The Suicide Squad.
The Welfare Bill was toxic for Scottish Labour. Many of its MP's appear not to have noticed ... or maybe they just didn't care.
At some stage next week, one of two things is going to happen. The Labour Party is either going to pull its controversial welfare bill or amend it enough that they are able to stave off a major rebellion.
Until last night, a major rebellion was inevitable. The only thing still up for grabs was the scale of it. They moved towards the amendments.
If Labour had any sense, they’d scrap the bill entirely. That so many organisations - and MP’s - remain fundamentally opposed to it means that the concessions are not enough and the stench of weakness grows sharper.
If they had a shred of respect for the people who elected them—if Labour MPs as a whole had any compassion or any commitment to the causes and ideals they are supposed to represent—this bill wouldn’t exist in the first place. But Labour has become a technocratic organisation capable of anything, and so here we are.
Still, the backlash has been severe.
The number of MPs who had said they would not support this bill was over 120. It’s impossible to know at this moment how many have been won over by the proposed changes. That’s incredible for a party which boasts of its internal discipline. It is all the more remarkable in one that has spent the last few years ruthlessly purging one flank of its own membership.
Even with the most left-wing voices silenced and dissent almost crushed, that so many MPs still found enough of their conscience and moral fibre to stand against this tells you how obscene this legislation is.
As I write this, rights organisations and MP’s from all the Westminister parties are furious that the changes create what they call “a two tier system.” From a position of crisis, Labour has somehow managed to craft an escape that is the worst of all world. It was too late for the kind of changes that would have mattered anyway.
People have made their minds up about Starmer’s government regardless, and as the electorate despises weakness they will consider today’s changes both pathetic and unprincipled, a combination which is deadly.
The reason Labour has gotten here is that their right flank has always been adept at punching down—hurting those most in need, on the rotten calculation that its voters have nowhere else to go.
History should have taught them, time and time again, that when there are two right-wing parties - for that is what Labour currently is - fighting for the same votes, the public will choose the one that means it.
Yet Labour seems incapable of grasping that lesson.
When Labour talks like the Tories, it lacks conviction. It’s even less convincing at trying to be Reform UK. Voters recognise that. If a tough-talking right-wing party is offering the full-fat version of that ideology, and Labour comes along with some diluted, jittery imitation, Labour will lose. Every time.
Because the Labour right don’t have a sliver of backbone. That’s why they punch down, as all cowards do. Press them and they are unconvincing. Unsure of themselves. The public wants conviction in its politicians, and the Labour right blows and bends in the wind and everyone knows it.
It can never sound tough enough to appease a media which despises Labour in whatever form it takes, and its own voters walk away feeling betrayed and disrespected. That leaves easy pickings for anyone clever enough to offer them something different.
Time after time, Labour has paid the price for treating its voters with contempt. South of the border, Labour supporters have shown repeatedly that they will walk away when the party behaves like that, for all the cynics on the party’s right believe otherwise.
So, any Labour MP who was willing to back this bill in the original form was not just callous—they were, and are, reckless too. They are heedless of the damage they’re doing to their own party.
At the time of writing, 12 Scottish Labour MPs signalled their opposition to this bill. That’s not even a quarter of the Scottish Labour contingent at Westminster. And I have to ask—how stupid are the rest of them?
Because here in Scotland, voters do have a very palatable alternative. As a progressive I have no problem voting SNP, and I’ve done that steadily now for years rather than give my vote to a Labour Party which treats Scottish voters with utter disdain. It is madness that they provoke us like this.
It’s astonishing to consider that Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, has indicated that he intended to support the government if they pressed ahead with this bill as it was written.
In offering concessions the London office has made him look like a fool. But when you willingly play that role you deserve all that you get.
I already wrote earlier in the week about how Scottish Labour is being advised on NHS policy by none other than the Tony Blair Institute.
If Scottish Labour MPs back a bill this appalling what does that tell you about their judgement? About their political values? About their contempt for the voters?
Any organisation that behaves the way Scottish Labour was prepared to does not deserve to survive. It’s that simple.
Scottish Labour has never been made up of the brightest and the best, but if they were too stupid to grasp even the raw political calculus here, they deserve every hammering that’s coming their way.
I’ve studied the welfare bill in detail, and there was no moral, political, or even economic case for it. Every organisation asked to analyse the social impact of the bill returned a damning verdict.
It would have destroyed people’s lives. That’s not speculation—that’s the bottom line. It would have forced people into brutal, impossible choices. No Labour government should ever be putting people in that position.
Even if there were some major economic rationale for doing it—which there wasn’t—it would still have been incumbent on the party to find a more moral, humane way of balancing the books.
But Starmer and his inner circle were not interested in that.
They wanted to look tough without actually being tough, which is a familiar strategy for the Labour right. They decided the easiest way to do it was by attacking the most vulnerable people in society. Labour’s right has always been as stupid, and callous, as they are gutless.
The worst of it is that Labour’s most loyal supporters would have been the ones most affected, and so they, of course, are the ones who are most disgusted. This policy was so far to the right that the likes of Farage and others managed to attack Labour from the left. That’s how deranged it was.
People like Farage can spot the opportunity in this immediately. Not only is it a shameful, abhorrent position for a Labour government to be in, but it’s a loser. It was asking MP’s to commit suicide. It’s unconscionable for so-called political professionals to have put themselves in this box.
To quote Logan Roy, these are “not serious people.”
Some are pointing the finger at Morgan McSweeney. Some blame Rachel Reeves. Some consider Starmer himself to be the guilty man.
Readers will know how little sympathy I have for him.
But with the next Scottish parliamentary elections on the horizon and Labour trailing badly in the polls, any Scottish Labour MP who did not sign that amendment letter—and any Labour MSP who had not signalled their backing for it—was more than just a fool. They were a drag on their own ticket.
They are the proverbial turkeys voting for Christmas.
As someone who came up through the Scottish Labour Party—who served as a branch chair, youth officer, and a national youth officer in a trade union—none of this surprises me at all.
Scottish Labour has always been the most blinkered, right-wing section of the party. It has always hated the left. It has more sectarian hatreds than all the rest of Labour combined, and it climbed into bed with the Tories on numerous occasions out of its abiding hatred of the SNP.
That’s why in Stirling, Labour councillors recently saved their own skins by teaming up with the Conservatives to survive a no-confidence vote.
This sort of cooperation between the parties has been commonplace since 2014. It’s one of the many reasons Scottish Labour was nearly wiped out the following year. Their stupidity and narrow mindedness is also visible in the types of people they’ve chosen as leaders—only Scottish Labour could have seriously thought that the likes of Kezia Dugdale, Jim Murphy, or Johann Lamont were credible candidates for First Minister.
But they were darlings of our right wing media, which in Scotland is basically almost all of the media. They were promoted beyond their abilities because they talked tough about standing against independence and spoke of “hard choices” for communities. Starting to see the familiar pattern here, eah?
I was equally dismayed last year to see so many of the 2015 intake back on the ballot in Scotland. It’s like they didn’t learn a damned thing. Maybe they don’t even realise there were lessons to learn.
Labour’s so-called Scottish comeback came down to two things: the collapse of the SNP and an electorate willing to give Labour another shot. That goodwill has already been squandered. This Labour Party is every bit as unfit for government as those who doubted Starmer suspected.
I’ve heard it said that good oppositions make good governments, the logic being that a strong opposition forces the government to rise to the challenge. But you know what’s even more true? That good governments are necessary to make a good opposition—and Starmer never had one to face.
He owes everything to the collapse of Johnson’s cabinet and the Liz Truss disaster. Sunak inherited the shambles and couldn’t fix it.
That denied Labour the chance to really stress-test its leader. It denied the country the chance to see how Starmer coped with a real opponent. Now we’re finding out the hard way that he’s hopelessly out of his depth. His party will have to reckon with that sooner or later.
But the reckoning in Scotland is not far off.
It’s coming next May. And at that point, those 12 MPs—and however many MSPs have had the guts to oppose this bill—will be the only people in the Scottish Labour movement who can look the voters in the eye.
The rest of them deserve to go down with the ship.