Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, says party could only promise things it can afford as report says benefit caps cause ‘extreme hardship’
Supermarket bosses will meet Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, today after he pledged to hold “rip-off retailers” to account for charging motorists “sky high” prices for fuel. Kalyeena Makortoff has the story here.
In his Inside Politics briefing for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush says that, regardless of what Keir Starmer told Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, a Labour government would end up getting rid of the two-child benefits cap. Bush argues:
The Conservatives’ policy — which caps the amount a household can receive in benefits if they have no, or low, earnings — upsets the party’s social liberals, its Christian socialists, its feminists and its pro-welfare tendency . . . Essentially every part of the Labour party hates this policy, which is one reason why almost every major figure in the party is on the record calling the policy “immoral”, “heinous” or “social engineering” or some variation thereof.
The only question will be whether a change to the current cap is enforced on the leadership — perhaps by some equivalent of the bill currently working its way through parliament — or if the policy never gets that far.
