It would take an interstellar malfunction of logic to explain how Keir Starmer, the man who promised fiscal discipline and moral reform while lying through his teeth, has ended up spending more public money while trying to save it.
Only Starmer could introduce a welfare cuts bill so clumsy, so amateurish, that it now costs the Treasury an extra £100 million, while fixing absolutely nothing.
This is not governing. This is a clown show, and Starmer is the ringmaster who’s lost control of the tent.
Let’s start with the central paradox. Starmer’s flagship welfare reform was sold as tough but necessary, the grown-up response to rising disability benefits. It was meant to save £4.6 billion a year. That figure is now basically zero. In fact, economists have confirmed it will actually cost more. A rounding error in a budget cratered by cowardice.
A once-rational reform has been rendered completely pointless by Starmer’s need to appease his own backbenchers, who have more spine than his Cabinet and terrify him on a daily basis.
This wasn’t a course correction. It was a U-turn wrapped inside another U-turn. A legislative pirouette performed by a government dressed as adults but acting like terrified interns. The whole Labour party is now doing donuts in a clown car, flinging out pages of its own Bill to lighten the load before the next rebellion.
And let’s not forget Starmer has a working majority of 165. Yet he folded at the first sign of internal pushback. A rebellion of 49 Labour MPs, plus 19 who couldn’t even be bothered to show up, was enough to gut the most important part of the Bill: the reform of the Personal Independence Payment (PIP). Gone. Scrubbed. Ninety minutes before the vote.
So what’s left? A hollowed-out mess of token gestures that do nothing to get people into work, nothing to curb welfare spending, and nothing to address the deepening fiscal crisis.
Bad politics, worse economics, and absolute clownery.
Labour’s claim to be the “grown-ups in the room” has never looked more absurd. Every time they try to do something that looks remotely like governing, they panic, buckle, and delete the policy they spent months defending. It is the political equivalent of setting fire to your homework the night before the exam, then turning up and blaming the fire alarm.
And speaking of fiscal fires, someone needs to check Rachel Reeves’ calculator. This circus act leaves her with a £5 billion hole to plug in the Autumn Budget, on top of the £1.5 billion lost to the winter fuel U-turn. The direction of travel is obvious: higher taxes, more borrowing. No government in modern memory has promised so much adult supervision, only to roll out a fiscal clown car with no brakes and no steering wheel. Why not save £30 billion of our hard earned money Labour and the scrap Chagos deal?
But of course, that’s too sensible for this Labour Party. We now find ourselves in the ridiculous position where a government elected on a promise of financial responsibility has increased welfare spending, alienated its own MPs, embarrassed its Cabinet, and still looks certain to raise taxes.
Some in Starmer’s orbit will try to dress this up as pragmatism. In reality, it is failure, plain and simple. He hasn’t just lost the confidence of the country, he’s handed the megaphone to the hard left. Wealth taxes are now back on the table. Immigration policy will be next. Once you show that you’ll fold under pressure, more pressure inevitably follows. Starmer has written the manual on how not to lead.
His Cabinet looks less like a team of ministers and more like a half-assembled startup with no product, no pitch, and no exit plan.
This isn’t bold leadership. It’s dithering, dressed in grey, hiding behind process, and hoping nobody notices the smoke pouring out of the engine.
So yes, Kemi Badenoch was right. This is an utter capitulation.
And yes, Mel Stride was right. This is the most humiliating moment of Labour’s first year in office.
The only rational conclusion now is to scrap the Bill entirely. Go back to first principles. If Labour truly wants to look like a party of government, it needs to stop playing dress-up in Downing Street and start acting like it knows what it’s doing.
Until then, every missed target, every U-turn, every tax rise and every clownish disaster will carry the same label:
“Pointless. Just like Keir Starmer.”
