Labour's Three Stooges are done for.
The welfare debacle is a shameful episode which will haunt the Labour right for years and has probably doomed Kendell, Reeves and Starmer.
Today, this Labour leadership is in office—but not in power.
The distinction is crucial to understanding what’s happened in the last 24 hours. Starmer, Reeves, and Kendall—perhaps the three most right-wing individuals ever to hold senior office in a Labour administration—have been forced into a humiliating, crushing, possibly even annihilating climbdown. And everyone involved knows their hand was forced. That too is an important distinction.
No government—no executive—can credibly claim to be in control when a flagship policy, one they were relying on to underpin multiple grand strategies, is ripped out from under them by their own backbench MPs.
Those MPs now know the leadership is weak. That it can be bullied. They know, too, that the leadership is morally bankrupt—that it will put political survival and expediency above principle, above policy, above any meaningful change.
That makes them incredibly vulnerable. And it removes from them the one thing any ruling executive needs—authority.
This government has none. Not politically. Not morally.
Putting that bill forward was a grotesque act of immorality. Letting it limp on, long after it was clear the opposition to it was serious and growing, was an act of political stupidity on a frankly astonishing scale.
No government which gets itself into a situation like this deserves to survive it.
This is a self-inflicted wound of enormous proportions—and possibly momentous consequences.
It’s entirely the wrong moment for a newly elected government—especially one claiming to be liberal—to be rocked back on its heels in a fight with its own members, having delivered such a calculated shot of pain to its own voters.
In doing so, this government has shown us all that it is not liberal. It is not progressive.
And that is especially dangerous when facing down an enemy like Farage.
Starmer, Kendall, and Reeves haven’t just put their party in peril. They’ve placed social democracy itself in grave danger.
The Labour Party cannot go into the next election led by these people.
So yes—they’ve jeopardised their own positions as well.
This is a crisis that shows no sign of abating.
The disability changes will not now come into effect until the government studies the recommendations in the Timms report.
But many are already concerned that the outcome is predetermined—even with several disability rights charities involved in the final text. If Labour attempts to resurrect any part of this bill, using a whitewashed or biased report as cover, the political consequences will be cataclysmic.
And it’s not beneath them to try that. That’s the problem.
Because when you have people in office who care only about being in office—and once in office, care only about staying there—when you have such unprincipled, amoral people at the top of a government, they are capable of anything.
It is possible they will reintroduce this bill, or some version of it, through what’s called secondary legislation.
Secondary legislation is usually done on the quiet. It’s done without parliamentarians being able to amend it, and usually passed in what are called delegated legislation committees. It can go before the full House.
It would be inconceivable, under normal circumstances anyway, for this government to attempt any sleight of hand here. Too many organisations are watching. Too many MPs have skin in the game. And doing so would be administration-wrecking—with a real chance of the government falling.
Which isn’t to say they won’t. Because they’re capable of anything.
Liz Kendall stood in front of the press lobby last night and tried to pretend this was a sign of strength—that it proved the government was listening to its members and listening to the people. No one bought that for a second. She vowed to soldier on, although she is the most gravely wounded of any of the three of them after this.
It’s hard to imagine her surviving in post much longer. But Reeves and Starmer should not think they got away with it just because the lightning rod took the lightning.
Kendall has been done up like a kipper here by both of those two. And even if she doesn’t quit, you can bet her people will be briefing before the weekend is out that this wasn’t her decision, that this wasn’t her policy, that she was shoved out front and left to humiliate herself for someone else’s mess.
Reeves and Kendall, and a handful of others on the front bench, have gotten by for years by talking the language of the right, almost safe in the knowledge that they’d never be in a position to actually implement any of their soulless, callous ideas. Then Starmer came along and elevated both of them.
Don’t forget that Kendall is a failed leadership candidate, utterly rejected by the membership because of her right-wing views. When she ran in 2015, she got less than 5% of the vote.
Neither of these two should ever have been anywhere near office in a Labour government. But both are darlings of the metropolitan media, and so both believe they’re special. Reeves has apparently flirted with the idea of running for the leadership one day—but it’s not for nothing that she’s described as “Keir Starmer without the charm or charisma.”
As for him—where do you even start?
There are leaders who let things get away from them, and we call them bad leaders. Really bad leaders fail to regroup and recover. But it takes a truly appalling leader to fail on every level the way Starmer has here—on a moral level, on a leadership level, and just on a basic strategic level.
This has been an utter calamity, and it has exposed him as a second-rate fraud masquerading as a Prime Minister. He may not recover from this.
He is the leader of the party that proposed a despicable policy. Then, when his own MPs rebelled, he gutted the bill.
But instead of doing the most obvious thing—the thing that could’ve turned this from a disaster into merely a damaging episode—he continued to press on. Instead of scrapping the bill altogether and working with his MPs to produce something fair and just, he let this unholy legislation stumble through Parliament, hollowed out but still bearing the stink of what it was.
It is fresh in the minds of the public, who will remember two things; first, that he put it forward at all and secondly that he dithered and wobbled at the end. He gets zero credit for the changes because he didn’t suddenly realise they were an immoral disgrace; he was forced to make them. People won’t forget that.
So now he’s weaker in the eyes of the electorate, and he’s no more rehabilitated in a moral sense. He looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights—like a man who lacks the ability to think more than one step ahead.
His personal ratings have tanked to the point where they look unrecoverable and if those numbers start to look like a drag on the party itself, he’s done for.
It isn’t crazy to offer the prediction that he won’t lead Labour into the next general election—a remarkable thing to say about someone who, just yesterday, was “celebrating” one year in office as Prime Minister.
The simple truth of it is that he doesn’t deserve to, and Labour will pay a high price if he does.
But who, from that wing of the party, could possibly lead after this?
The Labour right has been exposed in the most brutal fashion by this crisis, confirming what many on the left have long suspected: that not only do these people lack a shred of strategic sense, and offer no clear vision for the future, but that they are also yellow from bow to stern—and in a crisis, they cave.
An election battle between a Labour leadership like that and Reform UK would push Labour so far to the right that it would be like asking people to choose between a slug of acid or a gulp of strychnine. The results would be appalling either way, for the party, and for the country.
Last night was not the end of this mess. But it may have been the beginning of the end for the small, deplorable clique that has taken control of the Labour Party. They’ve been shamed. They’ve been embarrassed. They’ve been humiliated.
And progressives will remember.
They’ll bide their time, knowing that only a truly progressive Labour Party stands the remotest chance of being returned to power in 2029.
The current leadership has had it.