Sir Keir Starmer’s victory on Tuesday in a Commons vote to cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners was a pyrrhic one. The British prime minister defeated his internal critics – at a price. It turns out that many Labour MPs have an issue with depriving pensioners who struggle to pay their energy bills of help worth up to £300. More than 50 current and suspended Labour MPs did not vote with the government. One veteran leftwinger, Jon Trickett, a former aide to Gordon Brown, voted against it. Some ministers were permitted to stay away. But scores of Labour parliamentarians – from all wings of the party – conspicuously refused to back their government.
Sir Keir should take the win and let the matter rest there. Enough voices have been suppressed in the party that they have long supported. Ministers have much bigger problems to deal with than principled dissent, and it is there that the government’s attention should be directed. Sir Keir’s party ought to be basking in the afterglow of its sweeping electoral victory in July, which ended 14 years of Conservative rule. Instead, he is having to clean up after his vanquished opponents. The Tories governed like characters in The Great Gatsby, smashing up things only to retreat into their “vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
