Starmer dismisses welfare cuts revolt as ‘noises off’ and defends his leadership – UK politics live | Politics

Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, has added his name to those saying the government should pause the welfare bill. He posted these on social media this morning.

The Tories left behind a toxic economic & social legacy.

Everyone agrees our welfare system needs to work better, partic when it comes to support to get people into decent jobs. But changes that could push disabled people & their families into poverty are not the answer. 1/2..

In light of the the broad-based support for the reasoned amendment, the govt should pause and rethink their welfare reforms.

Let’s get this right – rather than rush through reform – & build a welfare system that’s fit for purpose.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is changing the rules to allow foreign prisoners to become eligible for deportation more quickly, the Ministry of Justice has announced. In a news release it says:

Changes to the Early Removal Scheme will mean prisoners with no right to be in the country will face deportation 30% into their prison term rather than the current 50%.

Combined with upcoming sentencing reforms, this could see many serving fixed-term sentences eligible for deportation after serving 10 percent, down from 20 or 25 percent currently.

The MoJ says foreigners make up around 12% of the prison population and that this move will free up around 500 prison places a year.

Here is more comment on the welfare bill crisis facing Keir Starmer.

From Andrew Marr’s cover article in the New Statesman

Something serious has gone wrong in relations between Downing Street and the Labour Party in parliament. Welfare reform is essential and yet the Liz Kendall bill may even be lost – such is the scale of the unhappiness on the Labour benches. On 19 June, Richard Burgon, on the left of the party, compared it to the winter fuel payment error but on a much larger scale. He told me the government just hadn’t made enough concessions: the bill, despite desperate pleading by Labour MPs, “confirms our worst fears that it’s going to be… plunging hundreds of thousands of more disabled people into poverty”. MPs who voted for it would find, back in their constituencies, that it was “hanging round their necks like a millstone”. New Statesman readers know very well the counter-argument about the huge number of people moving on to sickness benefits, and the vast cost of that. But plenty of MPs who are not Burgon’s natural bedfellows agree with him.

There comes a point when joining a rebellion is the safer thing to do, both for holding your seat and aligning with a majority of your colleagues; 1 July, when the welfare reform bill vote is scheduled, may be that moment.

From Tom Belger at LabourList

Some 59 of the 108 first signatories of the reasoned amendment opposing welfare cuts are new Labour MPs. Weren’t the newbies in the class of ’24 supposed to be ultra-loyal “Starmtroopers”?

A year ago, the idea so many of the new intake would be publicly rebelling on such a high-profile issue within the new government’s first year would have felt laughable …

The leadership seems to have underestimated the fact that for 2024 intake MPs of virtually all factions and none, “one of their most common reasons for getting involved in the Labour Party was opposition to Conservative austerity and welfare cuts,” as the BBC’s Henry Zeffman noted in February.

As one Labour insider wryly noted to LabourList this week: “Whoever ‘hand-picked’ this new intake is probably going to have a tough quarterly assessment.”

From Stephen Bush’s Inside Politics column in the Financial Times

The underlying problem for Labour is that the policy is bad. The cuts run contrary to the logic of the government’s broader reforms to welfare, to the extent that they have any policy logic to them. That is one reason why the attempts to contain the rebellion are not working — ministers have been deployed to win round rebels. But, as one rebel put it to me, the problem is “they don’t really have anything to say”.

The average Labour rebel is pretty close to public opinion on this issue — they agree with the big picture aim of what the government is trying to do and concur that our welfare system needs reform, but they look at the arbitrary changes that the government is making and they say: “What on Earth does this have to do with reform?”

The introduction of universal credit was a reform because it changed how the benefits system operated …

But this proposed change by the Labour government, where Pip will continue to be assessed and operated in the same way as before but under a new series of conditions, is not a “reform”. It’s just a way to save money.

From Kevin Schofield at Huffpost UK

Attempts by Cabinet ministers to persuade the rebels to back down have so far failed.

A senior government source said: “The rebels are dug in.

“There are two options, neither good – pull the vote or make major changes to the bill.

“Both will leave major questions about Keir’s authority and the financial costs.”

A Labour source said pulling the vote or making further concessions was “the most likely scenario”.

But he added: “I wouldn’t entirely rule out pushing through. The rebels should walk through the lobbies with the Tories to maintain the Tory welfare system that is spiralling out of control and keeping people locked out of work.”

Peter Walker is a senior Guardian political correspondent.

Many hundreds of transgender people and supporters are arriving in parliament for a mass “lobby”, a slightly old-fashioned and very direct tactic in which people arrive on the estate and demand to speak to their MPs about a subject.

Wednesday’s lobby, which the organisers predict will involve around 1,400 members of the public speaking to 130 MPs, is billed as a chance for trans people to directly describe how they see the supreme court ruling on gender, and the way it has thus far been interpreted by the official equalities watchdog, as affecting their everyday lives.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has faced criticism over what some term an overly literal response to the court decision that “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman in setting out how organisations should respond.

Its interim advice set out among other things that transgender people should not be allowed to use toilets of the gender they live as, and that in some cases they also cannot use toilets of their birth sex.

Normally such lobbies take place in the central lobby between the Commons and Lords, but due to the size of Wednesday’s event it was moved to Westminster Hall, with desks set up for people to say which MP they wanted to see, and a PA system for parliamentary staff to announce MPs’ arrivals.

Jess O’Thompson from Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, which has led the lobby, said:

It’s not a protest in the traditional sense. People are coming into parliament to speak to their MPs about trans rights because right now, things are really, really scary for trans people. The EHRC guidance, which looks set to become law, would effectively impose a trans bathroom ban in this country. It would make us an international outlier in terms of our approach to trans people’s human rights.

Some MPs who have been contacted by transgender constituents have previously raised worries such as people who have lived as their identified gender for decades and fear being forced to declare their status to co-workers or others. O’Thompson said one transgender woman in her 70s taking part on Wednesday was worried about being no longer able to attend her women’s gardening club.

One of the MPs waiting in Westminster Hall to see constituents, the Lib Dem Roz Savage, organised a debate in May about the repercussions of the court ruling. She said:

I have to say it was eye opening. I think most people just aren’t aware of the daily challenges faced by members of the trans community. I really just want to see everybody treated with the respect and the dignity that they deserve.

On the EHRC guidance she said:

It’s very hard to see how it could work on a practical level. I think you only have to imagine a few scenarios to see how impractical it is, and would probably actually cause more consternation than the opposite, than the way things were before.

So I think just on a common sense level, as well as a moral and ethical and humanitarian level, this really has to be looked at again.

At his press conference Keir Starmer said the vote on the welfare bill would go ahead, but did not specify in his answer that it would go ahead on Tuesday next week, as planned. (See 1.51pm.)

Sometimes an omission like that can be significant. But Geri Scott from the Times says in this case it wasn’t.

Keir Starmer committed again to a vote on welfare in his press conference at NATO but didn’t specifically say on Tuesday – some instantly taking this as a sign it may be pushed back but I’m told this isn’t the case and would be “over-reading” his answer. Vote currently still on.

Q: In London your spokesperson said there was a moral argument for welfare reform. Does that mean opponents of reform are immoral?

Starmer said that Labour was the best party to reform welfare.

The argument I would make is that it is a Labour government that should reform welfare.

If the welfare system isn’t working for those that need it, and is not, it’s a Labour government that should make it work for the future.

Just as it was a Labour government that created the welfare system, it falls to this Labour government to make sure we’ve got a welfare system that’s sustainable for the future to come.

We created the health service, and now we have to ensure that it’s fit for the future. Same with welfare.

That is a progressive argument, that is a Labour argument, and it’s the right argument to make.

Q: The national security strategy published yesterday said Britons should prepare for war on home soil. Should people be thinking seriously about cold war-style prepartions?

Starmer said it was mistake to think the UK does not face threats at home. Cyber attacks are happening on a daily basis, he said. Russia and Iran were carrying out cyber attacks against the UK on a regular basis, he said.

Q: Do you think President Trump wants to get tough on Russia now over Ukraine?

Starmer said at the Nato summit there was a view that Russia needs to be pushed harder.

I think it’s fair to say the mood of pretty well all participants in the session in Nato that we’ve just had in the moment summit was, on the one hand, of positivity and resolve and purpose in relation to the commitment we’ve made … but at the same time recognising that we need to now push harder on Ukraine. And I think that reflects the mood in the room, and that it’s time for Putin to come to the table.

That’s been the subject not only of the discussions at the summit, but actually of many of the discussions over dinner last night and in the margins.

Starmer did not explicitly discuss Trump’s views on this.

Q: Why have you failed to read the mood of Labour MPs on welfare reform. Is that because you have no political nous, as critics claim?

Starmer says Labour MPs are “pretty united” in agreeing that welfare reform is needed.

The question is how. The bill will modernise welfare, and make it fairer and more efficient, he says. That is what the goverment was elected to do, he says.

He goes on:

If I may say so, many people predicted before the election that we couldn’t read the room, we hadn’t got the politics right, and we wouldn’t win an election after 2019 because we lost so badly.

That was the constant charge of me at press conferences like this, and we got a landslide victory.

So I’m comfortable with reading the room and delivering the change the country needs.

We’ve got a strong Labour government with a huge majority to deliver on our manifesto commitments. And that’s the work that we did over many years to win the election. Now we start the work over many years to change the country. Having changed the party, we now change the country.

And is it tough going? Are there plenty of people and noises off? Yes, of course, there always are, there always have been, there always will be.

But the important thing is to focus on the change that we want to bring about.

Starmer has always been sensitive to the charge that he has poor political instincts. It was a claim often made when he was in opposition, and it still surfaces now, despite his landslide election win. In fact, just today the New Statesman has been promoting a cover essay by Andrew Marr making this claim. This is from Will Lloyd, the magazine’s deputy editor.

But Starmer’s answer implied the internal Labour row about welfare was little more than “noises off”. If that is what he meant, that would be a mistake, because the rebellion is much more serious about that. Perhaps he was wound up by the aggressive question (from a Mail reporter), which could have prompted him to say more than he intended.

UPDATE: ITV News has a video clip of Starmer’s answer.

Q: President Trump gave you hardly any notice of his attack on Iran and then he expressed doubts about Nato’s article 5. Is he really a reliable ally?

Yes, says Starmer. He says the UK works very closely with the US.