Thursday, January 15, 2026
Is the latest u-turn the final straw for Labour MPs?
The paper says that the government has reversed course on policy issues at least 11 times so far, including by raising the inheritance tax relief threshold for farmers after months of protest and scrapping a raft of benefits cuts under the threat of a backbench revolt.
They add that the latest decision comes amid growing concern over the direction of Sir Keir’s beleaguered Labour government in the face of disastrous approval ratings, with the prime minister facing mounting questions about his position:
Sir Keir last year said Labour would introduce a digital ID system that would be voluntary in most cases but mandatory for right-to-work checks. However, these plans were thrown into confusion on Tuesday night after it emerged that ministers were looking at rowing back on the compulsory element, allowing other digital documents to be used for right-to-work checks.
The U-turn, which has sparked a fresh wave of criticism from Labour backbenchers who believe the prime minister’s position is at risk, came just hours after health secretary Wes Streeting told a conference in London that the government should aim to “get it right first time”.
One despairing minister told The Independent: “Nobody knows what is going to happen next or what we are even doing.”
A senior Labour backbencher added: “It just feels like the government is in freefall at the moment. It is a complete shambles. It feels like this government is just holding on until May, and hoping that they can get through the moment of danger and things somehow turn around.”
Another MP said: “I keep being told to wait until the local elections in May, but increasingly I wonder what the point of that is.”
“It’s quite obvious No 10 have totally lost touch with reality,” another MP said of the U-turn. “One might have thought they were learning on the job. But their decision-making and policy development strategy is going from really bad to alarmingly inadequate.”
The MP expressed their belief that the prime minister will “fall on his sword” after what is expected to be a disastrous result for Labour at the local elections.
“A leadership contest has been on the cards for some time now. It’s widely accepted within the [parliamentary Labour Party] now. However, it’s a political game of chess – who makes the next move.”
Meanwhile, there has been vocal criticism of the attempt to revive Sir Tony Blair’s failed mandatory ID policy.
Norwich South MP Clive Lewis said: “This is the sort of thing a government tries to do at the height of its powers, not when it is struggling in the polls. If people trusted it on foreign policy and the economy, then it might have been able to say, ‘We are doing this in your best interests.’
“But these were badly designed plans in the first place. An unnecessary fight. And of course, it was always going to trigger the libertarian right.”
It came after former Labour home secretary David Blunkett fiercely criticised the U-turn, arguing that the government had been forced to abandon the scheme because it had failed to convince people of why it was a good idea after announcing it last year.
The u-turn is, of course, welcome, but one has to ask why it was proposed in the first place when there was no support for it, and how much money has been wasted on it already?
I think it is also the case that the proposal as it now stands is not even worth the paper it is written on and should be abandoned altogether before more public money is wasted,
