The backlash against Keir Starmer’s ruthless decision to suspend seven MPs for voting against the government has been completely slammed – even from within the Labour Party.
On Tuesday, a handful of MPs on the left of the party voted for an amendment calling for the two-child benefit cap – which prevents parents from getting help from the state for their third child – to be scrapped.
The government’s bid to keep the cap won by some margin, but the prime minister still chose to kick the rebels out of the parliamentary party for six months.
The move has attracted a huge amount of scrutiny from the new prime minister.
Mish Rahman, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) which is the governing body of the party, claimed Starmer was showing “complete control freakery, authoritarianism”.
Speaking to Times Radio, he said: “Starmer thinks that he’s showing that he’s a strong leader but really it’s complete control freakery, authoritarianism, showing people what he’ll do if people disagree with him.
“I don’t think this benefits him, the party or anyone in the long run just because, I mean these are backbenchers, they’re not frontbenchers, these people are there literally to represent their constituencies and they have to go back and explain why they would have voted.”
Rahman then claimed: “There’s no reason why even if these seven people had voted against it, why they had to have the whip taken away from them.
“I mean, they literally voted to end child poverty in the way that they thought voting against this would.”
He said everyone in the Labour Party agrees the cap is “heinous, it’s cruel, it’s punishing” anyway.
Labour’s Nadia Whittome, who abstained from the vote, criticised the suspension, too.
She said: “The government’s approach to party discipline has been appalling. No MP should have lost the whip for their vote this evening, especially on a policy that almost everyone in Labour opposes.”
Meanwhile, Zarah Sultana, who lost the whip over the vote last night, told the media this morning she was victim of a “macho virility test” but that she “slept well knowing that I told a stand against child poverty”.
Another one of the now ousted rebels, Aspana Begum, told Sky News: “I myself was quite shocked and surprised at the way I was treated.
“I had a very difficult election. Many people said to me, you know, we’re happy to support you as an individual but we’re finding it very hard to support Labour at the time, for a number of different reasons.”
She said some voters are “not seeing a difference between the two main parties in parliament”.
“It’s unacceptable, but that demonstrates the way in which that draconian stand was taken in regards to the scrapping of the two-child limit,” she said.
The backlash also extended to the House of Lords.
Labour peer, Prem Sikka, wrote on X: “Solidarity with the seven. With big majority Starmer silencing debate, just as Tories did. Sooner or later the cap will go.”
He also told the Lords it was “disappointing” the cap still had not been abolished, and there was “no shortage of money”.
He added on X: “Would the government find the money if a bank collapsed tomorrow? Poverty is a political choice.”
Meanwhile, independent MPs – Jeremy Corbyn, Shockat Adam, Iqbal Mohamed, Adnan Hussain and Ayoub Khan – took the chance to write to the rebel MPs on Wednesday, thanking them for voting against the government on the cap.
“It is beyond disgraceful that you have been punished for voting to alleviate child poverty,” the letter said.