Does the Government now see itself as immoral? I ask this because just a few days ago, Keir Starmer was arguing that there was a “clear moral case” for the planned welfare cuts. Party whips and ministers were making it very clear to Labour backbenchers that the only “moral” thing to do would be to vote for the cuts to benefits – that the Government has now backtracked on. When the facts change, so do the morals, it seems.
There are a number of problems with making a “moral” argument for a policy which you then junk, credibility being the most obvious. Labour backbenchers had already got a whiff of Starmer’s tendency to be pushed into a U-turn over the winter fuel payment, and had reasonably concluded that they just needed to hold out through the silly threats about no ministerial jobs, removing the whip from over 100 MPs, or aspersions about their morals, until the Prime Minister decided it was politically expedient to cave.
They are now stuck in a pattern with their leader where they don’t believe the first thing he says, regardless of the moral clarity with which he initially argues it, because they suspect he will adopt the very same tone as soon as he changes course.
The deeper problem, though, is that the cuts that Labour MPs were so worried about had little to do with morality anyway. There is of course a moral imperative to get people out of a benefits trap and into work. The welfare system does not work currently, and most of the people in it would agree with that.
But there is a difference between reform and cuts. Ministers tried to elide the two, assuming perhaps that Labour backbenchers were only half sensible and wouldn’t notice the difference. But there is a world of difference: welfare reform generally involves spending money up front to make the system work better, thus driving down the overall claimant count and then the bill in the long term as people are able to work. Welfare cuts are just about quick savings.
It was hardly a secret that the Government needed to do the latter: Rachel Reeves cobbled together an additional £500m of cuts to welfare at the last minute before her Spring Statement in March because the Office for Budget Responsibility told her the existing package, set out just days before, wouldn’t save enough.
It’s not immoral to want the markets to have confidence that the Government is in control of spending, but it is not the same thing as making deep and expensive reforms to the welfare system.
So backbenchers felt an insult to their intelligence as well as their morals in being asked to regard these proposals as “reforms” rather than cuts. Most party leaders secretly think that the bulk of their backbench colleagues would do a terrible job of running the country, and they’re not entirely wrong. But the problem is when they start treating those MPs in a way that betrays that private belief.
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Labour MPs didn’t feel listened to or respected. Given most of them are motivated by a sense of at least wanting to occupy the moral high ground, if not already on it, then the lack of respect coupled with the poor arguments really rankled.
Most of the discussion following this latest U-turn has been about the impact on Starmer’s political credibility, or on whether the Treasury will be able to find the cash that it has now lost from its benefit cuts. But something else that has taken a real knocking over the past few months is the very idea of welfare reform.
This is not the first government to try to cut and reform welfare at the same time: universal credit would have been far more effective had George Osborne not sawn chunks out of its funding in his drive for austerity when he was chancellor.
To be fair to Osborne, he at least always described what he was doing in purely fiscal terms, rather than clothing it in arguments about reform. He also knew that whatever benefit cuts he came up with, the public would just want more. Now, focus groups show an electorate horrified by the proposed changes to personal independence payment, rather than baying for tougher measures.
Labour still needs to reform welfare, and even if it does come up with a proper package of measures, it has made it harder to get them through for the simple reason that its own MPs now don’t trust the people making the decisions on this most sensitive issue. They don’t trust them to know the difference between a cut and an improvement to someone’s life, and they certainly don’t trust them to make a “moral” argument that sticks.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator magazine
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