FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon has insisted the SNP are the “real opposition” in Westminster after Labour abstained from voting against Tory welfare cuts and George Osborne’s budget.

Launching her party’s campaign for the Glasgow City Council by-election, the SNP leader was scathing of Labour’s decision to abstain on the Welfare Bill on Monday night in the Commons.

Only 48 Labour MPs voted against the bill which introduces a benefits cap and restricts tax credits to a claimant’s first two children. A total of 184 Labour MPs abstained.

“If Labour had voted with the SNP against George Osborne’s assault on those on low incomes, then the Tories could have been beaten last night,” the first minister said.

“Instead Labour sat on their hands. If Labour is not about standing up for the vulnerable, trying to lift people out of poverty and help those who are working hard to make ends meet, then what on earth is Labour for?”

Sturgeon then went on to say it was becoming clear Labour had “lost any sense of purpose”.

“It really does beg a fundamental question, if Labour is not about opposing a Tory government that is waging an ideological assault not on skivers who don’t want to work, but on people who are working hard on low incomes, if Labour is not about opposing that, what is Labour for?” she said.

“Last night just proves that Labour has lost any sense of purpose and it will be the SNP who increasingly will form the real opposition in the House of Commons.”

Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray said he and his colleagues who had abstained had actually voted for a Labour amendment “not to give the bill a second reading”.

After that amendment failed Labour decided not to vote against the bill as a whole because there were policies, such as the plans to create three million apprenticeships, and cuts to council and housing association rents that his party agreed with.

Murray added: “Immediately after the vote last night, we tabled a raft of significant amendments for the next stage which would remove the worst parts and keep in place the provisions we agree with, such as those on apprenticeships.”

He stressed: “Some people are claiming that the bill would have been defeated last night if everyone voted against. This is not only wrong to claim, but those who are claiming it know it to be wrong.

“You can’t defeat a government with an absolute majority on a major piece of their legislative programme. To suggest otherwise is wrong.

“Those who should know better taking to social media to perpetuate this myth are either peddling untruths or they simply do not understand the parliamentary process.”

That Labour didn’t even try to defeat the government was “unforgivable” according to SNP MP Hannah Bardell.

“Given that the Tories only mustered 308 votes for this miserable and hard-hearted bill, a united opposition had the chance to defeat it – but Labour failed even to try. That will haunt Labour through to next year’s Scottish Parliament election and far beyond,” she said.

Last night, after Labour failed to turn up to the vote on the Finance Bill, members of the SNP took over the opposition frontbench and argued that voters who did not back the Tories deserved better than Labour.

Following the vote, Angus MacNeil raised a point of order, asking the Speaker if the furniture in the Chamber could not be rearranged so the “actual opposition sits in the right place”.

Intervening during the debate former first minister Alex Salmond asked Shadow Treasury Minister Barbara Keeley why Labour were abstaining.

“What is it about this Budget, this extraordinary regressive Budget makes it such that the Labour Party don’t want to support an opposition to it?” he said.

Keeley replied: “The situation that we find ourselves in now is that much of this is split, it isn’t all in this bill or in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, and some of it will come forward as delegated legalisation and there will be plenty of opportunities to bring forward the arguments you have put.

“But opposing at this point isn’t the only thing we can do as an Opposition.”

The SNP’s Tommy Sheppard, a former deputy general secretary of Scottish Labour, said: “I really would urge and plead with members on the Labour benches – the country needs better than this, the people who didn’t vote for the Conservative Party – 63 per cent of them – expect them to be opposed in this chamber.

“And even if there’s one or two things in this bill which you find that you agree with, surely the overall rubric and intent of this bill is to penalise people in this society who you should be standing up for, and I do appeal to you to reconsider your position on this and to come with us in the lobbies tonight as we vote against this bill at its second reading.”

The debate on the budget finished early due to a lack of speakers on the Labour benches.

Tory Treasury Minister Damian Hinds mocked the splits in the Labour Party, claiming many Opposition MPs had not spoken in the debate to avoid showing disunity.

The Bill will return before the Commons in the Autumn for its committee stage.









