THAT just three members of the shadow cabinet urged the party to vote against the government’s pernicious welfare Bill shows how far the rot in Labour has spread.

Misleading guff from Harriet Harman and her sole cheerleader among Labour’s leadership candidates, the neoliberal Liz Kendall, says Labour “cannot afford” to “campaign against the public” by opposing Tory plans to lower the arbitrary benefit cap to £20,000 (£23,000 in Londonl) and to restrict child benefit to the first two children. They are wrong. 

Labour cannot afford another five years of feeble, half-hearted “opposition,” accepting the Tories’ fairy tale about runaway welfare spending and letting its supporters down again and again.

Kendall says we must listen to the verdict of the electorate, who rejected Labour in May.

Fair enough. The Labour Party the voters turned away from was one which supported the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition when they first introduced the welfare cap in 2012.

It was a Labour Party committed to cutting social security budgets and which repeatedly acquiesced in George Osborne’s attacks on the most vulnerable, competing to be seen as tough on people unfortunate enough to be out of a job, disabled or unwell.

In short, a Labour Party that had forgotten what it was founded for — to fight for the rights of the working class.

Labour should oppose lowering the welfare cap for the simple reason that it is unfair. 

However much the gutter press paint pictures of irresponsible loafers living it large on benefits, social security payments are rarely enough to live on. 

The Tory refusal to introduce rent controls on rapacious landlords or rein in the profiteering energy companies and the low pay, insecure and zero-hours contract jobs explosion the Cameron governments have indulged are the only reason some benefit bills are high, and the payments made end up in the pockets of rentiers rather than the families who claim them.

The welfare cap pays no attention to family size, and therefore punishes “surplus” children simply for having been born.

But limiting child benefit to two children only is an even more blatant announcement that the children of the poor do not matter.

Iain Duncan Smith’s sanctimonious rubbish about families making sure they do not have more children than they can afford plays on a very old trope, the sinister Malthusian conceit that the poor will recklessly multiply and must be starved in order to contain their numbers.

It is not Labour’s job to help the Tories by echoing this slander against the British people. 

If cutting the welfare budget is popular, it is entirely because the Conservatives have not been challenged on the litany of lies they tell on the subject.

Research done by the TUC in 2012 exposed the extent to which Establishment myths have entered the popular consciousness.

It found that on average people believed 41 per cent of welfare spending went to the unemployed, when the true figure was 3 per cent.

They thought around half those claiming jobseeker’s allowance did so for more than a year, when actually only one in 10 did.

People thought 27 per cent was claimed fraudulently, when it was 0.7 per cent. And they consistently overestimated the amount of money people on benefits are actually paid.

Labour should be challenging this dangerous set of misconceptions, which are allowing the Conservatives to wage an all-out war on vulnerable children.

Failing to do so impresses no-one, betrays those people looking to the party to fight their corner and, by surrendering the field to Tory propaganda, guarantees electoral oblivion.