Reading in The Guardian, we might say congratulations to Sir Kier Starmer for managing to create another no-win scenario. Star Trek fans will know this as a Kobayashi Maru. In fact this is more of a Star Wars story because it's all about a rebellion.
At least 108 Labour MPs have promised to rebel and vote down the Government's welfare reform bill. That's a lot. You can't threaten to remove the whip from that many of your MPs. That way you could shrink yourself down to the third smallest party in the house.
That opens up outcome 1: What if Labour lost this? While it's not a confidence, vote situation the level of embarrassment could be a political puncture under the plimsoll line.
Thankfully for Keir outcome 1 isn't likely. It would take all the rebels and the opposition to actually oppose and that's not what's on the cards.
The front page of The Telegraph we see that Kemi Badenoch has offered to back the PM to get this bill through. It comes with conditions but they're actually a trap. She said she'd lend her party's votes as long as Labour promised to bring down the welfare bill and to promise no make tax increases.
The first one is something Labour go on about all the time, so of course they'll agree to that. But if they agree to the second it'll be a rod that is used to beat them. All signs are looking like there will need to be some form of tax increase. If Labour does this, at the moment, it goes against what it promised in their manifesto. If Kemi can get another promise out of them there's more weight to add to the attack that will happen every Wednesday in Prime Minister's Questions.
That makes outcome 2 a win with the support of the Tories, which is a trap-filled political embarrassment.
Outcome 3 is winning the vote without Tory help but it still leaves so many backbenchers at odds with the party. The story of recent UK party politics is all about dealing with the divisions within the party. The pro/anti-Europe sections of the Tories eventually led to the Brexit vote, which regardless of your thoughts on the results, we can all say it didn't heal the rift for the Conservatives. It's slowly evolved into the Reform UK issue.
Labour is dealing with the pragmatists, of which Keir Starmer seems to be one, and the ideologues. Without the pragmatic element you have a Jeremy Corbyn world where you end up saying, “Well, we lost the election but we won the argument.” That's great if you were in a sixth form debate but you have to realise you were in an election, so winning it was the goal. It's like saying, “Well, we lost that game of foot ball, but we did really well at eating the pieces of orange.”
Pragmatism should be the solution but Keir Starmer seems to have found an extreme version of it where he ignores the feelings of those with ideals. It's true that you don't “need” to worry about it while you have a huge majority but that doesn't last forever.
It's led to bad execution of good ideas. Millionaire pensioners don't need to have the taxpayer helping out with their gas bills, so means testing the winter fuel allowance is a good idea. However, they manage to execute it by hitting pensioners on £14k a year.
If there is a loophole letting rich people use farms to cheat the inheritance tax system find a way to fix it without hitting all farmers.
If there's an issue with the investigation into grooming gangs don't dismiss it because you think you can, only to later do what people were asking for.
It now looks like there will be a compromise. Of course. That was outcome 4 which was the only one left all along. The lesson here is to explore your outcomes in reverse order and maybe, just maybe, try to do the right thing without causing yourself all that damage.
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