Starmer's authority dented by his benefits climbdown

When Labour took office a year ago, ministers proclaimed that “the grown-ups are back in charge” and “stability will replace Tory chaos”. But Keir Starmer’s government looked anything but stable this week. His authority as prime minister has been badly dented by his spectacular climbdown over £5bn of welfare cuts. He looks more like the follower of his mutinous MPs than leader of the Labour Party. Starmer can no longer take their support for granted after they forced U-turns on winter fuel payments and now sickness and disability benefits. Once MPs in any party rebel, they are more likely to do it again — and the welfare rebellion worked brilliantly.

As one Labour source told me: “Many of the newbies (the 2024 intake) think they are only here for one term, and are not going to become a minister because there are not enough jobs to go round. They have nothing to lose by standing up for what they believe in.” This is a big moment. It will make it harder to win approval for the “tough decisions” Starmer believes are needed to “renew” Britain. It will mean more of the "sticking-plaster solutions" he vowed to avoid. Treasury plans for further welfare savings will probably have to be shelved. The £4bn estimated cost of the winter fuel and welfare U-turns makes tax rises in the Budget this autumn even more likely. The same group of more than 120 Labour MPs, spanning the soft and hard left, will demand the abolition of the two-child benefit limit and now have the muscle to get it.

Starmer needs to rebuild bridges with his MPs and somehow find time to listen to them, despite his unavoidably huge foreign affairs workload. His MP critics view him as remote and were rightly furious he dismissed them as irritating "noises off". He can't do the TLC all by himself and needs to improve his Downing Street operation. His MPs should be seen as an asset to sell the government's message, not treated as lobby fodder. The PM and a long-overdue heavyweight economic adviser in No 10 will need to keep Rachel Reeves on a tighter leash; she, rather than Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, was the architect of the panicky welfare cuts, as she struggled to stick to her fiscal rules in March. The chancellor is making too many mistakes.

Some at Westminster detect more fundamental lessons. As the crisis on welfare deepened, some ministers muttered in private that the UK is virtually ungovernable in a social media age, when politics has sped up and impatient voters want change yesterday. If they don't get instant gratification, they will shop around. Traditional party loyalties are shattered, as illustrated by Labour's unprecedented decline since last year's election, Starmer's disastrous personal ratings and Reform UK's rapid rise. These ministers noted that a landslide — Boris Johnson's majority of 80 in 2019, or Starmer's current working majority of 165 — does not guarantee stability in the febrile new world. Voters make ever greater (sometimes contradictory) demands on politicians, but their trust in the system of government has slumped to a record low, the British social attitudes survey found this week.

True, governing has got harder since I moved to the Westminster village in 1982. A ravenous media also demands instant solutions. Governing is even more difficult when there’s little money to throw at problems, as is the case today. But I think Starmer's grumbling ministers protest too much. After all, Labour won power on a one-word promise: change. The party can hardly complain that the public wants to see it happen quickly. The U-turns symbolise a broken system. Labour figures, Starmer included, are rightly frustrated by a slow Whitehall machine. Structural changes would help, as I argued a week ago. But the winter fuel and welfare cuts were political choices. Indeed, critics of the system think ministers need to look in the mirror. Munira Mirza, a former head of the No 10 policy unit who chairs a new, non-party group called Fix Britain, says professional politicians are "rank amateurs" and ministers sometimes "shockingly out of their depth". She has a point.