SCOTLAND'S only Labour MP has backed both Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar over the two-child benefit cap.
Starmer has pledged to keep the controversial measure – which has been criticised by opposition politicians, including those from his own party, and leading poverty charities – at the weekend.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said he and his MSPs would “press” the UK leader to commit to scrapping the cap if he wins the next General Election but added that removing the law could “spook the markets” and risk a repeat of the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget.
On the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme, Ian Murray said they were "both right".
He said: “They’re both right, aren’t they?"
Put to him that the stance was “binary”, Murray added: “Keir has said quite clearly that we’ll look at every single policy, but we’ve got to identify how we’ll pay for it.
“I’m sure if we had said X, Y and Z last weekend, your questions today would, quite rightly, be ‘well, how are you going to pay for it?’
“We see that is – a hurdle we’ve got to try and get across and we’ll have a fully costed manifesto.
“There’s a long way to go to the General Election, a long way to go until we print the manifesto and I would encourage people to wait until that happens.”
Under the current rules, Universal Credit or child tax credit can only be claimed for the first two children, with an exception granted if the applicant can prove a third child was conceived non-consensually – a measure dubbed the “rape clause” by opponents.
The difference of opinion between Sarwar and Starmer – one of the few divergences between Labour in Scotland and the UK in recent years – was criticised by many within the party, including former Scottish leadership candidate Monica Lennon and frontbencher Pam Duncan-Glancy.
According to Murray, Starmer's stance is “let’s just see where we get to in terms of a plan to deliver a reduction in child poverty”.
“We want to eradicate child poverty,” he said.
“In fact, we halved it up to 2010 and would have been on course to eradicate it by 2020 if we’d have stayed in power.”
The SNP and Tory-led Governments in Scotland and the UK, he said have “reversed” the work of the last Labour administration on child poverty.
