Starmer’s won the winter fuel battle, for now...

The PM’s position is now stronger so he can now follow through with his strategy of things getting worse before they get better, writes John Rentoul

The government has shown strong parliamentary discipline and strong financial discipline – which is just what it needed (PA)

As parliamentary rebellions go, this was a totally manageable one. Only one Labour MP, Jon Trickett, voted against the government – and will presumably be suspended by the party. About 40 abstained deliberately, although it is hard to know how many of the 53 Labour MPs who did not vote had permission to be away.

It seems surprising that Keir Starmer should be facing such a stiff test of his authority just two months into a new government elected with such a huge majority. But he had already been tested in the vote on the King’s Speech, which was only two weeks after the election. That was a test he passed, too.

Then, seven Labour MPs mistook a new Labour government for a debating forum in which they would be free to speak their minds. John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, who used to pride himself on his advice to colleagues not to give the leadership an excuse to chuck them out, gave the leadership an excuse to chuck him out.

That smack of firm government had a salutary effect. Only one more MP, another member of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group, wanted to join the refuseniks. The real size of the rebellion was obscured by the cloudiness of parliamentary procedure, with MPs’ reasons for not voting not always being obvious. Except in the case of Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the Socialist Campaign Group, who tweeted that she was unable to attend the vote because she was “still out of the country following my Dad’s funeral in Ghana”. But she added: “If I was able to attend in person, I would be voting against these cuts.”

That really is testing the chief whip’s patience, but I suspect she will get away with it. The government has made its point. One of the disadvantages of a majority of 174 is that it makes rebellion seem like a luxury that backbenchers can afford, but Starmer has successfully contradicted that assumption. And one of the advantages of a majority of 174 is that Starmer can afford to lose eight MPs to “encourage the others” without it making any significant difference to his ability to govern.

He and Rachel Reeves now have strong parliamentary discipline to back up their strong financial discipline.

This means that they are reinforced in their ability to take the further “painful” decisions that Starmer said would be in the Budget at the end of October.

It was painful enough to get to this point. The debate before Tuesday’s debate was not one of those parliamentary occasions when the oratory rose to the level of events. Both sides traded predictable arguments. Mel Stride, the shadow work and pensions secretary, put on a theatrical show appropriate to a candidate for the Tory leadership fighting to avoid coming last in a ballot in a couple of hours’ time. He was duly knocked out in a vote of Tory MPs. “Look to your conscience,” he said, addressing the MPs opposite. “You know in your heart that these measures are wrong.”

Liz Kendall, for the government, had her head down as she ploughed through her speech. She and several Labour MPs made good points about Conservative hypocrisy. Stride and most of his colleagues fought the 2017 election on a manifesto that said: “We will means-test winter fuel payments, focusing assistance on the least well-off pensioners, who are most at risk of fuel poverty.”

But no one on the Labour side tried to make the kind of comprehensive case for taking the winter fuel payment away from all but the poorest pensioners. They could have pointed out, as Professor Jonathan Portes does in The Independent, that the triple-lock guarantee of a gradually increasing state pension is a better policy than an untargeted extra payment. Prof Portes also made the case that child poverty is a more urgent problem – and that if the Labour government really had to decide its priorities, lifting the two-child limit on benefits would be more important.

That, though, is probably an issue for the second half of this parliament. Starmer’s position has been strengthened so that he can follow through his strategy of things getting worse before they get better.

Although he has also been weakened to the extent that, however hypocritical it may be for the Tories to use it, they have a stick with which to beat Labour for the next four or five years – as the party that robbed the pensioners of their winter fuel payments.