism as a result of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity agenda — and cut their teeth campaigning against cuts to public services.
Ultimately, the fourth MP quoted above said, it will be the voting public that dictates the size of the rebellion.
“You don’t have the luxury of a limousine to take you back to your constituency, you have to travel on the train where people will stop you and say ‘you are a shit show.’ It gets to you,” they added.
