CONGRATULATIONS on your first year as Prime Minister, Sir Keir, it’s quite something to have won a landslide over the most corrupt and incompetent government in modern history, and think “hold my beer.”

This week, thousands of us allowed ourselves the slightest hope that his plans to toss a quarter of a million human beings into poverty may just have a chance of falling apart.

Over 130 Labour MPs had decided to rebel, either because they had seen the polling, found a backbone, or through principle. “Who cares?” I thought, if a group can be cobbled together, we have a chance.

Watching that chance melt away was agonising. The mover of the amendment, Hillier, backed off having been offered the chance to merely impoverish people who claim support in the future and not those already in the system. What a victory that was.

At the news, I’m sure disability rights groups throughout the country began gathering the rose petals to be scattered before her on her triumphant cavalcade around the country during the summer recess. 

Strangely, that didn’t seem enough for some MPs, and the government had to offer up another concession, this time to only move people onto the new system after they had been reassessed, and to offer a review of PIP.

Classic stuff. The first “concession” is even worse than the initial offer, potentially putting everyone on PIP in scope to be cut, and the second would have made Sir Humphrey blush.

Michael Foot once described a Royal Commission as a “broody hen sitting on a china egg,” which, like most government reviews, is the general intention. The consistent exception to that rule is, of course, in defence reviews, which, with depressing regularity, diagnose wild profligacy on the part of the ministry chiefs and the arms manufacturers they will one day retire to the boards of, and just as regularly prescribe a stiff dose of Treasury bills.

Odd that for all the waste that we’re told blights our welfare system, this rule never seems to apply. Perhaps people who claim welfare support ought to form boards and offer retired ministers and senior officials lucrative sinecures.

A genuine review on the future of our welfare system would, of course, be welcome. That foodbanks exist should be enough to tell us that decades of effort from successive governments to convince us the state can’t do any good, that we’re on our own, and drive us into the arms of the private sector for succour, has worked.

Some will argue that this review is a case of the government kicking the issue into the long grass, but I’m afraid to say it’s a great deal worse. The government was in a hole, and in defiance of Healey’s dictum, they continued to dig. Like the worst Wile E Coyote cartoon ever imagined, however, they climbed out, placed a sign atop saying “co-production here,” and pulled up the ladder when it was full of useful idiots.

Sadly, most of the early rebels climbed in. Scores of MPs now sit down there, shadows all pointed in the same direction, blinking up at faceless, silhouetted ministers, unable to see their lips move even as they call the shots.

I have about as much sympathy for them as the government ministers who stand ready with the shovels do, but their witlessness isn’t their tragedy, it’s ours.

Actual support for Sir Keir’s plans to kill the vulnerable — because that’s what happens — is almost non-existent in the Labour Party membership, as far as I can see. Loyalist defences occasionally offered amount to the system being a mess, and that as one of the richest societies on the planet, we somehow cannot afford people being able to feed themselves. The former is self-evidently correct, the latter is either the product of sheer ignorance or sociopathy — take your pick.

On this basis, the rebels are only preparing the ground for a future right-wing government to carry out the reform, they told me.

One took this a step further, comparing the proposals to starve kids to Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife debacle. The argument goes that because her attempts to curb trade union power as a Labour minister were torpedoed by her colleagues, those colleagues made the Tories’ future anti-trade union rampage possible.

I’ve heard that theory many times before, not least in interviews given by Castle herself. Maybe it offered her comfort as the years rolled away, but it doesn’t make it any more true.

What may feel like an interesting little thought experiment atop the ivory tower with past, present, and future laid out in perfect panorama, is in fact being argued from the bottom of that well — a tragic, valedictory, cry to the man with the ladder.

It would be churlish not to accept that there are parallels, all the same. Not because I think a future Tory or Reform government might seek to dismantle what’s left of the welfare state — that’s priced-in, that’s what they do and they are proud to do it. 

The simple fact of the matter is that they will seek to do that whether a Labour government chooses to kick the vulnerable or offer the hand of support and solidarity. 

No, it wasn’t the defeat of In Place of Strife that paved the way for Thatcher’s attacks on organised labour, it was the very fact that it had been tabled at all, offering opponents the opportunity to point to it and say “even their own want to rein unions in.” 

And so it is with our beleaguered welfare system, George Osborne’s “strivers and skivers” mantra reborn with Wes Streeting’s Labour’s claim, “1,000 a day” are signing up for PIP, followed by the usual incoherent ramble about sustainability.

Government and opposition united in calling us lazy ne’er-do-wells. Thousands don’t really need help to live, help to get adaptations, or social services to support them, you see. Instead, we should all have friends like Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh, who can lend them £1.2 million to buy her terminally ill sister a home with a downstairs loo. 

Presumably, that was the thought process as she trotted down the lobby to vote through the cuts for the less well-connected this week.

I hesitate to pick on one person though, because the variety of cognitive dissonance on display in the debate was truly world-class. A particular highlight was watching my own MP tell Jeremy Corbyn that by voting against a Bill to slash benefit entitlements, he was denying other payments offered in the Bill.

Whatever gets you through the night, I suppose.

Maybe choosing to outlaw Palestine Action — which awkwardly points out the government is complicit in a genocide — helps them get to sleep too, though its crowning achievement will be paving the way for the far right to ban whoever they fancy in future as “terrorists.”

In a joyous coincidence, the move was marked by the birth of a new direct action group calling itself “Yvette Cooper,” goading the Home Secretary into proscribing herself.

After all, she did once stand up in Parliament to praise those who once engaged in action, including blowing up a Prime Minister’s residence to win the right to vote.

It’s a beautiful subversion, but like all the best, it points to a truth. If terrorism is the use of fear to achieve a political aim, ask yourself who is really being terrorised in this country and why. Forever, working people, the sick, and the elderly, have had fear beaten into them in the name of profit.

Political leaders choosing complicity may convince themselves that their punches are better than others, but don’t get caught up in their delusion. The point is not to go with the flow. The point, as we must teach our political class, is to change it.