It’s hard to overstate just how extraordinary Labour’s current plight is. Keir Starmer was elected less than a year ago, and yet is already seemingly preparing to U-turn on a central plank of his government’s programme. With more than 120 rebels within the party set to oppose the Prime Minister’s welfare cuts, media reports suggest he may be forced to water down the reform bill — or scrap it altogether.

Should the bill be rejected by Parliament, Starmer may face a confidence vote from MPs though, naturally, there is some internal disagreement as to what constitutes a confidence vote. If these threats seem absurd and implausible, that is largely a reflection of the broader condition of this government: it is absurd it has reached this state so quickly, and implausible that Starmer would have staked his office on a vote less than a year in.

However, we should not dismiss these warnings as ill-judged tactics to get rebels into line. This isn’t an arbitrary deal with Mauritius or a private backbench bill on assisted dying — both of which Starmer seems determined to deliver, whatever the cost. Rather, this is about the Government’s ability to deliver its own core programme.

Consider the implications of the bill failing. There’s obviously the question of where Rachel Reeves will find the money and, by extension, the inevitability of her breaking her explicit promise not to raise taxes on working people — again. More fundamentally, it will mean that Britain has a government, elected less than a year ago with an historic majority, which cannot reliably secure its own legislation or deliver the measures announced by the Chancellor at a fiscal event. That is the sort of fact which ought, if the true scale of it is grasped, to blot out the sun.

It was always likely that the Government would end up here. Starmer’s first, anaemic King’s Speech provided an early indication that Labour would not be able to deliver its programme. Reeves’s official spending plan involved two lean years at the end of the Parliament; she clearly bet the house on growth restarting, but had no theory on how to deliver it. Labour has too many MPs to keep them all plausibly tempted with Government jobs, and many of them have slender majorities. Yet the speed of the collapse in authority is remarkable, and so will be the likely consequences.

The blunt fact is that no European country maintains higher levels of state spending than Britain without higher taxes on working people. Labour’s attempts at squeezing cash from easy targets, such as the non-dom change and VAT raid on private schools, would have been a drop in the ocean even if they worked perfectly. As it happens, they have not.

But surely none of those countries also has Britain’s combination of extremely high basic cost-of-living issues — especially regarding housing and energy — and an increasingly dysfunctional state, both of which deeply undermine voters’ preparedness to endure higher tax levels. More acutely, if Reeves can’t deliver on her fiscal plans then the markets have no reason to be reassured by them. That means the odds may be about to shorten again on another bond crisis, especially if the Government ends up U-turning on tax rises too. This welfare bill could have ramifications beyond even a vote on Starmer’s authority.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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