ANDY BURNHAM is correct to say that Labour is “crying out for leadership” after Monday night’s shambles over the government’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Burnham claims credit for persuading interim leader Harriet Harman to table a “reasoned amendment” to the Bill before falling in line with her abstention call.

He insists that, were he party leader, he would have opposed the Bill outright.

So that’s clear then. The Bill is a vile attack on working people dependent on state benefits to exist because of greedy private landlords and stingy employers, but party discipline dictates acceptance of Harman’s abject advice to abstain.

Diplomatic tip-toeing around clear class issues might make sense in Westminster’s rarefied atmosphere, but from further afield it smacks of self-motivated opportunism.

Shadow minister Stephen Timms accused some of Labour’s new parliamentary intake of having undermined party unity.

If unity can only be achieved through failing to challenge anti-working-class draft legislation, what use is the party or its unity?

Leadership apologists claim that Labour should be cautious about falling into a “trap” set by George Osborne that would expose Labour as faint-hearted over cutting welfare spending to demonstrate fiscal discipline.

This approach, it follows, demands acceptance of an overall benefit cap and restrictions on in-work benefits, especially for families dependent on low-paid employment who indulge themselves by having more than two children.

Harman gave the clearest explanation of this position when she told Andrew Neil that Labour wouldn’t oppose the Bill because voters had backed the Tories at the general election.

“The voters didn’t trust us on the economy and benefits,” she pontificated.

Harman and her New Labour colleagues are mesmerised by most voters regarding claimants as scroungers and feeling angry that their wages are often lower than benefits.

It would be amazing if that were not the case given the concerted chorus of condemnation orchestrated by the main parliamentary parties and the capitalist media.

There used to be majority public support for stringing up murderers and other criminals, but principled politicians argued against such vengeful and self-defeating measures and have changed dominant opinion.

Jeremy Corbyn couches his refusal to row in with the benefits cap zealots in a determination to tackle the twin scourges of low pay and high rents, thus obviating the necessity for in-work benefits.

Until action is taken to overcome these injustices, he is not prepared to treat third-born children as less deserving than their older siblings.

Labour’s Achilles’ Heel is that it fails to embrace a strategy to transfer wealth and power from rich to poor, so it is left to parrot Tory mantras about strivers, choice, aspiration and benefit caps.

Harman insists that her “bash benefits” trope stems from what she was told in her pink bus or on the doorstep.

She would admit, if honest, that for every elector rejecting Labour because of its supposed lack of fiscal discipline, a dozen declared: “You’re all the bloody same.”

Too many Labour parliamentary leaders are timid of challenging the Tories’ transparent class war approach for fear of isolation through associating themselves with a real alternative.

Labour’s 48 principled MPs found themselves in the lobby with Scottish and Welsh nationalists, Liberal Democrats and members of the Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party, Social Democratic & Labour Party and the Green Party, who all gave a resounding No to Osborne’s Bill. Some isolation.

New Labour timidity serves to emphasise the positive qualitative difference offered by Corbyn in the leadership poll.