Flogging a live horse

Ben Wildsmith

I only watched a few seconds of the video showing Olympian dressage star Charlotte Dujardin whipping a horse 24 times.

I’m weak, I suppose, such things upset me for so long after viewing them that I just can’t cope with it. She’s ruined, of course. Bracketed forever with that woman who threw a cat in a bin, Dujardin is on the national shit-list: someone over whom we can all feel morally superior.

Morality, though, is quicksand in our godless, atomised world. There is no authoritative clergy to govern our behaviour now, and praise-be for that. Instead, we make our own rules, within the law, until the arc beam of social media illuminates our doings for judgement before the mob.

Last night in the Commons, an amendment to the King’s Speech, which would have lifted the two-child cap on benefits, was defeated by 363 votes to 103. Only seven Labour MPs voted for the measure, and all were immediately suspended from the party.

None of the seven represents a Welsh constituency. The measure currently affects 1.6 million children.

So, those are the plain facts.

Torsten Bell

Here’s Swansea West’s new MP, Torsten Bell, writing 12 weeks ago, about the urgency of scrapping the cap.

‘The limit has to go. The costs are real (£2.5bn a year), but small compared to the damage. Abolition would lift half a million children out of poverty.’

His article in April was titled, ‘It’s immoral to push children into poverty, but that’s what the benefits cap does…’

Now, I didn’t come down the Taff on a bubble and neither did you. Compromise is a necessary part of politics, and nobody wants a legislature where intransigence prevents reasoned progress.

Here, though, at the outset of this government’s term, we seem to be in a place where an MP considered so integral to Labour’s mission that he was imposed on a constituency about which he knew next to nothing, is required to vote against an explicitly moral position that expressed less than 12 weeks ago.

Having escaped a 14-year abusive relationship with the Tories, what have we ended up with on the rebound?

Nobody expected any wild redistribution of wealth under this government. Its adoption of the existing fiscal rules signalled that bold measures were never on the cards. As Bell makes clear, though, the misery-to-cost ratio of this issue is stark. For context, the UK is sending £2.5 billion to Ukraine next year.

Priorities

People do have a right to expect a change in priorities from an incoming government, alongside a change of tone. The refusal to fund this measure is all about the latter. Sir Keir ‘isn’t afraid of the big decisions’, ‘the sums must add up’, etc. etc. All well and good, but not of a piece with refusing to reform Capital Gains Tax, is it?

I’m forgetting, of course, that Sir Keir is playing 4D chess, as is his habit. What a fool I will appear when, having done ‘the sums’, Rachel Reeves announces the repeal of the cap in her first budget.

Sensibilists across the UK will triumphantly crow at the lesser minds who were so naïve as to object to the government’s initial caution. Analysts will marvel at Sir Keir’s efficiency in ejecting dissenting voices from his swollen parliamentary ranks when he was going to scrap the measure all along.

Between now and then, though, little bellies will rumble across the UK for a few months more. Not as loudly as the crack of a whip on a horse’s thigh, but just as plaintively for some of us.