‘Steely’ Starmer has delivered the strongest attack on welfare by any Labour PM

With his determination to cut the benefits bill, Keir Starmer has found his voice as a tough pragmatist who can hold the centre ground of British politics, says John Rentoul

Unsustainable, indefensible and unfair. Keir Starmer’s words to Labour MPs last night were strong. He was making the case against the rising spending on benefits for people of working age who are not working.

“It runs contrary to those deep British values that if you can work, you should,” he said. And what was most striking, according to those in the room, was how many MPs supported him.

Of course, some of this is ambition, as new Labour MPs try to impress the prime minister and the whips with their loyalty and eligibility for promotion. And some of it is party management by those same whips, seeking to strengthen the leader and make dissidents feel isolated.

But a lot of it is a change of mood. Starmer is showing a new confidence as he finds his role as a prime minister who is reliable in a crisis and who is tougher than anyone thought he would be in tackling difficult problems.

He has administered electric shock treatment to the Labour Party – and it is starting to work. The cut in winter fuel payments may have been a tactical error, but it was indicative of a seriousness of purpose from which, it is now clear, he and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will not retreat.

By slashing foreign aid, he and Reeves positioned themselves as more “right-wing” than even Tony Blair – under whose government the country was set on the path to spending the UN target of 0.7 per cent of national income on international development.

And if Starmer becomes the first Labour prime minister to be serious about welfare reform, he could outflank Blair to the right again. Not that it is necessarily right wing to want to cut the benefits budget. As Starmer said to Labour MPs: “This is the Labour Party. We believe in the dignity of work and we believe in the dignity of every worker.”

This sounds like Gordon Brown’s rhetoric, and indeed much of the sloganising about welfare reform is very New Labour. One of Blair’s best lines against John Major in 1997 was that a Labour government would “cut the bills of failure” on social security.

In practice, that turned out to be hard to do. New Labour succeeded in stopping the benefits bill from growing – assisted by a booming economy – and in the later years started to reduce it.

It is notable that Labour Together, the pro-leadership faction run by Jonathan Ashworth, the former Labour MP, put out a graph today suggesting that the benefits bill went up under Conservative governments before 1997 and 2024, and started to come down only under a Labour government.

The last Labour government contained the problem and reduced it, but it never achieved the full double benefit of fundamental reform – saving public money and increasing the workforce. If Starmer and Liz Kendall, his work and pensions secretary, can secure that double bonus, that would be a great achievement.

Just as significant, though, is that Starmer seems to be finding his voice as a tough pragmatist who can hold the centre ground of British politics. He has grown in stature in recent weeks as the national security prime minister – so much so that I keep coming across sensible Tories who think that Starmer is going to win the next election. They were impressed by his handling of Donald Trump and by his leadership in Europe. They think he is tough on immigration without making impossible promises – which may help to fend off Reform and the Conservatives.

Starmer explicitly linked welfare reform to his plan to see off the populists in his speech to Labour MPs last night. He said he was “not afraid” to take the big decisions needed, “whether that’s on welfare, immigration, our public services or our public finances”.

If he and Kendall can find a way to cut the benefits bill by getting people “off welfare and into work”, rather than simply by being mean to the disabled and long-term sick, this will reinforce his pitch to the electorate, which can be summed up in one phrase: not to be scary.

This means taking positions on defence, foreign aid, immigration, welfare and public spending that make many Labour Party members and MPs uncomfortable – but Starmer’s growing confidence reflects a stronger connection to the priorities of the voters.