Corbyn can claim victory on tax credits but he still has much to learn

A win is a win. The tax credits row is a clear victory for the Labour opposition. Victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan. The clamour to claim credit for winning this fight will be deafening.

But the new Labour leadership deserves credit for pushing this issue. Robust internal pressure to take this issue on was important but so was their willingness to accept they do not have a monopoly on wisdom.

John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and team are long standing critics of tax credits. They regularly attack the £93bn of what they call “corporate welfare” which includes tax credits on the grounds that they “subsidise” low pay. Despite these misgivings they saw an open goal on tax credits and went for it. The first lesson they should therefore draw is that this lack of dogma is a necessary condition for a successful opposition.

Long-standing party staffers saw the strength of the attack on the tax credits cuts after the Chancellor’s post-election budget. This came largely from the female candidates for the Labour leadership, the Interim Leader Harriet Harman and Shadow Chancellor Chris Leslie. They felt that a key message coming out of Jeremy Corbyn’s party conference speech should be the need to defend tax credits. When I jokingly reminded them that the speeches had attacked “corporate welfare,” and by implication, tax credits one experienced ex-colleague said “don’t point that out, we’ll get in trouble”.

The leadership deserves credit for allowing themselves to be steered. Corbyn was encouraged to keep the pressure up at successive editions of Prime Minister’s Questions.

A second lesson they have been taught is to heed the advice of the existing party machine. In this case the long standing Lords Chief Whip Lord Bassam: taking the fight to Osborne and Cameron on the specifics of an unfair measure is not a retreat from the battle against “austerity” it is the most effective way to take it on. It was a constructive amendment dealing with a specific issue of money in people’s pockets that caused trouble for George Osborne.

This recognition that generalised protest is easy for the Tory leadership to dismiss must stick. Conservative Party Conference was boosted by the wrong-headed protests outside. I watched much of the coverage and had little idea what they were even about. The overall impression created was of aggressive name-calling in the streets and the Government responding in what they claimed was the national interest.

Which brings me to the final lesson we should take from this. The risk to tax credits was a central plank of the attack on the Tories in the May election. Labour told anyone who would listen that tax credits were the only way for George Osborne to make his numbers add up.

But nobody was listening. Labour was seen as weak in the face of the SNP, as anti-business, as having wider issues with spending. And the polls suggested there would be no majority Tory Government to cut their promised £12bn from welfare anyway.

George Osborne knew that Labour’s current woes made this even more the case and it led him to over-confidence: it is arguable that had anyone but Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership the tax credit cuts would have been softened weeks ago.

So, Corbyn and McDonnell must remember that the key to being a strong opposition is to be a strong alternative government. This requires a clear focus on reassuring the public on Labour’s weaknesses. And here there remains a niggle from the last fortnight.

Shadow Cabinet ministers were pressed last weekend as to whether they would reverse the tax credit cuts. Rightly they resisted un-funded spending commitments.

After all, where in five years’ time, would £4bn come from in a Labour manifesto? Are taper rates on benefits (the taper is the rate at which benefit is reduced to take account of earnings) few will understand be the most electorally powerful way to pledge to make people better off in 2020? These are all questions an opposition should consider before promising.

But on 18th October, presumably under internal pressure, the Shadow Chancellor slipped out an announcement that Labour would indeed reverse these cuts. Nobody noticed, except CCHQ one assumes, who will have filed it away for another day. The fifth lesson that the Shadow Chancellor will need to learn is how to say “no”.