The morning after: a time for headaches, reflection, throbbing mirrored promises to do things differently next time. In the Commons chamber, as Keir Starmer did his bold best, and backbench rebels cheered hypocritically, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, appeared to be in tears. (A spokesperson for Reeves later said that this related to a personal matter.)
The aftermath of the successful rebellion against the welfare bill (it turned out not to be a conventional rebellion marked by a Commons vote, but one carried out in private parliamentary rooms, with a gutting knife, and the original legislation sprawled helplessly on the table) challenges everyone at the top of government.
Before the rebellion, it was really the bond markets, even more than the distant prospect of a general election, which provided the most potent outside pressure on the Starmer-Reeves regime. It was the Truss-inflected markets, abetted by those unwise tax promises in the election, which turned the financial screw, which produced the benefit cuts project, which produced the political disaster.
Now, to use JK Galbraith’s phrase, there is a countervailing force. It is the parliamentary Labour party – or, to put it in a slightly more abstract way, the reviving memory of social democracy and inherited Labour values. This shift will have consequences for the remainder of the life of the government, for better or worse.
Angela Rayner, the standard-bearer of the soft left, was heavily involved in the radical and chaotic retreat from Liz Kendall’s original legislation. Awkwardly she is also seen on the Labour benches as the obvious next leader if Starmer falls. Without any insight into her soul, it can at least be said that there is an imbalance growing at the top of government, a certain increasingly visible instability.
Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have lost authority. Among critics of both, there is a “more in sorrow than in anger” tone about Starmer – a feeling that he doesn’t have the political skills needed, but absolutely no personal hostility towards him. The same cannot be said, I fear, of Rachel Reeves, under deep and angry personal attacks inside the party, where she has not been forgiven for the winter fuel allowance cut.
She knows it. Usually an outwardly self certain figure, Reeves appeared exhausted, tearful and almost broken in the chamber today. Losing her now would deepen the financial impact of the current crisis and further weaken the Prime Minister. But she is running out of political space. Tutored by the old Labour right, even they complain that she has become a numbed, unpolitical Treasury creature. Now, since the parliamentary defeat of this week, she has to find even more money in the autumn and the likelihood of tax rises is very high.
Consider how strongly Reeves has defended her election manifesto commitment not to raise taxes on working people – she was at it again yesterday in a much more bullish mood. Alongside that, add growing evidence of the negative impact of the national insurance increases on business, and lobbying by the super rich against her non-dom regime – and, leaving aside the personal, it is obvious that she is almost out of options.
If Reeves is quietly furious about Labour MPs who dumped these problems on her doorstep while complaining about her lack of political instinct, it would only be natural.
But her trouble is really, authority. She has little left inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Those old antagonists, the bond markets, will be unimpressed by her government’s grip on public spending… with the obvious consequences for borrowing costs. Chancellors have to be believed to be effective.
Pat McFadden, the cabinet minister often touted as Reeves’s successor, insists that the quad of top ministers will stick it out – “we take these decisions as a team, we stand as a team and we go forward as a team“ – and those are fine words and that is undoubtedly Keir Starmer’s preference.
But a reshuffle must be coming. What does Liz Kendall do now, with the central thrust of her political project eviscerated? And what does Reeves do in the run-up to her budget with so few options left?
Keep buggering on, perhaps, in the Churchillian expression. But with the pressure to be more Labour, that will be increasingly difficult. As my colleague Rachel Cunliffe pointed out, rebellion quickly becomes a habit. One early victim of this one will be, I expect, the abandonment of any plan to raise the two-child cap in the anti-poverty strategy coming later this year.
When it comes to policies like that, or unpopular tax rises in November, ministers will be saying to backbench Labour MPs, “Well you did it. That’s the position you have put us in. Grow up and own it.” And there will be a vindictive edge to the conversation. But that will not quiet or calm or subdue the turn to Labour values we have seen this week.
A new politics has to come out of this. It has to pick up the anti-patronising pro-working class instincts of Blue Labour, shared but too rarely explained at the top of government; and mingle those with an unapologetic social democratic agenda of the kind the disability groups and campaigners so active this week will recognise.
Not either-or. Both. Reach out to the ignored and the patronised and speak proud Labour values. That cannot be impossible. Keir Starmer, focusing first on the NHS and free school meals at Prime Minister‘s questions today, made a decent start. But beyond parliamentary soundbites this needs fresh language, sharper definition and a new note of conviction. If at this dire moment in their fortunes, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor discover that they cannot do this, other people may come along who can.
[See more: PMQs review: Keir Starmer fails to rule out sacking Rachel Reeves]
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