THE furore over Keir Starmer’s announcement that he will refuse to scrap the two-child benefit cap has gone eerily quiet for now. 

While it represents yet another 180 degree pivot away from any semblance of decency for the Labour Party, it also serves as a reminder of the ongoing blurring of boundaries between Labour and the Tories.

Of course, the Labour front bench would insist otherwise, but their propensity to play Tory doppelganger is easily seen by even the most apolitical of people. 

Those who have been disenfranchised by the political process, in many instances people with very strong class instincts, recognise that both of the governing parties oppose the recent strike waves, refuse to defend refugees and workers, refuse to put an end to spiralling student debt and reject the hugely popular policy of nationalisation of utilities. This is to say nothing of the two-child benefit cap.

The cap, which prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017, penalises children for simply having more than one sibling. 

It was introduced by the former chancellor George Osborne in his austerity drive to “encourage” parents of larger families into work. 

Of course, it is rare to find working-class families in which the parents are not working, many often working multiple jobs each. 

More than half of those affected by the two-child cap are in work, revealing its primary function: to immiserate and push families into poverty. Just as obscene is the “rape clause” which accompanies it.

Even David Freud, parliamentary under secretary of state for welfare reform during the Cameron-Clegg coalition, has described the cap as “vicious,” while Starmer’s own shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, recently condemned it as “heinous.”

There seems to be no end to the depths that Labour will plumb in order to become the next servile administrators of the capitalist state. 

Not only is this latest foray into moral infirmity sickening, but also a strategic own goal. Almost 200,000 families living in Labour-run councils are affected by the cap, recent analysis has revealed, with additional government data showing that the four UK councils with the largest number of families where at least one child does not receive financial support due to the cap are Labour-run councils.

Even Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford has mustered a weak defence of Starmer. In an exclusive two-part interview Mr Drakeford gave to the Morning Star, he said that “it’s almost fashionable to write off the Starmer government before it’s even been elected” and that he hears “lots of people” say “how let down they are by a Starmer government that we haven’t even got.” 

An incredible thing to say from a self-styled socialist. Frankly, if child poverty is a Starmer policy, the Labour party doesn’t deserve power. 

The First Minister went on to say the following: “Every election we lose we let everybody down who looks to a Labour government to defend their interests.” 

Whose interests are these? Chief executives and City donors? Property tycoons and the moneyed few? Despite the fact that the Labour Welsh government said in June that the policy was “having such a devastating impact on families,” its willingness to challenge Starmer is hampered by its commitment to a union in which they feature as the trusty sidekick to a political and ideological chameleon.

The First Minister’s comments are all the more disheartening in light of government’s recent refusal to not find the money to feed vulnerable children on free school meals over the course of the summer, forcing some already stretched local authorities to find it themselves, and a damning new report by Loughborough University commissioned for the Wales Child Poverty Eradication Network. 

This report found that almost 28 per cent of children are living in poverty after housing costs, rising to 80 per cent of children living in poverty in Welsh working households before housing costs — the second highest in the UK behind the south-east of England.

In Britain, child poverty is now a bipartisan issue, and the fight we have on our hands to forge alternatives beyond this contemptible Westminster duopoly is urgent.

The excuse offered is always the same: “There just, frankly, is no money left,” as shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell recently put it.  

Yet another tired version of economics based upon the household analogy and a sorely mistaken iron devotion to fiscal discipline that results in the punishment of only the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

No child has any control over the number of siblings they have, or the level of wealth/poverty into which they are born. People must seriously think twice before placing their faith in a party that would punish children on this basis.

The End Child Poverty Coalition has shown that 25 per cent of children in the UK live in families that have been made at least £3,000 poorer as a direct result of the policy. Abolishing it would lift a quarter of a million children out of poverty and a further 850,000 out of extreme poverty. 19,000 families are affected by the policy in Wales.    

Poverty is a political choice — children do not choose to grow up in it, but governments can make the necessary choices to ensure it never happens.

The disillusionment that Starmer’s refusal to make those choices has inculcated will spread further throughout the electorate. He has made it abundantly clear who he represents — Labour voters in Wales should listen and, in Starmer fashion, U-turn on a party that would readily perpetuate such misery.

Luke Fletcher is a member of the Senedd for the South Wales West region.