16:07

Top of Esther McVey’s in-tray at the department for work and pensions should be the so-called ‘rape clause’, according to two campaigning Scottish women politicians.

The SNP’s Alison Thewlis has written to McVey regarding the cuts to child tax credits – which she has been fighting since they appeared in the 2015 budget – which limit the benefit to the first two children in a family and require women who have conceived a third or subsequent child as a result of rape to apply for an exemption. Thewliss said:

Esther McVey is now the fifth secretary of state for the DWP since I was elected in 2015, and the first woman in that time. I want to know from her whether she is comfortable in making a woman who has suffered the trauma of rape, domestic violence and coercive control go through the shame of proving her child was conceived as a result of that sexual abuse.

Former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has also written to McVey about what she describes as “one of the most abhorrent policies of a government in my adult lifetime”.



Noting their different political ideologies, Dugdale argues: