There's a lesson to be found for the SNP in King's Speech

On the same day that a multi-million (some have even suggested billion) pound hat that wouldn’t look out of place at your local fancy dress outlet was paraded through the streets of London in its own golden carriage, four million children went to bed impoverished. Hungry. Without what they need.

We have long awaited the departure of the knowingly rotted to its core Tory government, and this King’s Speech, albeit always destined to be inevitably mind-numbing, was an opportunity for the reprieve these islands have waited so long for. An end to austerity, a tangible change in outcomes for the most vulnerable in our society who have been failed for too long and a boost for the NHS that took us through some of the hardest times in the last few years with little thanks.

Instead, Keir Starmer fell flat. As he does, as we knew he would. His hallmark has fast become being a spineless careerist with little to no morals that aren’t bendable dependent on circumstance.

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Instead of enacting the change he has spent the entire campaign trail unashamedly championing, he had the gall to stand up yesterday and announce little other than that he is, in fact, the Tory in a red tie that we suspected he was. We already knew in part what to expect, between Starmer’s almost admirable lack of integrity at every given opportunity, and Angela Rayner’s admission that the two-child cap would not be scrapped, in a carefully scripted monologue fluffed with age-old political excuses about priorities.

But it was actually worse than I anticipated, and that is quite the feat given that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone less impressed with Labour in their current form than I. There’s a lot of noise to wade through, but the consequence of Starmer’s decision to keep the two-child cap in place is extraordinary in its cruelty – and from a professed socialist no less. Despite a mild and open-to-interpretation commitment to a “child poverty task force”, Labour have fallen short of taking the action that the facts tell us will actually work.

Starmer’s supporters and colleagues have, naturally, taken to Twitter/X to defend his stance on the two-child cap, with the most common lines of defence being “the Scottish Government has the power to mitigate it, why aren’t they?” or “we can’t undo everything the Tories did in 14 years straight away”.

To the first, I would say that the Scottish Government is mitigating the effects of abysmal Westminster policy, to the tune of around £100 million a year.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (left) and former prime minister Rishi Sunak (right) lead MPs through the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London (Image: Dan Kitwood)

It is only able to do what it can with the limited resources it is given to do it, and need I continue down this road where we will inevitably arrive at the Scottish independence junction? Defending Starmer’s inability to tackle the problem at its root, while simultaneously criticising a devolved government with limited resources for not cleaning up his mess for him, I feel is an argument tying itself in knots in such spectacular fashion on its own that I don’t really need to unpack it for you.

As for the latter, this is a political framing that we have all come to know and loathe over the years. There’s no money. We can’t do everything. It’s a political excuse that – no matter what the party of government – always manages to be cleverly repackaged and resold to the electorate.

Arguably, tackling the scourge that is child poverty in modern Britain should be the ultimate priority for any Labour government, and would be if Labour hadn’t let successive election defeats entirely derail their moral integrity. The idea that the other 39 bills laid out in yesterday’s speech were of higher importance is testament in itself that this government is about as socialist as David Cameron’s 2010 offering.

Despite it being a slightly softer brand of conservatism than the hard-right Sunak era that just railroaded Britain into the ground, it was still hardly a time we should look back to with ambition.

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Labour won this election in a perfect storm of abandoned principles, opposition turmoil and demographic change. A report yesterday found that more 2019 Tory voters died than gave their vote to Labour, though a chilling 1.1 million did – most likely down to the increasing difficulty to spot the difference between the two parties. But their striking lack of integrity was really the star of the show in yesterday’s speech.

Once a party of the working family, a party founded on the principles of community and the party that brought the NHS to life, it is now little more than a Home Bargains attempt at the Tory party. So tired of losing elections because they spent more time whining about their losses than they did listening to public opinion, their only tact for winning an election became abandoning the principles they stood for and becoming a watered-down version of what they once vehemently fought against.

A warning too perhaps for the SNP, currently in the throes of election loss, that winning elections doesn’t really mean anything if you lose your core beliefs in the process. Being a sell-out at the expense of hungry kids is no political badge of honour, and history will reflect on it as such.

With Labour crumbling to Tory ideology, those four million impoverished kids now have little political hope to depend on. At least below number 39 on the list of priorities, they will go to bed again tonight without all that they need and no clear plan of action as to how to improve their circumstances – except this time instead of Rishi Sunak, it will be the direct responsibility of Keir Starmer.