Liz Kendall, secretary of state for work and pensions, stood behind the Speaker’s chair, waiting for her moment. Fellow Labour ministers clustered round her, offering the occasional pat on the shoulder, as to a colleague who is about to do something that sits on the scale between brave and suicidal. Think of Guy Gibson sighting enemy coast ahead, or brave Horatius pondering how many he’d need to stand on either hand if he was to hold the bridge over the Tiber.
At the other end of the chamber stood Mark Tami, the government’s deputy chief whip, arms folded across his chest. The worry in the coming hours wasn’t the opposition — barely 30 Conservative MPs had turned up — but the packed Labour benches.
Kendall took her place with a nervous glance up at the press gallery. She was about to unveil the first really contentious act of this government, the thing that has destroyed Labour careers again and again: welfare reform.
The Cabinet had turned out in support. Keir Starmer was on one side of her and Angela Rayner on the other. There was Rachel Reeves, dressed all in black. Turning up was really the least she could do, given that her department is the one driving the cost-cutting. Slightly further along was Wes Streeting, who at least believes in this stuff. Leave it up to him, and we’d solve the issue of long-term joblessness with press gangs.
Kendall’s approach was that of an enthusiastic head of sixth form at a turnaround school in a troubled area: she really believed that people’s lives could change if they just got the right help, and she was there to make it happen. Later she would be asking us to stand on our desks and quote Whitman.
She set out the grim statistics: one in 10 claiming sickness or disability, one in eight young people not in work or education. She was careful to make sure everyone understood whom she blamed. “This is the legacy of 14 years of Tory failure,” she said, “and today, we say no more.” It was a rhetorical moment greeted with silence.
Kendall’s statement was set out as a sort of sandwich: tasty things Labour might like on the outsides, and something meaty and hard to digest in the middle. First, there was the stuff to help people stay in work or get back to it. Some of this got genuine cheers. Far behind her, Richard Burgon could be seen visibly trying to work out what the catch was.
It came so quickly that you might almost have missed it: a change to the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments. Was that a big deal? “This is a significant reform package that is expected to save over 5 billion pounds.” That is a big deal. Before that could sink in, she moved onto a nice thing: more money to get disabled people into work. “We all have something positive to contribute and can make a difference!” she finished, to the sound of about 30 Labour ministers trying to sound like 300 backbenchers.
Kendall is at least lucky in her opposition. Helen Whately, for the Conservatives, had to speak against the rustle of copies of Kendall’s statement being passed along the Labour benches. Her message was essentially that the welfare system was a total mess but had been going brilliantly eight months ago, that Kendall’s moves went too far and also not far enough, and that Labour had both copied and rejected Tory plans. The thought began to creep in that Whately’s speech might be an attempt to fake a claim for incapacity benefit. Perhaps she’d seen something on TikTok suggesting that if she did badly enough, the government would give her a car.
The greatest moments for an opposition come when the government is doing something you support but that their own side hates. Your strategy at such a moment is simple: identify the crack in the governing party, and try to widen it by loudly praising what ministers are doing. Whately was doing the opposite, reminding Labour MPs that however much they might hate what Kendall was doing, they hated the Conservatives more. “Governing is hard,” Whately said, at which point the Labour benches fell about. “But nothing,” she went on, “compared to how hard life can be for a severely disabled person.” You could hear people wincing across the chamber.
As Whately listed possible reforms that the Conservatives would like to have done if only they hadn’t been stopped by the wicked Tories, Streeting began heckling her. “Didn’t do it!” he yelled again and again. At one point the employment minister Alison McGovern slammed her head into her ministerial folder in mock frustration.
Later, other Tories would make more thought-through criticisms. Esther McVey asked how the move to get people into work fitted in with the moves by other bits of government to make employing people harder and more expensive. But the main criticisms would come from Labour.
John McDonnell warned of “immense suffering”. Clive Lewis said Labour supporters were “very angry”. But most of the replies were muted, more sorrow than anger. Those of us who’ve spent years watching Tory MPs accuse their own leader of actual treachery have grown used to noisier rebellion. The tone here was more “serious concerns” than “letter to the 1922 Committee”.
What was missing was anyone speaking up to actually back the changes. Horatius may have been able to hold off a thousand Etruscans with just three warriors, but government ministers generally want a few more than that.
