I’ll be there for you: After his welfare revolt bruising, Starmer should call his friend Albanese

London: Anthony Albanese learned the hard way that saving money on disability support was a political nightmare. Now the prime minister’s friend and counterpart in Britain, Keir Starmer, has just learned an even tougher lesson.

Starmer has suffered a serious blow to his authority from rebel Labour MPs, who forced him to retreat on welfare savings meant to save more than £5 billion, or about $10.5 billion.

Feeling the heat: Keir Starmer has only been in office for a year but already appears embattled.Credit: Getty Images

He survived a storm in parliament to pass a draft law with some of the changes, but only after throwing most of the savings overboard.

Starmer, who marked his first year in power only days ago, now has a gap in his budget that seems to be worth about £4.5 billion, although the rapid pace of the vote left some of his own team confused.

“I am not sure that all colleagues understood what they voted for,” one Labour MP, Paula Barker, told the BBC after the vote.

Albanese will know exactly what Starmer is dealing with – and so will Bill Shorten, the former government services minister who made tough calls over two years to slow the growth of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Could Anthony Albanese offer sage words and help Starmer get his groove back?Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Shorten got there in the end, but only after months of concern from Labor caucus members and some hard politics with state premiers about where to find the savings. The Greens were strongly against, and the Liberals and Nationals played games to drag out the vote – before most of them agreed to the overhaul last year. Labor did not split.

Starmer got there in the end, but with far greater wounds.

He risked losing more than 120 of his own MPs on the issue last week, before making a hurried retreat.

In the final vote on Tuesday afternoon in London – early on Wednesday in Australia – he reduced the rebel group to 49 MPs who voted against his plan.

Starmer also had to deal with not one but two tricky oppositions. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch voted against the welfare bill and then complained that it did not save any money.

Reform leader Nigel Farage voted against and then said Labour was bankrupting Britain.

The House of Commons voted by 335 to 260 to approve the bill. It was a narrow win for Starmer, considering he won the election a year ago in a landslide. No wonder some call it the “loveless landslide”.

While the two welfare systems are vastly different, the politics were the same. The Australian and British experiences both show the challenges governments face today in enacting change.

Shorten moved slowly and cast his reform as a long-term overhaul that would reduce the spending growth of the NDIS from 14 to 8 per cent a year. Few other government programs grow at 8 per cent. It took most of the last term for the changes to be drafted and passed.

Faster, not better

Starmer moved more quickly with a very detailed plan that encountered immense resistance. This haste was for nothing because he and Pensions Minister Liz Kendall will not see the changes they originally drafted. Nobody will ever know if they could have prevailed with a slower and more careful change.

Now, the British leader looks diminished, and the Labour MPs look rattled.

Starmer has made a series of retreats and backflips in recent months. The government tried to cut winter heating subsidies for pensioners, and then backtracked.

The prime minister held out for months against holding an inquiry into grooming gangs that preyed on girls and young women – a national scandal – before relenting in June.

Labour insiders admit that Starmer lacks the charisma of proven winners of the past, such as former prime minister Tony Blair. The media is now full of forecasts of Starmer’s possible fall from power.

A YouGov poll released last week suggested the prime minister could lose his majority at the next election. It also found that Farage and his Reform Party could soar from five seats in the current parliament to 271 in the next. That is not a misprint.

But the next UK election is not due until August 2029. The British media is full of commentary that assumes Starmer is finished before he has really begun. In the bifurcated media, he is being assailed from the left for trying to scale back spending and attacked from the right for spending too much.

Sound familiar? Albanese spent all of last year being told he was toast because his opponent was ahead in the polls. This phony contest evaporated when voters were faced with a hard choice between two options at a real election.

Will Starmer find a similar way to turn the tables on his opponents? He is in a serious slump, but he has four years to lift himself out. If he is looking for lessons, he could do worse than calling his friend in Canberra.

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