McDonnell calls for challenge to Starmer

The suspended Labour veteran John McDonnell has called for a grassroots leadership challenge to the Labour government, warning that unless party members, unions and MPs "stand up and assert themselves to take back control of our party", then "we may not just lose a government, we could lose a party".

- Aletha Adu

The former shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn accused Keir Starmer's government of "callousness and political incompetence", criticising its hesitance in abolishing the two-child limit on benefits, and the "brutal launch of an attack on benefits of disabled people".

Writing for the Guardian five decades after joining Labour as a young trade unionist, McDonnell said the movement he had devoted his life to had "instigated a series of policies that fly like a knife to the heart of what we believed Labour above all else stood for when we joined.

"When in the first king's speech the Starmer leadership didn't just fail to address the major cause of child poverty, the two-child benefit cap, but demanded Labour MPs vote against its abolition, the first signs of the callousness and political incompetency of the decision-making of the new administration were put on display," he wrote.