Politics Updates: HARMING HARMAN

by Paul Waugh | Politics Updates

* Paul Gaugh

Parliament’s final day before summer recess is dominated by George Osborne today, with Treasury Questions, a Treasury Select Committee hearing and the Second Reading of the Budget. But the political presence of the Chancellor also loomed large last night as Labour MPs fell into his trap of forcing them to choose between opposition to his cuts and being seen as ‘soft’ on welfare.

The stats from Harriet Harman’s Black Monday are worth noting. There were 48 Labour rebels - exactly 20% of the entire PLP. The remaining 184 Labour MPs abstained...and 184 was the Government’s majority on the second reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. That’s a figure you can bet the SNP will use as much as the 48 the Tories will cite in future.

Of the 48 rebels, 18 nominated Jeremy Corbyn for leader, 15 Andy Burnham and nine Yvette Cooper. None backed Liz Kendall. Half of the new intake of 2015 MPs defied the party whip.

But of the leadership contenders only Jeremy Corbyn voted against the whip. On one level this is unsurprising given he’s the only one not on the Labour frontbench, where rebelling would entail resignation. Yet Andy Burnham was swift on Facebook last night to say he was ‘firing the starting gun’ of a new attack-minded Labour party and pledged that if elected leader he would order his party to vote against third reading. He also claimed that the Harman amendment last night only happened because he’d demanded it.

But Burnham was getting it in the neck last night from critics on the left, right and centre of the party. Some MPs were openly mocking him on the Terrace after the vote, dubbing him ‘flipflopAndy’. Some Cooper and Kendall supporters were particularly incensed at the way Burnham had joked about ‘George and Harriet’s two-child test’ last week and at his decision to brief the media on his Shadow Cabinet plea for an amendment. 

One MP told the Telegraph: “His disloyalty to Harriet is outrageous - if during his whole parliamentary career he does half as much for families as she has done he’ll have been doing well.” There’s ridicule too of Burnham’s suggestion to a local radio station that he would still attend every Everton game even if Prime Minister (though was he joking about that, as he was about giving Corbyn a Shadow Cabinet post?).

As it happens, the Labour rebels will seize on the Guardian story showing that the Government’s own impact assessment of the benefit cap shows that 330,000 children from low-income families in England will be hit, costing an average of £63 per household each week. Single mothers will be hit hardest and 37% of those affected may be ethnic minority households.

Osborne effectively trolled Labour MPs with his Guardian piece yesterday. But what will really upset the Opposition is the suggestion that the Employment Support Allowance cuts are all a temporary ruse. The Speccie reports that Tory MPs have been told that the benefit cut will be reversed once the Government starts running a surplus.

Labour’s real problem is that the squeeze that hurt it in the general election could be getting worse: UKIP and the Tories are pushing the line that Labour isn’t serious about welfare reform, the SNP are saying the Harman-led abstentions proves that they are the real Opposition.

Some modernising MPs are tearing their hair out that a third way message isn’t being sold strongly enough. John McDonnell said he'd 'swim through vomit' to vote against the bill, but Blairites are nauseous at the feeling that it may take another three election defeats for the party to find a hangover cure.

Whoever replaces Harman has a long way to go. No wonder some MPs are muttering that she is not the only ‘interim’ leader the party may get in the next few years.

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* Paul Waugh, is the Executive Editor, Politics, HuffPost UK.