Both Starmer and Sarwar right over two-child benefit cap, says Murray

The shadow Scottish secretary told BBC Radio Scotland that both Labour leaders were right on the controversial policy.

Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray was speaking on Friday (Jane Barlow/PA) (PA Wire)

The stances adopted by the Labour Party’s leaders in the UK and Scotland on the two-child benefit cap are both right, a senior MP has said.

Sir Keir Starmer would not pledge to drop the controversial measure – which has been criticised by opposition politicians, including those from his own party, and leading poverty charities – last week.

Within 24 hours, however, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said he and his MSPs would “press” the UK leader to commit to scrapping the cap if he wins the next general election.

Under the current rules, Universal Credit or child tax credit can only be claimed for the first two children, with an exception granted if the applicant can prove a third child was conceived non-consensually – a measure dubbed the “rape clause” by opponents.

The difference of opinion between the two – one of the few divergences between Labour in Scotland and the UK in recent years – was criticised by many within the party, including former Scottish leadership candidate Monica Lennon and frontbencher Pam Duncan-Glancy.

Asked on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme who was right, shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray said: “They’re both right, aren’t they?”

Put to him that the stance was “binary”, Mr Murray added: “Keir has said quite clearly that we’ll look at every single policy, but we’ve got to identify how we’ll pay for it.

“I’m sure if we had said X, Y and Z last weekend, your questions today would, quite rightly, be ‘well, how are you going to pay for it?’

“We see that is – a hurdle we’ve got to try and get across and we’ll have a fully costed manifesto.

“There’s a long way to go to the general election, a long way to go until we print the manifesto and I would encourage people to wait until that happens.”

According to Mr Murray, Sir Keir’s stance is “let’s just see where we get to in terms of a plan to deliver a reduction in child poverty”.

“We want to eradicate child poverty,” he said.

“In fact, we halved it up to 2010 and would have been on course to eradicate it by 2020 if we’d have stayed in power.”

The SNP and Tory-led Governments in Scotland and the UK, he said have “reversed” the work of the last Labour administration on child poverty, Mr Murray claimed.