Ever since Labour started having to respond to Tory policy announcements, there have been little fissures in the party over what sort of stance it should take on welfare. When Harriet Harman announced that the party was ‘sympathetic’ to lowering the £26,000 welfare cap for workless households, one leadership campaign told me it was no consulted before that policy changed and that ‘nothing Harriet does now is set (or written) in stone’. Now, as Brendan Carlin reports in the Mail on Sunday, those behind-the-scenes mutterings are becoming a little more serious, with the party’s interim leader issuing what sounds like a stinging rebuke to the man who may well take over from her in a few weeks’ time, Andy Burnham, for questioning the party’s position on cuts.
Harman is clearly keen to plough ahead, regardless of any voices of dissent from leadership candidates, today telling the Sunday Politics that Labour would not ‘do blanket opposition’ and therefore it wouldn’t oppose the Welfare Bill: ‘We won’t oppose the household benefit cap,’ she said, adding: ‘I mean for example what they brought forward in relation to restricting benefits and tax credits for people with three or more children.
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