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A humiliating climb-down by the government overnight is a huge win for rebel MPs opposed to planned cuts to benefits.
More than a hundred Labour MPs signed an amendment confirming that they intended to derail a vote (that is still due to happen) next Tuesday on a bill that would severely restrict eligibility criteria for welfare support among people living with illness and disability.
Faced with losing a vote to his own MPs, Keir Starmer has agreed to make concessions, most importantly agreeing to exempt anyone currently claiming benefits from the proposed new rules, thereby sparing them from cuts.
We’re yet to find out if these changes are enough to enable the bill to pass on Tuesday but as lecturer in British politics Tony McNulty writes today, the political damage has already been done. Before finding a new life in academia, McNulty was himself a Labour MP – and a government whip, at that. He charts the missteps made by those in charge of party management that have made this confrontation such a disaster.
By pure coincidence, the row over disability cuts has coincided with a major release of public opinion data on the very same subject this week. The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) asked thousands of people whether they thought this budget should be cut or increased. I asked John Curtice to take us through the findings. What he reveals helps explain why this is such a vexing problem for the government.
You know it’s a busy week in politics when you need to call on John Curtice twice to explain things to you. A few days before the climbdown, Professor Curtice also wrote about another part of the NatCen data release. This shows that the country’s new political divides are placing unprecedented strain on Labour and the Conservatives. Here, he shows that this fracturing is delivering votes to Reform on the right and the Greens on the left.
At the launch of this data in London on Wednesday, Curtice made an interesting point that has been ringing in my ears ever since. The threat posed by Nigel Farage has, for a long time, been a reason not to pursue proportional representation in British elections. Why would a Conservative or Labour government abolish first past the post – a system that keeps them in power and locks Farage out? However, recent polling suggests Reform could now win an election held under the current electoral rules. So the calculation suddenly looks quite different. And since support for electoral reform has hit an all-time high of 60% (and even enjoys majority support among Labour and Tory voters), the obvious question, then, is: are we about to get a change?
Alan Renwick at UCL’s Constitution Unit has been researching electoral reform for years, so he was the perfect person to approach about this. He informed me that, historically, big changes of this kind largely happen under two conditions. Find out what those conditions are here – and how and when they might come about in the UK.
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