Labour Rebels

• PM Starmer has removed the whip from four of his MPs and demoted three others.
• Whilst not purely a result of their vote on the welfare rebellion but rather more general intransigence, or as one source told The Times “persistent knobheadery”, it is instructive to look at where they rank on our Welfare Rebellion ratings so that we can see if other MPs are similarly at risk.
• If we plot this against our more general Starmer Ratings we can identify a group who are likely rebels and anti Starmer. They are located in the bottom left quadrant of this scatterplot:

• The black dots represent the seven MPs who have been disciplined.
• There are 59 other MPs in the same quadrant.
• The working majority of the government is now 157, meaning 79 votes against the government could prevent the passage of legislation.
• This is too close to comfort for a government wrestling with such a binding fiscal constraint.
• It will be a fractious path towards the Budget. 

++ With thanks to Tom Berey and the team for their hard work ++