Scottish Labor leader chides Keir Starmer over ‘appalling’ two-child benefit cap – News Block

He said the party “recognizes” that any new Labor government “will inherit economic carnage” but added: “We will continue to press any incoming UK Labor government to move as quickly as possible within our fiscal rules to remove this egregious “. policy.”

“I fully accept that we have to create economic stability. I fully accept that we have to get growth back in our economy. But that growth then has to be used to alleviate poverty and create opportunity. And one way we can do that is by removing the two-child limit and reforming universal credit,” he said.

Meanwhile, Stephen Flynn, the leader of the SNP in Westminster, has also strongly criticized the two-child benefit cap, calling it an “absolutely disgraceful policy”.

He said sky news The policy “seeks to limit the resource that low-income families can receive from the government according to the number of children they have,” and that is attached to a clause that says that a woman who has been raped has to prove it to obtain benefits

“What kind of society are we living in where that is the case?” he added.

Flynn said he finds it “deeply unfortunate that the Labor Party fully agrees with the Conservatives on this.”

He criticized Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer, saying he “has signaled that he doesn’t believe in change when it comes to austerity measures, and that is very, very worrying.”

“Going into a general election campaign when the public is looking for real change, this is not going to be enough,” he said.

In 2020, Labor MP Angela Rayner tweeted that “the obscene and inhumane two-child limit must go away”, linking to research that said it was a key factor contributing to women’s decisions to abort.

Labor MP Meg Hillier also told the BBC’s Westminster Hour yesterday: “Well, I was never comfortable with the child benefit cap coming in… personally, I would be pushing for it to be lifted.”

The labor chairman of the work and pensions committee, Stephen Timms, told the Yo newspaper that “it only makes sense if you think families shouldn’t have more than two children… as time goes on, the case for the two-child limit will become harder and harder to make.”

The decision to maintain the policy also comes as a major academic study on the effects of the two-child limit concluded that the policy has had a “poverty-producing” impact over the past six years.

The research, published Monday morning by academics from the Universities of York, Oxford and LSE, concluded that the two-child limit did not have a positive incentive effect on employment, nor did it reduce fertility among older families. poor.

Yesterday, the shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, insisted that the two-child benefit cap be maintained to ensure fiscal restraint.

She said sky news: “We have been very clear. We can only finance it… We have to be clear about what we can finance and that is why Keir Starmer has laid out the position. Because we have to make sure that whatever policy we propose, anything we want to change, anything we don’t like the Tories have done, we still have to say how we would fund it.”