{"id":83623,"date":"2025-07-01T19:11:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=83623"},"modified":"2025-07-01T19:11:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:11:18","slug":"starmer-has-been-defeated-and-has-not-a-shred-of-credibility-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/07\/01\/starmer-has-been-defeated-and-has-not-a-shred-of-credibility-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer has been defeated and has not a shred of credibility left"},"content":{"rendered":"

As The Guardian<\/a> has reported in the last hour, Stephen Timms told the Commons after 5 pm with regard to the Bill delivering benefit reforms:<\/p>\n

I can announce that we are going to remove the clause five from the bill at committee, that we will move straight to the wider review, sometimes referred to as the Timms review, and only make changes to Pip eligibility, activities and descriptors following that review.<\/p>\n

The government is committed to concluding the review by the autumn of next year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As The Guardian then notes:<\/p>\n

\n

That is another big concession.<\/p>\n

It means there is a chance that new Pip eligibility rules will not come into force in November 2026.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They added:<\/p>\n

\n

Much more importantly, it means that the switch to the four-point Pip eligibility rule may never happen at all. It won\u2019t be in the legislation. And there is no guarantee the Timms review will revive the idea \u2013 certainly if it is genuinely \u201cco-produced\u201d with disabled people, as the government promises. The four-point rule was the key instrument that was going to deliver the \u00a32.5bn savings that, this morning, the Treasury was going to deliver.<\/p>\n

This means MPs are set to pass a bill that won\u2019t necessarily deliver anything like the level of cuts originally planned. It is a huge win for those campaigning against it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In fact, this Bill now delivers no significant cuts at all. Those that are left should still be abandoned, though.<\/p>\n

There is no beating about the bush here. What must have happened is that sometime late this afternoon, the Whips told Labour that they were still going to be defeated by their own backbenchers and so, to avoid this embarrassment, the Bill had to be gutted, leaving it almost meaningless.<\/p>\n

No government Bill has done this badly for 40 years, and that was a relatively minor one in the Thatcher era, and this was a fundamental Bill in the Starmer era.<\/p>\n

The callousness of the Labour government has been exposed. Its own backbenchers have rightly hammered it.<\/p>\n

The time has come for the government to rethink, entirely. It has almost all its policies wrong. It's not just this issue. The whole of its austerity programme is unjustified, and that is now obvious.<\/p>\n

Labour has a choice. They can demand total change from Starmer, or they can demand that Starmer go. There are no other alternatives, and only one of these is likely to be viable, given that Starmer, Reeves, Kendall and many others in the Cabinet have not a shred of credibility left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As The Guardian has reported in the last hour, Stephen Timms told the Commons after 5 pm with regard to the Bill delivering benefit reforms:
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,16,147,118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-ethics","category-inequality","category-labour","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83623"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83627,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83623\/revisions\/83627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}