Sir Keir Starmer is right to show Labour rebels the door

Editorial: Suspending seven MPs following their rebellion over the two-child benefit cap is more than a prime minister flexing his political muscle. It is a reminder that, in government, choices are never easy, even ones about child poverty – especially when increasing benefits may not even be the best solution

(Dave Brown)

At one level, it seems that there is little that divides the prime minister from the seven MPs who have been suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party. He and they agree that the two-child limit on benefits has the undesirable effect of pushing children into poverty. The Independent agrees that, although parents should not have children if they cannot afford them, children should not be punished for the actions of their parents.

Where the seven disagree with Sir Keir Starmer, and indeed with The Independent, is in thinking that the new government should find the £3bn a year needed to increase universal credit for families with three or more children – and that they should find it now. They argue, in effect, that taxes should be raised and the money spent on this before anything else.

The seven make a strongly emotive argument for this, that they care more about “child poverty” than the government does. But the choices made in government are never as simple as that.

For one thing, Sir Keir made it crystal clear during the election campaign that his party would not lift the two-child benefit limit immediately if it formed the next government. John McDonnell and his colleagues are pretending innocence when they claim that there is no big issue of principle in voting against their own government 19 days after it was elected so decisively by the British people.

Leaving to one side for a moment the merits of the case for increasing payments to three-child families, there are important questions of democracy at stake here. Sir Keir has just been elected with a mandate. He is entitled to ask his MPs, who were elected on that same mandate, to respect it. Party discipline is necessary for a functioning democracy, as parties put their programmes to the people and then seek to implement them in parliament. Sir Keir should be commended for showing clear and strong leadership, which is all the more important in these early days of his time as prime minister.

Zarah Sultana, one of the suspended MPs, is quite wrong to complain that she is the victim of a “macho virility test”. She is the victim of her own arrogance in thinking that, in an important symbolic vote on the new government’s legislative programme, she can go against the party that put her in parliament.

More important than the dispute about procedure, however, is the argument over the substance of the policy. First, it is only sensible to acknowledge that, serious as child poverty is, there are other urgent priorities that need to be addressed – the NHS, including children’s healthcare, and prisons being among them.

The prime minister and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are also right to say that the problem of child poverty is not simply that of the two-child limit. They are right to commission a review of the wider issue and to ask for recommendations. Abolishing the two-child limit would, for example, allocate extra cash only to families with three children or more.

It may be that some of these families are “troubled” or “chaotic”, or whatever euphemism is currently in favour, and that there are better ways of helping them than with cash transfers that may not always increase the welfare of the children. It may be that those resources would be better deployed on a faster rebuilding of Sure Start centres, one of the more successful social policies of the last Labour government, from which the deputy prime minister benefited personally.

Sir Keir is right to take his time over this decision and to make sure he gets it right – and, in the meantime, to insist on the basics of parliamentary discipline from his MPs. If Mr McDonnell and Ms Sultana do not like it, the prime minister has shown them where the door is.