The UK’s Welfare shambles will have a long echo

When you are Keir Starmer and you have an almost unmatched majority in a Parliament where a majority of one means almost absolute power (despite winning it based on fewer votes than your socialist predecessor), it is tempting to rule as if you have absolute power and all those under you will loyally comply with even your worst attempts to hurt those weaker than you.

Which works. Until they don’t and then you don’t.

The scenes in the UK Parliament this week of chaos as the Government re-wrote their welfare reform bill on the fly to try and stave off a massive backbench rebellion and in the process ended up jettisoning almost everything substantial in the bill.

This will be a relief to those affected as some reports estimated that around 250,000 disabled people in the UK would be pushed into poverty by the reforms and even the watered down version that made it to Parliament at the start of the day would have impoverished around 150,000 people. As of the time of writing, estimates of the number of people who’ll be negatively affected by the bill that eventually passed are not available.

From a purely legislative view - never mind the moral view of a Labour government doing more to harm the poor than the Conservatives before them - this bill should be a lesson on how not to make policy. Planned reforms should be agreed with supporters ahead of time. Opposition noted and, where appropriate, amendments negotiated and compromises made. By the time the legislation is drafted, the votes should be already secured. As Sun Tzu advised - a battle should be won long before the first blow struck.

What we saw instead was party loyalists putting their principles on the line for a bill that changed at least four times yesterday and will no doubt spend the coming days in the media telling everyone that, no, THIS is the version that they truly believe in and always did.

While the backbench rebellion had a strong core in Scotland, many of those loyalists represent constituencies here too and this shows the next weakness in this particular piece of legislation. Where the cuts intersect with devolved matters, they wouldn’t directly affect Scottish constituents except there would be extreme pressure on the Scottish Government to pass those cuts on - almost certainly to derisive cries from those who made them inevitable.

The impact on the UK Government from this mess will become clearer in coming days but one more pressure looms as a result of paring this bill back to the bone. Rachel Reeves was hoping that they’d “save” up to £5 billion by taking it from poor disabled people and the UK Government needed that money to buy bombs under the defence plans Starmer agreed with Donald Trump. That money is not longer available. There’s next to no question that they’ll go looking for that money from the rich who stand to profit from war, so where will the next cuts land instead?