Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer have taken another hit to any credibility

The National

a day ago

For the recently wedded, the first anniversary is known as the paper one. So-called, apparently, because the relationship of the couple is still fragile and delicate territory and is also a blank page representing how they are just beginning their life story together. Or maybe underscoring the need for a government to remember the all-important relationship with its own troops.
However, you dress it up, the very late-night concessions wrung out of a beleaguered Work and Pensions Secretary last Thursday night count as the third government U-turn in the last month. Thatcher once famously told her conference: 'You turn if you want to, the Lady's not for turning.' As they say; compare and contrast.
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In the past 48 hours, the narrative has been swiftly rewritten as the bill being strengthened, and the Government only changing its mind having listened – however belatedly – to its own backbenchers. 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.