Keir Starmer faces the Commons at PMQs for the first time as prime minister. He does so after responding to the first challenge to his authority while in Downing Street by suspending seven MPs.
As reactions go, it was tough, unprecedented and a shock to many as he sent a signal to the left wing of his party, to new MPs and to the opposition about his feelings about rebels.
As Jessica Elgot reports, “the move to suspend MPs from the party’s left, including the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, sent shockwaves through the party and drew criticism from some MPs who voted with the government.”
Starmer’s response was to a rebellion supporting an amendment to scrap the two-child benefit limit amendment. That amendment failed by 363 votes to 103, a majority of 260 for Labour.
The former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Imran Hussain, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Zarah Sultana all voted for the amendment and were suspended from Labour for six months. Forty-two Labour MPs abstained, including Diane Abbott, who said she couldn’t vote for personal reasons but was “horrified” that her allies were suspended.
Sultana is on the morning media round and told the Today programme she had not been warned she would be kicked out of the party if she rebelled but said it wouldn’t have changed how she voted anyhow. “I wasn’t spoken to or informed that would happen,” she said. “But I was always going to vote that way.”
Sultana suggested she was the victim of a “macho virility test”. Asked for her view of the PM, the Coventry South MP said: “I’m not interested in playing up to this macho virility test that seems to be what people are talking about. It’s about the material conditions of 330,000 children living in poverty. This isn’t a game. This is about people’s lives.”
She added: “It’s really important to use every opportunity in parliament to make the case that the two-child cap has to be scrapped. There are 4.3 million children living in the UK in poverty and in my constituency one in three are.”
Asked if Starmer had made an “immoral” decision in choosing not to scrap the two-child benefit cap, Sultana said: “If scrapping the cap is not an urgent priority for a Labour government, then you have to ask what is. Every day it is in place hundreds of thousands of children are enduring unacceptable poverty.”
Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, she said: “When you’ve got anti-charity campaigners, thinktanks, trade unions saying that the key driver for child poverty in this country – which is the sixth largest economy in the world – is the Tories’ two-child benefit cap, then it is a moral imperative on the Labour party to scrap that and do everything that they can to make sure that not a single child has to live in unnecessary hardship and poverty.”
Removing the cap is backed by the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Reform. Suella Braverman, who also abstained from voting, told the House on Monday that it had not worked as a measure to stop people having more children. “I believe that the cap is aggravating child poverty, and it is time for it to go,” she said.
Starmer is sure to face further questions over the cap and the rebellion at midday.
Elsewhere overnight, James Cleverly became the first Tory leadership hopeful to declare his candidacy in the race to replace Rishi Sunak and warned his party against “infighting, navel-gazing and the internecine manoeuvrings”.
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Source: theguardian.com
