Reducing child poverty clearly isn't a priority for Keir Starmer

The two questions now demanding urgent answers are: How much do we care about that failure? And what can we do about it?

It’s obvious that the party’s election victory had everything to do with voters’ desperation to get rid of the Tories rather than a positive endorsement of a powerful alternative vision of what Britain could become. There was no widespread support for any specific policies put forward by Keir Starmer. The Labour leader flip-flopped on so many key issues it was impossible to know what he believed and what policies he would adopt.

In the end, he stood on nothing more concrete than a vague promise of change which crumbled to dust when subjected to any serious interrogation.

The Labour Party were not the Tories and when election day arrived that was enough. But now that Starmer has won, he cannot evade the responsibility to provide an alternative to the cruelty and immorality displayed by every Tory prime minister in living memory.

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The election result was not about delivering a message to the Conservative Party. It was much more fundamental than that. It was a rejection of austerity and the philosophy behind it. It was a desperate cry for help from those who bore the brunt of Tory austerity cuts and a clear indication of an overwhelming demand for a better, fairer approach.

The last thing response it required was more of the same with just a little extra dash of humanity to take the edges off, which is exactly what this week’s King’s Speech served up. The dismal failure of that speech underlines the need for more than just lip service to some vague form of change.

It needs a commitment to radical action which should have been kick-started by the immediate abolition of the iniquitous, reprehensible two-child benefit cap.

Nothing less is acceptable.

It is beyond doubt that this cap condemns hundreds of thousands of children to poverty. There is near-universal acceptance of that fact, particularly by those charities working to help families suffering from its dire effects.

(Image: Newsquest)

Save The Children says the policy is “cruel”. The Children’s Charities Coalition calls it “devastating”. A prominent social policy academic, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, has described it as “the worst ever social security policy”. Unicef has called for its abolition. Even some prominent Conservatives hate it. David Freud, a welfare minister when it was introduced in 2017, said it was “vicious”.

A recent study found that one in four children living in some of England’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3000 poorer by the cap, which has affected 1.5 million children.

Labour politicians have spoken out against the policy. Former shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth described it as “one of the single most heinous elements of the system which is pushing children and families into poverty into poverty today”.

The party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner preferred the words “obscene” and “inhumane”. Even Starmer himself has tweeted: “We must ... scrap punitive sanctions, two-child limits and benefit caps.”

Yet when given the chance to scrap it, the new Labour government bottled it. Starmer’s excuse that to do so would cost too much money makes no sense. It is simply not true that we cannot afford it. Politics is about priorities and what has a higher priority than helping children out of poverty?

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It was a political decision not to scrap the cap and one that demands a proper explanation.

Instead, Starmer adopted the familiar tactic of time wasting by setting up a new taskforce to tell us what we already know. It was a pathetic attempt to appear to be tackling the problem while doing absolutely nothing to solve it.

At the same time, it represented a huge slap in the face of Labour figures in Scotland and by extension those who voted for them. The party’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has already stated very publicly that he wants the cap scraped.

In yet another tedious and toothless contribution to the national debate, former prime minister Gordon Brown slammed the cap as “condemning children to poverty”. Brown is deemed important enough by Labour whenever it deems gravitas is required but never important enough to actually listen to. Deputy leader in Scotland Jackie Baillie has made it plain Scottish Labour oppose the cap.

Starmer ignored them all.

It was a very public slap in the face. The description of Scottish Labour as a branch office is every bit as pertinent in the new Labour government as it ever was in the days of Better Together.

Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar

Most of the mountains of analysis of the General Election in Scotland has focussed on the lessons it holds for the SNP. The media narrative is that the party needs to take drastic action to reconnect with an electorate whose aims, ambitions and values it no longer reflects and which has lost faith in its abilities.

I have some reservations about the more hysterical conclusions drawn by some commentators. But there needs to be some reflection on how to reinvigorate the SNP’s commitment to independence as well as tighter internal structures and wider contributions on forming policy.

But it’s not just the SNP that have to change in the wake of that vote. Labour have to understand and live up to the responsibility they now have to represent those in Scotland who gave it their votes.

They need to guard against the assumption that the election represented some reset back to the days when Labour ruled supreme in Scotland, a restoration of the “natural order” of things after the SNP “blip”.

Scotland rejected Labour for a reason. It was sick of being taken for granted and will not accept this happening again.

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This is a country which generally leans to the left. A country which voted decisively not to leave Europe but was dragged out of it anyway, which does not vote in great numbers for the Tories but has been saddled with 17 years of Tory rule by UK elections, a country where around 50% or so of the population believes in independence, not yet an overwhelming majority but a proportion significant enough to warrant consideration.

There was precious little in the King’s Speech for this country. There was nothing which suggests a change in devolution to give us more power, and no reversal of a Brexit which has been regarded as a disaster by the majority.

There is nothing to reflect the fact that immigration is necessary to boost our economy yet we are shackled to an immigration system that prioritises the needs of our neighbour and dismisses our own.

And there are some worrying hints that our energy resources will once again be plundered to boost the profits of eye-watering rich corporations. Entirely absent is any indication that Labour’s hierarchy will pay any attention to the views of any of the new Labour MPs who have just been voted into office.

Given the disdain with which prominent Labour members are regarded by the Labour leadership, it’s hard to see Labour voters here being taken any more seriously.

What can we do about it? Well, we can support any moves to push Keir Starmer to immediately reconsider an immediate scrapping of the two-child benefit cap. Stephen Flynn’s Commons amendment to that end shows that even a reduced cohort of SNP MPs can push the new Labour government to do the right thing.

If the amendment is accepted for debate it should by rights attract support from Scottish Labour MPs as well as independent MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn. We will not forget if new Labour MPs refuse to support a move that would bring a real and immediate improvement to thousands of children’s lives just because it was initiated by the SNP.