In the aftermath of this government’s first King’s Speech in July 2024, Labour suspended the whip from seven of its MPs: Apsana Begum, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Zarah Sultana, Ian Byrne and Imran Hussain. This group was charged with voting – against the Labour whip – for an SNP amendment which called for the removal of the two-child benefit cap. This policy, designed by George Osborne and introduced by the government in 2017, limits the number of children for whom a family can claim financial support. According to data from the Resolution Foundation, 470,000 children would be lifted out of poverty if the cap was removed.
Nine months later, the government has all but confirmed it is about to stage a U-turn. Reporting over the weekend suggested that Keir Starmer is convinced that the cap should be removed with the government hoping to unveil this decision in its upcoming Child Poverty Strategy, which has been delayed until the autumn (it was originally intended for publication in the spring). Doing the broadcast round on Tuesday morning, Bridget Phillipson confirmed that lifting the cap is “something we’re considering”. This follows Starmer’s recent announcement that the government would retract its decision to cut the winter fuel payment for more than nine million pensioners, a policy that did a lot of damage in this year’s local elections. For the seven MPs who voted to remove the cap, this is a vindication.
“I think it’s pretty poor form,” said Byrne when we spoke over the phone. “You’ve got people who actually voted on a point of principle for constituents [who were suspended], then there’s been a realisation that they were actually doing the right thing, and the government follows on almost 12 months later,” he said. Byrne, along with three of the seven (Long-Bailey, Burgon and Hussain), had the whip restored in February this year. Sultana, McDonnell and Begum remain independent.
Byrne, who has not spoken to the government about its impending decision, thinks that if a U-turn is on the cards, the three remaining MPs should have the whip reinstated. “They should have listened to us from the get-go. There’s still MPs who’ve lost the whip who are important to the Labour movement and represent huge swathes of the Labour movement. I think it’s really important that they’re given that back,” he said.
McDonnell has already seen the opportunity in this moment. Writing for the Guardian, the former shadow chancellor accused Starmer’s government of “callousness and incompetency” and said that the removal of the whip from himself and six other colleagues for voting against the two-child benefit cap “showed a remarkable combination of arrogance and lack of judgement”. He called on MPs to “stand up and take back control of Labour”.
The optics are clearly not great. And as the Labour leadership moves rightward to – as Starmer told a meeting of the PLP last week – take on the party’s “main rivals for power”, Reform, they remain exposed on the left. (Although Farage, this week, shifted his party leftward, telling a press conference on Tuesday 27 May that Reform would remove the two-child benefit cap.) Byrne thinks this rightward move from the Labour leadership is a mistake. “We cannot be outflanked by Nigel Farage,” he said. “There seems to be an obsession with people around the leader with focus groups.” To Byrne, where the party’s focus must really lie is on issues such as alleviating child poverty, “things that George Osborne did, and the damage it did to our constituencies, in working class areas, that needs to be tacked – not a fixation on focus groups”.
Rumours of a new leftward alliance have already been swirling; there have been suggestions that this could be driven by the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (who was suspended from the party by Starmer in 2020) or even a member of the still suspended three (such as Zarah Sultana). But nothing material has happened yet. Two questions remain, however: will Starmer’s Labour readmit McDonnell, Sultana and Begum? And if the offer is on the table for the three remaining rebels, how likely are they to say yes?
[See more: The economic fantasies of Reform]
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