BBC Scotland today have:
With six children, a busy home, and barely a spare moment, Heather MacMichael’s life is hectic before she even begins to think about money. The 35‑year‑old from Dunfermline has learned to stretch every pound while raising her family on a tight benefits budget – more so under the Universal Credit two-child limit, which excludes support for most of her children. With that policy set to be scrapped on 6 April, Heather is preparing for a shift that could bring a welcome £1,200 extra a month into her household. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czre84d03veo
Who has been responsible for this ‘awful experiment’ for nearly two years now?
BBC Scotland tell you quickly:
The two-child limit was introduced by former Conservative chancellor George Osborne in 2017.
Indeed, but the Conservatives have been out of power since July 2024. Who kept it going?
12 paragraphs down we get:
Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced last November that her party did “not believe that the solution to a broken welfare system is to punish the most vulnerable children”, and scrapped the rule. So from Monday, third or subsequent children born after 6 April 2017 will receive Universal Credit and tax credits.
That was quick. Did anything happen in between?
Well this on 21 July 2024, the Chancellor said:
It costs more than £3bn a year. We were really clear during the election that we were not going to make spending commitments without being able to say where the money was going to come from. If we’re not able to say where the money is going to come from, we can’t promise to do it. That’s true when it comes to the two-child limit and anything else.” “Previous Labour governments have lifted kids out of poverty. It is what is in our DNA. We will do that, but I’m not willing to make unfunded commitments. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng572nnvwo
There was an SNP amendment to scrap the bill. Did Scottish Labour MPs support that?
None of the Scottish Labour MPs voted for scrapping the cap by supporting the SNP amendment. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c03l2843715o
Did Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar call for the PM to resign or for the Scottish Labour MPs to vote against the Chancellor?
No, neither but his get to say he the policy was ‘wrong’ umpteen times across the media operating in Scotland. He did call for Starmer to go but only when he thought it might save his skin.
What about that SNP? I can’t find them anywhere in this BBC Scotland report. Didn’t they do something?
Oh, yeh, there was this on 4 December 2025, a few weeks after the Chancellor:
SNP government vows to scrap two-child benefit cap – The Scottish government will scrap the “pernicious” two-child cap on benefits north of the border, Finance Secretary Shona Robison has vowed.
Wait, that was in a BBC Scotland report too. You’d think they’d remember that.
The letters SNP are not there once.
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I thought exactly this when I read the article. How could they write this bit (below) without mentioning the SNP or at the very least the Scottish Government?
“Removing the two child-limit across the UK will cost £2.3bn in 2026-27 and £3bn in 2029-30, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). John Dickie, director of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) said it was an “exceptionally good use of public money”.
“The two-child limit really has been quite an awful experiment, causing real hardship for children and families across the UK,” he said. “Here in Scotland, there was already commitment to fully mitigate it, but it’s far better that it’s been abolished at source and that all children across the UK will now benefit from the financial support that they need.”
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Printed news and BBC IN Scotland are absolute bastards. They’re not on the side of the Scottish people. They clearly detest our democratically elected Scottish Government so much that they continually commit traitorous industrial strength lying and omission.
They’re not interested in actual news, only anti-Scottish propaganda. They’re not WITH us, they’re actively aggressively AGAINST us and should be treated accordingly.
stop paying the license and tell them exactly why. They are enemies of the Scottish people.
John (not anonymous) Lawson
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‘BBC Scotland omit the SNP promise’ – indeed. In fact, the BBC article omits the SNP entirely. Despite the topic – large families and the role of government in alleviating their poverty – there is no mention of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP).
Does BBC Scotland NOT wish to reveal how much the family with six children it profiles benefit from the SCP because they live in Scotland under an SNP government? From April 2026, this family could be over £650 per month better off than a comparable family in the rUK.
The BBC reports that the family in Scotland could gain an additional £1,200 per month once the two child limit on DWP’s Universal Credit benefits is scrapped. This indicates something of the scale of what larger families on UC have had to forego for years under Westminster policies.
On past occasions when BBC Scotland has referred to the SNP on the topic of poverty, its been negatively framed. Its reporting has tended to focus on unmet poverty reduction targets rather than the good done by the SCP. Such reports have lacked the important context of what has been foregone financially over a long time now by larger families due solely to Westminster’s two child limit.
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The BBC has chosen a woman who has six children, not because it wants to evoke sympathy for this woman and her children, but because it wants to evoke hostility. The baleful response to children living in poverty has been that ‘they should not have had these children if they could not afford to bring them up’.
Politically, since the establishment of the welfare state over a hundred years ago ‘the scrounger’ who never works, but lives off handouts and gets housing ahead of ‘hard working’ people has been a potent trope deployed by the Tories and the media. ‘New’ Labour subscribed to this trope with its emphasis on the mendacious concept of ‘meritocracy’.
Although the Blair and Brown governments lifted large numbers of children out of poverty – to the great credit of these governments – they lacked the political courage to make the arguments explicitly and to challenge the hegemony of the ‘scrounger’ trope. Instead, we had people like the hapless Johan Lamont griping about the ‘something for nothing society’.
The current Labour Government is led by a man who cannot set out a vision, who speaks in vacuous cliches and, according to a recent biography just does what he is told by the ‘Blue’ Labour clique at the heart of the party. It contains cabinet ministers who lack warmth or any empathy with the increasing numbers of people across the UK who are finding the cost of living and the problems of public services hard.
Labour has become the party which is the ‘party of Britain’, but it has no clear understanding of what ‘Britain’ is. It condemns the displays of the flags of St George, but conflates England with Britain. Few of its members can set out a vision of what Britain/England is/are.
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