It’s welfare, stupid

How have we got to the stage where Keir Starmer’s Labour has lost control of more than 120 of its MPs? To misquote former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville, it’s welfare, stupid.

As you’re reading this, MPs are debating a welfare Bill that has seen more than 120 Labour MPs publicly threaten to rebel – easily enough to defeat the government. 

Almost exactly ten years ago, in July 2015, 48 Labour MPs defied party whips to vote against the Tory government’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Harriet Harman, acting Leader of the Opposition in the wake of Ed Miliband’s general election defeat two months prior, had urged her party not to vote against the Bill. The idea was to say to the electorate that the Labour Party had listened to the message received at the ballot box and was no longer a party that voters would have to worry might let welfare payments spiral out of control.

Yet nearly fifty Labour MPs defied that edict and voted against the Bill regardless. Some of these were serial rebels, like longstanding Socialist Campaign Group members Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn - the latter of whom had recently launched a leadership campaign that everyone with any insight agreed would go nowhere, but was a worthy demonstration of the kind of soul-searching, broad debate Labour needed to have after its unexpected electoral loss.

However, quite a few of the rebels were not hard left outliers whose rebellion was already priced in. They included such members of the 2015 intake as future Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, future Farming Minister Daniel Zeichner and future City Minister Tulip Siddiq. They also included then-London Mayoral hopefuls David Lammy and Sadiq Khan.

Fast forward ten years, and more than 120 Labour MPs – led by well-respected Treasury Committee Chair Meg Hiller and joined by twelve other politically moderate Labour Committee Chairs – have signed a reasoned amendment that would have torpedoed the Starmer government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. Despite winning concessions from the government, it is anticipated that fifty or more of this group could still rebel.

How did we end up here? There are three main reasons. 

Firstly, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is huge, and huge majorities are hard to control. The way that No.10 has been seeking to exert control to date represents a significant failure of stakeholder management. 

Secondly, despite Labour HQ’s iron-clad control over candidate selection, the new composition of the PLP in combination with Labour’s dispiriting first year in government has left many MPs, both new and longstanding, in a position where rebelling does not seem much riskier than the alternative. 

Thirdly, a cleave in the ranks of Labour MPs has been inevitable for some time – it is unsurprising that the thing which catalysed out and out Labour rebellion is a controversial welfare vote.

Like many in the public affairs industry with experience of multiple previous Tory governments, I have found myself surprised at the level of control No.10 has sought to exert over its backbenchers over the last year. It is highly unusual to prevent Parliamentary Private Secretaries from also being APPG Chairs, for example. MP staffers I have spoken to have lamented how difficult it is to get No.10 to sign off on even incredibly benign national media opportunities in time for their bosses to take advantage of the offers (one example I’ve heard involved an MP being prevented from taking part in a positive piece about young women, exercise and body image for a women’s magazine). Under Starmer’s leadership, the PLP have been kept on a very tight leash, with any threat of rebellion met in return with threats of instant removal of the whip, and even deselection. 

The problem with this style of stakeholder management is that if you begin negotiations at maximum threat level, you have nowhere left to go from there. The Labour rebels can be quite confident that the leadership will not remove the whip from more than one hundred of their MPs – and at that point, the balance of negotiating power shifts firmly in the MPs’ favour.

This holds even in the face of Labour’s rigorous candidate selection process. In the lead up to last year's election, the media was full of breathless reporting on Morgan McSweeney and team’s ruthless approach to building a PLP staffed entirely with loyal ‘Starmtroopers’. The party left railed against heavy handedness from the central party in imposing its preferred, loyalist candidates in target constituencies.

So why, then, are more than one hundred members of the PLP willing to rebel? In part, the Labour leadership is the victim of its own selection successes. The current PLP is full of able, sensible new MPs with their own key areas of expertise and a pretty accurate understanding of just how unlikely it is that they will ever end up a Minister if they were elected in 2024 with a majority of 12. 

This is also on average a more economically literate grouping of MPs than Labour has had on its backbenches for some time; they have informed objections to the Treasury’s attempt to avoid breaking pre-election promises on tax through a welfare Bill many worry has been pulled together hastily and with more of an eye on number crunching than on fixing long-term issues in the operation of the welfare state.

But there is also the important point that many of the rebels are longstanding and experienced Labour MPs – a fact which has likely contributed to greater numbers of the new intake being willing to put their heads above the parapet, too.

Former Shadow Disabilities Minister Vicky Foxcroft resigned as a Government Whip to back the rebellion. Emma Lewell, MP for South Shields since 2013, recently wrote a piece for Politics Home stating that despite the concessions achieved by the threat of mass rebellion, she still intends to vote against the Bill today. She expressed her regret at following the Labour whip back in 2015, when she was not among the 48 Labour rebels who voted against the Conservatives’ welfare Bill.

“I hated myself, and when the Bill wasn’t changed in Committee, because let’s face it, they hardly ever do… the damage was done.”

It appears that Lewell is not the only Labour MP to take this lesson from the 2015 welfare vote – and it is hard to argue that their position is illogical. Labour was attacked from both sides for their stance on the Bill. The party membership, still reeling from general election defeat, could not understand why Labour had chosen a course of action it only seemed able to defend to them through obscure explanations of the difference between the Second and Third Reading of a Bill in Parliament. 

Look back at contemporary media coverage of the 2015 vote, and you will see multiple columnists advising whichever of Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper would inevitably be elected Labour leader in a few months that they needed to unite the PLP. 

Jeremy Corbyn made the fact that he was the only leadership candidate to vote against the Tory welfare Bill a major plank of his early leadership campaign. Supporters canvassing on his behalf invariably mentioned it, as it went down very well amongst Labour members. A little over three weeks after the contentious welfare vote, the BBC published an article headlined: Where is Labour's 'Jeremy Corbyn mania' coming from?

Labour’s position on the 2015 welfare vote, and the way the party managed it after the fact, wasn’t solely responsible for making Corbyn the swift frontrunner for the party leadership, but it certainly helped propel him there.

Labour MPs new and old know that welfare is a totemic issue for the party. They know too that Labour’s landslide majority is broad but shallow, and following the next general election, it is likely that many of the current PLP will not be re-elected, no matter which party (or parties) form a government. They understand the political risk but cannot predict the ultimate impact of a surging Reform Party come the next general election. But many have real concerns that trying to out-compete Reform on issues like welfare could backfire dramatically.

In these circumstances, it is easy to see why the usual threats of losing the whip or promises of promotion have not been enough to avoid the threat of rebellion breaking out into the public sphere. We are far enough out from the next general election that enough MPs thought it was worth the risk to try and persuade the government to pursue different policies and different tactics. Many are clear eyed enough about their prospect of holding on to their seats at that election to consider a calculated risk – or even a conscience vote – worthwhile.

However, many MPs end up rebelling today is, strategically, less significant than what happens next. Once MPs become comfortable with the idea of rebellion and confident that they can push the government into making concessions, party management only gets more difficult. The Prime Minister is faced with almost a third of his parliamentary party no longer fearing the stick and no longer believing that the carrot is real. No.10 might just find itself forced into taking a more consultative approach to the Labour backbenches – for this set of rebels, that would represent a victory in itself.