Richard Burgon

Sometimes politics seems complicated. Sometimes the passage of a Bill through Parliament, especially with antics and shenanigans like those we saw last week, may confuse people. But actually, the issue before all of us when we vote tonight is very simple. Today, Wednesday 9 July 2025, are Labour MPs going to vote through cuts to universal credit that will take £2 billion from 750,000 sick and disabled people who are already on low incomes—people who will have been judged not fit to work? Will we put our name to a Bill that will, on average, take £3,000 off every single one of those 750,000 people? I think that if we had not had the complications with the Bill the week before, Labour MPs would find it very easy. They would see a Bill that asks us to take billions of pounds from low-income people in our constituencies across the country and find it very easy to vote no. I ask my friends on the Labour Benches to cast their minds back to when they were first selected and first elected. None of us got into politics to take £3,000 a year off low-income people who are sick and disabled and on universal credit. It has been said that what is morally wrong can never be politically right. People outside this Chamber see the issue before us very clearly indeed. The Bill is being railroaded through, disabled people’s voices are being excluded, and when colleagues say, “Don’t listen to those who say we shouldn’t press on,” that means, “Don’t listen to disabled people.” I think we should listen to disabled people, and not one disabled people’s organisation supports the changes. The reason the Bill is being rushed through a Committee of the whole House, rather than a Committee where disabled people and their organisations—people with lived experience—could talk to the MPs on the Committee, is because of a politically imposed artificial deadline that is there to save face. I welcome the changes made last week as a result of pressure from disabled people and Back-Bench MPs, but we are voting tonight on taking money off people on low incomes. We are voting tonight on whether we think, after saying last week that it was wrong to have a two-tier PIP system, that it is right to have a two-tier universal credit system. The reality is that people will remember how we vote tonight. It has been said before, but I will say it again: some votes define us. They define us as politicians and they define how we view our time in Parliament. Disabled people who come to see us in our constituency surgeries will not understand if we, as Labour people, vote for this cut to universal credit tonight or abstain. We will live with that vote in every single constituency surgery between now and the next general election. Let us take a step back and imagine that we did not have a Whip system in this House. Of course, all of us agree on 99% of things all the time. That is the reality, but if this were not a whipped vote, I think the vast majority of Labour MPs would vote with their conscience and with their disabled constituents against cutting universal credit. All the rest is sophistry. We will live with this vote. It is often said that the longer the statement on Twitter from an MP after a vote, the worse the decision they must have made. You start at the first sentence and by the time you get to the end, the constituents are thinking, “Did they? Did they really vote for that after all they said on the TV, in their tweets and in the Chamber?” We are Labour people. This is not a left and right issue in the Labour party; this is a right and wrong issue. I say this: any Labour MP who votes against these cuts to low-income people on universal credit tonight will sleep soundly, knowing that they did all they could, on £90,000-odd a year, to stand up for their disabled constituents. That is what we got into politics to do. We should not plough ahead. We should vote this out.