Bridget Phillipson’s child poverty victory
In September 2017, Bridget Phillipson took to the pages of the New Statesman to burst the feel-good bubble that Labour occupied after that year’s election. That wasn’t a fashionable thing to do then: “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” had soundtracked the party’s summer, sometimes sung by the leader’s former foes.n
But in her 4,000-word essay, Phillipson sounded some unashamedly discordant notes. First, deploying the argument later made famous by Morgan McSweeney, she noted the inefficiency of Labour’s vote: the party had won just four more seats than when it lost in 2010. Second, she questioned whether the 2017 manifesto – then a quasi-sacred document – was as progressive as suggested.
“Our manifesto either left most of George Osborne’s benefit freeze intact, or hid an absence of funded plans to reverse those cuts behind a fudged commitment to reviewing them,” lamented Phillipson. “If we are serious about the redistribution of power, wealth and opportunity, we have to be serious about in-work poverty and the living standards of working people and their children. A Labour Party that is genuinely for the many and not the few should prioritise that above the immediate abolition of fees for university education.”
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It was the language of priorities – described by Nye Bevan as the “religion of socialism” – and it has guided Phillipson as Education Secretary. While raising tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,535 (and linking them to inflation), she has championed measures such as the expansion of free school meals to half a million more children and the abolition of the two-child benefit cap in the face of more sceptical cabinet colleagues (“I’ve had to fight tooth and nail,” Phillipson told me earlier this year).
For this, MPs, including those who backed her deputy leadership opponent Lucy Powell, give Phillipson credit. “This was not a done deal from the start, it required a lot of argument and Bridget making the case,” an ally says.
After being appointed co-chair of the Child Poverty Taskforce last year, Phillipson regarded it as untenable for Labour to go into the next election without a sea change in policy. The strategy published today, which extends childcare to more families on Universal Credit and imposes new limits on temporary accommodation, is the result: the Resolution Foundation forecasts that child poverty rates will now fall in 2026-27, the first reduction in nine years (outside of the pandemic), and that more than half a million children will be lifted out of poverty by 2029-30, the biggest reduction in a single parliament.
For Phillipson, who saw her mother pushed into poverty for want of childcare, this has always been a personal and a moral cause. “I saw lots of really brilliant people who were my friends not achieving all that they could because their families didn’t have much money and because crime was high. I felt a sense of fundamental unfairness,” she told me.
Confronted by a sceptical public – 59 per cent of who back the two-child cap – this is the argument that Phillipson will now make: that child poverty is both a moral injustice and a societal waste. If the state does not pay now, she will warn, it will pay later as worklessness and ill health proliferate.
It’s a cause that aligns Phillipson with the last Labour government, which reduced child poverty by 600,000, and which she has long championed (while remaining sceptical of Tony Blair’s later public service reforms).
At the start of this year, the Education Secretary appeared marginalised as her school reforms faced both internal and external resistance (with now-departed No 10 policy director Liz Lloyd among her opponents). But critically, as rumours of her imminent sacking became ubiquitous, she retained the backing of Keir Starmer. And while defeated for the deputy leadership, Phillipson can today reflect that on several other fronts she has won.
Labour’s Europe debate heats up
In Tuesday’s Morning Call I reported on increasing support inside government for a new customs union with the EU. So it’s notable that David Lammy has now added his voice to the debate. “You can see countries like Turkey with a customs union seemingly benefitting and seeing growth in their economy. That’s self-evident,” the Deputy Prime Minister told The News Agents podcast. While he emphasised “that is not currently our policy, that isn’t where we are”, Lammy’s comments are the warmest from any cabinet minister on the subject (Darren Jones has riposted that policy will be announced in parliament, not “on podcasts”).
An increasing number in Labour now believe it is inevitable that the party will change its Europe position before the next general election – and that if Keir Starmer, that ardent European, does not move first, then whoever follows him will.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: We can break the cycle of poverty]
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