By Andrew MacAskill
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s opposition Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer on Tuesday defended his pledge to keep a controversial limit on welfare support payments for children if his party wins a general election expected next year.
Starmer, whose party enjoys a double-digit lead over the Conservatives in opinion polls, is trying to convince voters that Labour would not be reckless with government money.
“We keep saying collectively as a party we have to take decisions and in the abstract everyone says, yes, that is right,” Starmer told an event in London.
“But then we get a tough decision … and they say ‘well I don’t like that, can’t we just not make that one’.”
Starmer at the weekend said he would not change a policy introduced in 2017 by the governing Conservative Party that means families only receive some types of benefit payments for the first two children in a family.
The Conservatives have accused Labour of being reckless with public money and Starmer’s comments are seen as an attempt to avoid that criticism.
But the announcement angered politicians in his own party who said the policy was unfair, cruel, and a driver of child poverty.
The charity Child Poverty Action Group estimates 1.5 million children live in families affected by the policy and said removing the limit would immediately lift 250,000 children out of poverty.
Starmer, at the event in London organised by former prime minister Tony Blair, said the economic turmoil during last year’s brief premiership of Liz Truss underlined the need for careful spending.
Truss was forced to resigned after six weeks as prime minister after announcing a series of unfunded tax cuts that shattered Britain’s reputation for financial stability.
“If you want proof that unfunded commitments cause damage, which is then visited on working people, then you have a living example of that. So it is a fundamental,” Starmer said.
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; editing by William James)
