With friends like Andy Burnham, who needs Jeremy Corbyn?

Telegraph

a day ago

Former Labour MPs, now safely ensconced in powerful positions in local government and having little to do with benefits, can taste blood in the water. They are using their national profiles to make life as difficult as possible for their party leader and the Prime Minister.
Last week we had London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, encouraging Labour MPs to rebel over the cuts. And now that other aspiring party leader, Manchester's Andy Burnham, has helpfully put the boot into the Government too, urging his former parliamentary colleagues to continue their rebellion. This is despite last week's humiliating U-turn by Keir Starmer, who agreed to water down the cuts in the face of the prospect of more than 100 Labour MPs voting against the Bill.
Starmer must be wondering if the last Labour Government's (and the last Tory one's) eagerness to set up powerful mayors across the country was wise after all.
Both Khan and Burnham are not accountable to the Labour whip at Westminster, and neither has any power to impact on the levels of benefits paid out by the Department of Work and Pensions, yet both are keen to burnish their soft-Left political credentials by jumping on the anti-cuts bandwagon and making life even less comfortable for Starmer than it already was. With friends like these, etc.
Any kind of genuine benefit reform – reform aimed squarely at those who have given up trying to get a job and have decided they would prefer to rely on benefits long-term – requires a degree of consensus, not just across the political spectrum but within the Labour Party itself.
Starmer's majority in the Commons is higher than the total number of Conservative MPs, so it is Labour who will decide how serious the current appetite for change actually is. The problem for the Government is, firstly, the Treasury.
Any reforms worthy of the label will initially cost more money than they save – for example, moving wholesale to face-to-face interviews. The benefit to the Government would be obvious in terms of the number of claimants who would develop cold feet and choose not to press ahead with their application based solely on their reluctance to defend their claim face-to-face.
Yet for the bean-counters at the Treasury, any increase in costs, even in the short term and even if such costs would pay for themselves within a year or three, this would be unacceptable.
It is this kind of change that is missing from the Bill currently set to go before the House and which would reduce the benefits bill – in time – far more effectively than the piecemeal and miserly short-term cuts currently planned.
There are others that could be enacted even without legislation, for example, the scrapping of monetary bonuses to staff who get through a high number of claims in as short a period as possible, which only encourages approval of claims without proper assessment.
But even these changes would meet political opposition from within Labour, including from the King in the North and the Bus Driver's Son in City Hall.
The key to progress lies with neither of these ambitious men, but with Rachel Reeves herself. Consider this quote from the Chancellor: 'We are not the party of people on benefits. We don't want to be seen, and we're not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.'
Granted, Reeves said this long before the burden of responsibility for the nation's finances was placed on her shoulders. In fact she said it ten years ago when she was the shadow work and pensions secretary under Ed Miliband.
But as her leader continues to struggle with what he actually believes about welfare reform and grapples with his more recalcitrant parliamentary colleagues, perhaps some of Reeves's erstwhile radicalism could help rescue her party from the quagmire it has constructed for itself. Aid is certainly not going to come from those who left parliament years ago to grandstand from afar.