21 May 2025

What’s the point of a Labour government that allows child poverty?

Keir Starmer says in private that lifting the two-child cap is his personal priority.

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Let’s be truly unfashionable and talk of political morality: what is the moral core of social democracy? I’m talking not of “the government” but the individuals sitting around the cabinet table: what are the values they rely on when, for instance, taking decisions about wealth and poverty?

This is timely for two reasons. First, the near-at-hand one. As Labour moves closer to right-wing populist thinking on immigration curbs, welfare cuts and social conservatism, the “who are these people?” question becomes unavoidable, to the point where it is beginning, perhaps, to seep into opinion polling.

The second reason is on an epic scale. Matthew Arnold noted the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of Christianity as the moral core of this country. He was writing around 1850 but throughout the 20th century British socialist thinking rested heavily not just on the Christian moral code – as Harold Wilson famously put it, there was “more Methodism than Marx” in the Labour Party – but on the assumption that this code was a general core belief system, which could be used and appealed to, even when unnamed. Was this a dangerous assumption?

Most senior Labour people, even if they became intellectual agnostics, had begun with the Church. Ramsay MacDonald grew up in the Free Church of Scotland and taught in Church schools, though he later became a humanist. Clement Attlee came from a line of devout Anglicans, and said he believed in the ethics of Christianity, just not “the mumbo-jumbo”. Tony Crosland, currently the subject of a play in London, was brought up as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, rejecting them later. James Callaghan was a Baptist and Sunday-school teacher when young. Tony Blair was always religious, before becoming a Roman Catholic later in life.

Gordon Brown, who is guest editing this issue, wrote in his memoir that he was sorry he had not drawn a clearer line between his religious faith and his political choices: “This was, to my regret, a problem that I never really resolved. I suspect I was thought of as more like a technician lacking solid convictions. And, despite my strong personal religious beliefs, I never really countered that impression.”

This matters because key Christian teachings and stories, from “do unto others”, through to the Good Samaritan and the one about private equity managers, camels and needles, long meant Labour objectives on redistribution, fairness and the importance of community, barely needed to be stated. The underlying assumptions were already there, inside people’s heads.

But although there are signs of religious revival today, the shrivelling of official Christian religion at the core of British life has been dramatic. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, modern physics and images from space telescopes have burrowed into the common imagination. Far fewer go to church. Far fewer know the Bible stories. There was an assumption that the moral spirit would continue alive in our politics even as churches became cold stone corpses. Was that idiotically optimistic?

For there are rival ways of thinking, if not ideologies or belief systems. Decades of consumerism, then the online culture of exhibitionism, greed and material success, have eroded earlier notions of equity or restraint. The problem extends beyond social democracy: Freddie Hayward reported recently that the American writer Ross Douthat “thinks liberalism lacks a metaphysics, an explanation for the universe which would breathe meaning into concepts such as free speech”.

Deeper waters, but invigorating ones. I was brought up in a Scottish kirk, not so far from Brown’s home town of Kirkcaldy, though my father was an elder, not the minister. When Brown was in office we used to talk sometimes about morality and the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly that of the economist and philosopher Adam Smith.

In his grander if lesser-known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that we judge our moral lives by standing outside ourselves: “We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us… With the eyes of other people.”

This empathy machine offers a more optimistic analysis – that there is a basic common understanding of fairness which, perhaps, pre-dates or stands below organised religion. We have an inbuilt instinct for fairness which modern philosophers like Peter Singer have rebranded effective altruism.

But when Smith proposes his version, he assumes a morally homogeneous world in which “other fair and impartial spectators” are freely available to imagine. In our fractured society, with such great chasms in wealth and opportunity, and different belief systems rubbing up against one another, is that still the case?

I think it is. But at this point, let’s apply this abruptly to ordinary politics. What would be the moral point of a Labour government that left office having increased, rather than decreased, childhood poverty?

There is, in my experience, still a notion of fairness rooted in the current cabinet, whether among the minority with strong religious views – Jonathan Reynolds, Shabana Mahmood, Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillipson – or the agnostics such as Keir Starmer. Under pressure from the bond markets, disillusioned voters and the media, are they listening enough to their internal moral voice? With huge potential rebellions looming on winter fuel and benefits for the disabled, it’s clear that Labour backbenchers are.

Fairness is not just about tax and benefits. It embraces the importance of controlled borders to protect the interests of working-class people; breakfast clubs for hungry children; the desperate need for more housing; the recent renters’ law and the workers’ rights package.

But child poverty is inescapably central to any party with a sense of justice and fairness – it creates damage for a lifetime, the growing destitution described elsewhere in this issue.

So, when Nick Williams, the former economic adviser to the Prime Minister, said recently that taxes are going to have to rise because current spending plans are not credible without them, he reignited the most important moral question facing the cabinet. They can’t go on cutting benefits and ignoring tax. They just can’t.

Indeed, I don’t think Labour can survive as a major national force without changing direction on the winter fuel allowance, without rethinking a planned deeper round of welfare benefit cuts, and without spending more to tackle both poverty and its partner, crime. Starmer says in private that lifting the two-child benefit cap is his personal priority.

So how to fund it? There are several solutions in this issue of the New Statesman. I have heard credible plans to expand the range of National Insurance to those who don’t currently pay it – people living on capital income, pensioners, landlords – or to abolish class-2 National Insurance, the self-employed rate, and roll it into income tax. Even with offsets and mitigation to protect poorer pensioners, this could raise about £20bn, similar to the first Reeves Budget. Treasury people say this would be greatly preferable to risking trouble with the bond markets by loosening the fiscal rules.

In politics, there are no final judgements. Democratic history offers an illimitable sequence of collapses, elegant or otherwise. Here and now, Labour is heading for one of those unless, very quickly, it speaks and acts a moral language of fairness, empathy and determination. We need a little anger. We need a little fire. The alternative is unthinkable. A government that allows destitution to spread may be many things but it is not a Labour government.