AFTER WINNING A stunning electoral victory just under a year ago, the UK Labour Party has been roiled by divisions this week over Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s proposed cuts to social welfare payments. 

Starmer’s chief of staff, Irishman Morgan McSweeney, has become a lightning rod for much of the criticism coming from the left of the party. 

Starmer has now reversed course on his planned cuts to sickness and disability supports, an issue that had become emblematic of the ideological divisions in his party. 

Only days after the Labour leader insisted he would plough ahead with the reforms, Social Care Minister Stephen Kinnock confirmed concessions had been made to “rebel” MPs who had threatened to scupper the bill’s progress.

A total 126 of Labour’s more than 400 MPs publicly backed a move to block the proposals, forcing the the government into its latest U-turn.

The new reversal on welfare payments would protect some 370,000 existing claimants who were expected to lose out. The cuts, as they were first proposed, would have taken away benefits amounting to about £5 billion.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Starmer told MPs he wanted the reforms to reflect “Labour values of fairness” and that discussions about the changes would continue over the coming days.

He insisted there was “consensus across the House on the urgent need for reform” of the “broken” welfare system.

Starmer previously felt the anger of the left wing of his party when it came to his first budget, and changed tack when it came to the UK’s winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap.

The welfare bill will be up for debate again next Tuesday, when MPs will have their first opportunity to support or reject it.

A spokesperson for Starmer’s office said: “We have listened to MPs who support the principle of reform but are worried about the pace of change for those already supported by the system.”

“Our reforms are underpinned by Labour values and our determination to deliver the change the country voted for last year.

Morgan McSweeney, who has been credited as the brains behind Labour’s general election victory, has emerged as a primary target for Labour “rebels”.

Those MPs have been pointing to McSweeney as the main influence behind Starmer’s austerity measures and Starmer’s rightward shift more generally.

“They just kept saying that MPs were in a different place from the public on benefit cuts and we’d just have to tough it out,” one MP who signed the blocking amendment told The Guardian this week.

“But we speak to our constituents all the time and many of them are terrified. They just don’t get it.”

Another MP was reported describing McSweeney and his team in 10 Downing Street as running around “like extras in The Thick of It”, a reference to the satirical TV series about UK politics. 

Outside of economic policy, Starmer has also angered large portions of his party with his crackdown on immigration and massive increases in military spending. 

In a speech he delivered earlier this year, Starmer echoed the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech made by the anti-immigration Conservative MP Enoch Powell in the 1960s.

Starmer said Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers” due to high levels of immigration.

Starmer said today that he “deeply” regretted using the phrase. 

On top of that, he has angered anti-war Labour supporters with his approach to foreign policy, particularly UK support for Israel and the repressive measures taken against protesters – as well as calling for the Irish band Kneecap to be excluded from the line-up at the Glastonbury music festival. 

Starmer has also committed to spending £15 billion on upgrading the UK’s nuclear weapons while making simultaneously pushing cuts to welfare spending. 

All of these issues have highlighted Starmer’s general rightward shift since assuming the premiership, a continuation of his approach to leading Labour after taking over from Jeremy Corbyn, which was widely characterised as a “purge” of the left wing of the party.

Since winning the general election last year, when they defeated an abject Conservative Party, Labour has seen its popularity outstripped by Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK. 

Many have seen Labour’s lurch to the right as a reaction to that surge in support for the far right, but it seems that courting conservative voters is coming at the expense of Labour’s progressive base.

Labour may well end up appealing to neither next time Britons go to the polls.