PM ‘incapable of sticking to a decision' after welfare U-turn
The reforms would only have made 'modest reductions to the ballooning welfare bill', but Sir Keir Starmer was 'too weak to hold the line', the Conservative Party leader is expected to say.
In a speech to the Local Government Association Annual Conference in Liverpool on Wednesday, Ms Badenoch will criticise Sir Keir for creating a 'punishing welfare trap that shuts people out of going back to work'.
'This week, the Prime Minister backed down on limited reforms that would have made modest reductions to the ballooning welfare bill,' she will say.
'He was too weak to hold the line.
'The result? A punishing welfare trap that shuts people out of going back to work.
'Right now, Labour are making everything worse. And Keir Starmer sums up exactly what's wrong with politics today.
'Now that his backbenchers smell blood, there's almost certainly another climb down on the two-child benefit cap in the offing.
'Labour told us 'the adults were back in charge', but this is actually amateur hour. The Prime Minister is incapable of sticking to a decision.
'If he can't make relatively small savings to a benefits bill that is set to exceed £100 billion by 2030, how can we expect him to meet his promised 5% defence spending, or ever take the tough decisions necessary to bring down the national debt?'
On Saturday, the Prime Minister told the Welsh Labour conference the 'broken' welfare system must be fixed 'in a Labour way'.
In a speech to the Welsh Labour conference, he said: 'We cannot take away the safety net that vulnerable people rely on, and we won't, but we also can't let it become a snare for those who can and want to work,' the Prime Minister said.
'Everyone agrees that our welfare system is broken: failing people every day, a generation of young people written off for good and the cost spiralling out of control.
'Fixing it is a moral imperative, but we need to do it in a Labour way.'
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Sky News
30 minutes ago
- Sky News
Starmer says he was 'heavily focused' on world affairs before U-turn on welfare bill
Sir Keir Starmer has said he was "heavily focused" on world affairs before he was forced to U-turn on his welfare bill after rebellion by MPs. In a piece in The Sunday Times, Sir Keir said he was occupied with the G7 and NATO summits and the escalating tensions in the Middle East for much of the past two weeks. His "full attention really bore down" on the welfare bill on Thursday, he added. It comes after the government was forced to U-turn on plans to cut sickness and disability benefits after significant rebellion by Labour MPs earlier this week. The government has since offered concessions ahead of a vote in the Commons on Tuesday, including exempting existing Personal Independence Payment claimants (PIP) from the stricter new criteria, while the universal credit health top-up will only be cut and frozen for new applications. Sir Keir defended the U-turn by saying: "Getting it right is more important than ploughing on with a package which doesn't necessarily achieve the desired outcome." He said all the decisions were his and that "I take ownership of them". There have been reports that rebel MPs blamed Sir Keir's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney for the government's approach. Sir Keir said: "My rule of leadership is, when things go well you get the plaudits; when things don't go well you carry the can. "I take responsibility for all the decisions made by this government. I do not talk about staff and I'd much prefer it if everybody else didn't." 1:30 Sir Keir said on Saturday that fixing the UK's welfare system is a "moral imperative". Speaking at Welsh Labour's annual conference in Llandudno, North Wales, Sir Keir said: "Everyone agrees that our welfare system is broken, failing people every day. "Fixing it is a moral imperative, but we need to do it in a Labour way, conference, and we will."
The National
an hour ago
- The National
The creative ambiguity from Keir Starmer is now rapidly breaking down
Nobody, I think, would be at risk of mistaking Sir Keir Starmer for this kind of easy character. He doesn't even have superficial charm. But his political career demonstrates a keen awareness of the importance of telling the audience in front of you what you think it wants to hear, even if that message is wildly at odds with what you might have said a couple of days, weeks, months or years earlier. For fans, I suppose you might describe this as evidence of Starmer's strategic flexibility. To critics, it looks like mendacity. They probably amount to the same thing. These days, savvy modern political analysis tends to assume people-pleasing ambiguity is what cunning political operators should do, particularly before elections. When everyone hates you a few months later, you can wisely look back and observe 'you campaign in poetry and govern in prose'. By then, everyone will have forgotten how prosaic your campaign really was. READ MORE: Scottish manufacturing firm announces 90 jobs face redundancy Roll out a platform of policies before an election, and you are guaranteed to get yourself mired in the details, some of which are likely to be less than fully worked through. Is this scheme fully costed? Are the costings credible? Have you fully thought through the eligibility requirements? If you commit to a particular platform, it's inevitable that your policies will both generate and alienate elements of your support. Almost all policy choices create winners and losers, and the losers may not be inclined to vote for you. Imagine Labour had included winter fuel cuts or Pip clawbacks and cuts in their manifesto. The reaction, I imagine, would have been interesting. And thus the conventional political wisdom says – don't give your enemies a large target. Be vague. Don't commit. As far as possible, don't specify. Deal in vibes instead. Speak of visions and moods and abstract goals. Talk about change by all means, but don't overcommit. Maintain a tight political silhouette. Stay ambiguous. By avoiding standing for anything in particular, there is much more scope for the voters – and indeed, parts of the media – to invent for themselves the details you have failed to fill in. If you have goodwill in your favour, or at least enough antipathy to your opponents to work with, your bland features and featureless policy platform will become a cluster of hopes and expectations. Present the voters with a blank canvas, and the electorate can project their aspirations and hopes on to you, without experiencing anything so discouraging as being alienated by your actual policy ideas or repelled by the principles you actually stand for. (Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire) The political cynicism of the press and general public adds a whole other layer to this because if people assume you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth, they might persuade themselves that they – unlike the credulous saps taken in by your fencing and hedging – know what your real intentions are, and happily suppose these real intentions align with their own political preferences. The easiest people to lie to are always those who want to be deceived, after all. And one of the most remarkable – and remarkably prevalent – thoughts about the incoming Starmer administration was the widespread belief, especially among its supporters, that it was basically lying to get elected, on everything from the economy to welfare to immigration. On immigration, I've lost count of the number of folk of more liberal persuasions on the issue who persuaded themselves, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that this embattled Labour administration would herald a shift in official attitudes towards refugee policy and immigration. This is just one area where the creative ambiguity which lifted Labour to power is now breaking down. When you elect to appoint someone from your party's hard right as your Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who already has a track record of crying for 'crackdowns', you know what you're getting, even if it takes 12 months for everyone else to cotton on. Liz Kendall, you might not remember, stood for her party's leadership in 2015. Steered by Morgan McSweeney – now Starmer's eminence gris in Number 10, after the defenestration of Sue Gray, killed off in classic British establishment style with the pointy end of a peerage – the Kendall campaign secured a mighty 4.5% of the vote, trundling in in fourth place, despite widespread and apparently sympathetic boosting of her candidacy in the right-wing media, claiming that the Leicester MP would be the only Labour leadership candidate to 'strike fear' into Tory hearts, presumably because she'd be advocating a policy platform most of them would recognise. (Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire) Disabled people have well-founded fears about what Kendall has in mind for them. I imagine the average Tory sleeps soundly in contemplation of this pint-sized terror. This last week suggests her Labour colleagues have been tossing and turning more anxiously of late. So, it seems, has Sir Keir. In an interview published in The Observer on Friday, Tom Baldwin outlined what he characterised as the 'private trials of Keir Starmer', using the tormented metaphor that like Downing Street's front door, Starmer can only be 'unlocked from within'. Baldwin advances the dubious thesis that Starmer has always been most effective when he is making and recognising his mistakes. 'Like someone crossing a minefield, he takes steps backwards, to the left and the right, before moving forward again,' Baldwin writes, claiming this 'may look inelegant or uninspiring, but it's still probably the best way of getting to the other side'. I don't know if Baldwin has any more experience than I do of traversing a killing zone packed with unexploded ordinance, but I'm not sure the lolloping slosh he describes is a particularly sound way of maintaining forward momentum with all your limbs intact – whether you're forging through the Korean Demilitarized Zone or attempting to survive as Prime Minister for more than a calendar year. But alongside the fawning dribble, Baldwin has tempted Starmer into making a series of fairly remarkable admissions in this interview. Baldwin's thesis, essentially, is that when Starmer – a man who claims he has no capacity for introspection, no favourite book, no favourite poem, no landscape of dreams – experiences a clash between the public and private dimensions of his life, emblematised by his front door, a self-pitying truculence surges up and dominates the Prime Minister's political responses. I may have editorialised a bit in this summary – but not by much. Take the first few months of Labour's time in office, dominated by the decision to prioritise cutting Winter Fuel Allowance, Downing Street turf wars over which henchperson should be the henchperson in chief, and uncontrolled briefing about just how many freebies different members of the new government were taking from donors and firms in the form of designer clothes, new specks, sports tickets and corporate hospitality. For this expenses scandal, Starmer blames the dirty-minded people of the press for dragging his wife into it, on the shabby pretext that Mrs S (or 'Lady Victoria Sponger' as some unsympathetic platforms described her) accepted a mere £5000 worth of contributions to her personal wardrobe from Labour donors. The problem, according to Starmer, is that he 'got emotionally involved', losing his usual 'calm' because 'they dragged Vic into it through no fault of her own'. Optics, he tells us, aren't 'substance', and if you think his family shouldn't be cashing in to the tune of thousands of pounds in expensive costumes, then he seems to think you're the one being insubstantial and optical. The adults are well and truly back in charge, as some of you centrist dads used to coo. The Labour leader also seems to blame emotion for his decision in a recent immigration speech to caution us all about the imminent prospect of Britain becoming an 'island of strangers'. Starmer told Baldwin that he delivered this speech in a fog of emotion and minimal preparation after an arson attack at his family home. 'I wouldn't have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell,' Starmer says. 'I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn't know either.' Starmer admits he should have read through the speech properly and 'held it up to the light a bit more' before opening his mouth in public – a remarkable suggestion from someone whose supposedly forensic approach to politics is one of his few and diminishing virtues. As human responses to high-stress situations go, 'accidentally evoking Enoch Powell' is a new one for me.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer have taken another hit to any credibility
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The latter, of course, had already been listening to some very alarmed disabled voters and unpaid carers, liable to lose some £4k of urgently needed funds. Turns out that what the PM dismissed as 'noises off' when he was at the G7 was more of a howl of anguish from a wheen of Labour MPs who had listened to their constituents more assiduously than their own cabinet had listened to them. What can't be mended by this late-night about-turn is the anguish of many PIP recipients who have been through the mental wringer as minister after minister intoned that the bill would not be amended. There's a very instructive passage in the book Get In, which recounts how Starmer was selected as Labour's likely leader and, if all went to plan, the PM in waiting: '[Morgan] McSweeney and his acolytes saw themselves as insurgents … as long as Starmer's private office was functional, they could control the party's politics themselves, without interference from small-minded Westminster villagers.' The book also details Starmer's contempt for, and refusal to play by, the normal political rules. Which may just explain why Labour's high command, and its leader, remained tone-deaf to the scale of the rebellion until five minutes to midnight. It also explains why Starmer first appointed Sue Gray as his chief of staff, believing that she could plug the gaps in the rest of the staff's political nous. Then she too was defenestrated. McSweeney took the post instead which is a high-profile insider's role when the going is good, less so when the solid matter hits the fan. As he found out when he and Sir Keir tried to stem the rising tide of rebellion. Even deploying high-profile colleagues to ring around the erstwhile faithful failed to persuade them to take their names off the so-called wrecking amendment. They longed for more of what Bush Senior once called 'the vision thing' and less growth through guns. (Image: Rafik Wahba on Unsplash) There's always spare cash for shiny new weaponry, many thought, but less for the poor, vulnerable or disabled. This was not why people had voted for Labour. (Not at all incidentally, the 12 new F-35A planes – which can carry tactical nuclear weapons – will come in at £80 million each, or just under £1 billion all told. Other defence contracts will be just shy of £60bn in the next calendar year.) Not really the sort of price tag which usually attracts 'noises off'. The other thing to note about the purchase of the planes is that they're entirely contingent on the USA giving the go-ahead for their use – a bit like Trident which some people persist in calling our 'independent' nuclear deterrent. The other day I heard Pat McFadden, the Scot who has sat for a Wolverhampton seat for the past 20 years, talk of America being a 'reliable ally'. Really? Would that be the country with a president as predictable as a Scottish weather vane? The chap with the shortest attention span of any adult political leader? Allegedly the G7 timetable was hugely truncated to stop the Trump person getting too bored and maybe even again leaving early! It was once observed of Scottish golfing great Sandy Lyle that the longest thing he had ever read was a left-to-right putt. Bit like the perennially (and expensively) golfing bod in the White House. Maybe flying back early from the Canadian summit gave him time for a quick nine holes before popping into his security meeting. Typically, he then claimed credit for solving all conflicts everywhere, his Iranian adventure certainly ensuring that attention was diverted from the carnage in Gaza. Despite the ill-named Humanitarian Foundation he set up with his pal 'Bibi' having led to the murder of countless civilians whose 'crime' was being so desperate for food that they approached the aid stations, where many were gunned down. Trump's reaction to all of this was to toss the Foundation another $30m, although the operation had been roundly condemned by everyone who actually understood, after many years of experience, how to distribute aid without casualties. Inevitably, the fallout from the latest UK Government's capitulation has had an impact on the politics in our own backyard. Although there were the signatures of no fewer than 12 Scottish Labour MPs on the amendment, Anas Sarwar chose to back his ultimate boss. No change there, then. Wonder how he felt on Friday morning when the commitment to reform welfare and the pre-existing bill met the Head Office's shredding machine. If you want people to stop referring to Scottish Labour as a branch office, then it's essential to stop behaving like a branch manager. Sarwar may have to eat some humble pie this coming week, but his are flesh wounds compared to the ugly gash in the PM's credibility. Sir Keir was much given to mocking what he called the 'sticking plaster' policies of the government he so handsomely defeated a torrid 12 months ago. It will take more than a temporary plaster to heal this particular wound, I'm guessing. And what of his Chancellor? Her legendary fiscal rules are apparently self-imposed; a naked bid to convince the marketplace that she was a serious chancellor with a serious agenda and would not cave in to external pressure. That too will lack credibility when she checks her spreadsheets and finds an ever-larger, blacker hole than the one she inherited. She and Keir will doubtless argue that the humongous hike in defence expenditure was an essential response to the dangerous times in which we all now live. If that response includes tax rises and these are not aimed at those with obscenely broad shoulders, she may find herself pointed at the shredder too. There is a well-trained army of lawyers and accountants whose day job is to allow the very wealthy to stay that way by stashing their cash in a variety of offshore hidey-holes. Every government promises to clamp down on this mammoth tax fraud and no government, to my knowledge, has made the smallest dent in it. When Denis Healey was chancellor, he got pelters for suggesting he would 'squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak'. Mind you, the same gent once observed: 'Being chancellor is not a woman's job. There's a difference between the sexes, and people who don't know that don't know what people are like with their clothes off.' I'm sure he didn't repeat that in the hearing of the redoubtable Edna Healey, his missus. Then again, having a woman ruling the roost at number 11 probably depends on the woman.
