Labour’s blame game ignores what’s really missing at the top

Good morning. How might the government get out of the hole it has dug for itself over welfare cuts? It has three possible ways out. Here they are, ranked from the best to the worst option (politically speaking).

Labour could go for the old, old trick that administrations under pressure often reach for, which is to make a big and eye-catching concession the morning of the vote, hope that enough rebels will buy it to take the wind out of the sails of the rebellion and pass the bill that way. This is the best option, but given that the government’s attempts to get the rebels back in line have undermined trust and annoyed MPs, it might not work at this stage.

It could go for another old trick of governments that have lost any hope of passing something: just pull the vote rather than be defeated. This is the safest lever, which is why governments in trouble reach for it.

Or it could force a confrontation, which could unleash all manner of chaos. Currently this is the option that Downing Street is set on, with Keir Starmer confirming yesterday that the vote would go ahead, despite more than 120 MPs backing an amendment aimed at blocking the bill. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the government of the day has got all the way to the edge of the abyss, looked down and decided that discretion is the better part of valour.

A good guide to the mood in government is the blame game playing out about who, exactly, in Downing Street is responsible for the mess. Some thoughts on that below.

It’s been a long road, getting from there to Keir

Who is to blame for Labour’s welfare spending debacle? Today’s Times brings much of the finger-pointing out into the open. It’s the fault of Alan Campbell, the chief whip, for failing to keep MPs in line and/or the fault of Claire Reynolds, the prime minister’s political director, for being unable to predict or limit the rebellion.

But the name being cited more than anyone else by MPs is Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff and most important aide. Jim Pickard, George Parker and Anna Gross set out the internal divides within the Parliamentary Labour party and the ways that “Morgan McSweeney, good or bad” has become a proxy for them in this terrific profile.

Who is to blame? I think the real answer is “none of the above”. The job of the chief whip and the political director isn’t “to have supernatural powers of mind control”.

There is no one in the world who can convince MPs to vote with the government when the policy case for the legislation does not stand up to scrutiny. As one minister put it, “we were all watching” when the Treasury visibly imposed a bunch of spending cuts that didn’t really fit the stated logic of the government’s welfare reforms. No amount of babble about the importance of “reform” can make MPs forget that and accept that the changes to personal independence payments are an integral part of what the government wants to accomplish.

What of McSweeney? The most frequent criticism I hear from Labour MPs is, as one of them put it, he is “a wartime consigliere in peacetime” — that is to say, an electoral strategist in the role of chief of staff to a government, which is the wrong approach this far from the next election. It doesn’t help that, as another MP put it, “Downing Street keep saying their number one priority is the re-election — but we’re losing”.

I don’t think that the government’s focus on the next election is particularly helpful to it at this stage. It reflects not the fact that McSweeney earned his place through winning elections, but rather Keir Starmer’s quite conscious absence of an ideological or policy project. Without that steer from the prime minister, the government inevitably has to be run by something, and that something is always going to be “getting re-elected”.

All of these are incidental to the original sin of this government, which is that Starmer made, essentially, the same irreconcilable promises in 2024 that Boris Johnson made in 2019: to rebuild the country’s tattered public services while keeping the major taxes flat or falling. In opposition, Labour often seemed to talk and act as if the only reason why Johnson’s government ended in failure was an insufficient work ethic. But “working hard and ending the louche culture that had developed around the place” did not make those irreconcilable promises any easier for Rishi Sunak to keep and they aren’t helping Labour, either. That’s why each fiscal event instead becomes a painful trial, and the underlying reason why Labour MPs are increasingly fractious and worried.

Now try this

I saw Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning last night. It’s a bit of a disappointment: having been such good fun for so long, this final entry is visibly a bit of a mess, lacking much in the way of wit and charm and cursed with pointless nods to the past. (I don’t know who they think in the imagined audience for these movies wants trivial links between minor characters and the first film, or a convoluted link between the villain in this movie with events in the third, but it’s certainly not me.)

Danny Leigh’s review is here.

Top stories today

• Stuck in the works | Several major pieces of government legislation, including Labour’s flagship employment rights overhaul, will not become law until at least the autumn after being caught up in the grindingly slow parliamentary process. 

• Shoring up services | Keir Starmer will launch a new trade strategy today focused on boosting UK services exports, while strengthening anti-dumping defences to protect Britain from the fallout from Donald Trump’s global tariff war.

• Reform’s talk of ‘fighting-age men’ | Despite having half the national average rate of asylum seekers living in the area, Reform UK’s hardline anti-asylum rhetoric struck a chord in former mining communities in county Durham. Councillor Darren Grimes, the new Reform deputy leader of Durham county council, tells stories about “fighting-age men” moving into the area, including next door to a single mother “worried about her children”.

• Concessions, get your concessions | Number 10 is preparing to offer concessions to Labour MPs to get them on side, such as changes to the points needed for eligibility for Pip, the Guardian reports. MPs also want to see changes made to other proposals affecting the health top-up for universal credit which applies to those who cannot work. The Telegraph (paywalled) hears that, as a potential amendment to the current bill, Number 10 is mulling including a promise to speed up payment of funds to help people back into work. Another option is offering assurances that reviews of policies in this area will be published soon.