by Sunny Hundal

Yesterday, while Labour MP Liam Byrne was making speeches in Parliament rejecting the government’s 1% cap bill, the media was highlighting his hypocrisy.

Kiran Stacey at the Financial Times collected his quotes (though the Daily Mail were doing this too).

It is certainly true that the terms [‘strivers’ and ‘shirkers’] are not new: they have been used several times over the last two years by Liam Byrne – the same Liam Byrne who criticised the tone of the debate today.

He goes on to highlight extracts from Liam Byrne’s speeches of the past.

1. In 2011, Byrne told Labour conference: “Many people on the doorstep at the last election felt that too often we were for shirkers not workers.”

2. He told LSE a year ago: “Labour is the party of hard workers not free-riders. The clue is in the name. We are the Labour party. The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.”

3. An ally of Liam Byrne told the Mail on Sunday in Dec 2011: “Decent Labour voters see their neighbours lie about all day and get benefits while they are working their socks off, and say, ‘Why should I vote Labour when they let this happen?'”

It’s great that many Labour MPs are stridently rejecting this dangerous and counter-productive narrative, perhaps finally recognising it just reinforces Tory narratives with the electorate.

We know from media reports that Ed Miliband hasn’t been happy with Byrne’s hard-line on welfare.

We can also recognise that Byrne himself has started to soften his rhetoric, especially on disability benefits (but is still constantly accused of not listening at all).

But as the lobby press highlighted yesterday, Liam Byrne is partly why this language has become so popularised, and is the wrong person to lead this charge.