Dissent will not be tolerated here. That's the message Keir Starmer, Britain's new prime minister, sent to the left wing of his party on Tuesday, July 23. Less than three weeks after winning the general election with a large majority, he quashed the beginning of a rebellion by a handful of MPs to stifle any internal protests.
On Tuesday evening, the plan for his government, presented in a "King's Speech" on July 17, was put to the vote in the House of Commons. All 404 Labour MPs (out of 650) voted in favor, of course. Nonetheless, during the course of the evening, the Scottish National Party (SNP) introduced an amendment to extend the child benefit from two − its current limit − to three children. Seven MPs from the left wing of the Labour Party voted in favor of the amendment, despite firm instructions to oppose it.
Starmer responded by suspending them from the Labour parliamentary group for six months. "This is extreme. Nobody wants to see such authoritarianism," said Bell Ribeiro-Addy, an MP close to those in question (she abstained from the vote and was not suspended), with indignation.
Among those voted out were influential voices from the party's left wing who were close to Jeremy Corbyn when he led Labour (2015-2020). They included John McDonnell, who was then in charge of economic issues, Rebecca Long-Bailey, in charge of industrial policy, and Ian Byrne, an MP from Liverpool.
The crackdown took Labour's elected representatives by surprise, particularly because the subject concerns child poverty. The two-child cap on benefits was imposed by the Conservatives in 2017, angering Labour at the time. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a British think tank, this reform represented a loss of £4.300 (€5,100) in welfare benefits on average for just over half a million households, with the poorest being hit especially hard. Reversing it would cost 3.4 billion pounds (4 billion euros), or 3% of the welfare budget. Enough to make it a highly popular idea among Labour's elected members.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed said while that was true, the new government had promised fiscal discipline. "We were clear during the election campaign that we didn't have the money to do everything we wanted," he said on the BBC. "You can't campaign saying that and then do the opposite when you come to power." The government has not completely ruled out ending the two-child cap, but it will only make a decision on the matter once the budget is presented in the fall, and the opposition's amendment on Tuesday night was not the right time to debate it, he said.
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