Labour cut to its core over leaked child benefit proposals

BUDGET proposals get leaked for different reasons.

Sometimes a government wants to test the waters by leaking a proposal and gauging the public’s reaction. If the reaction is uniformly hostile, the proposal is usually binned.

Sometimes, in a coalition government, ministers in one party might leak a controversial Cabinet proposal because they don’t like it and want to foster dissent among their backbenchers. The dissent, in turn, gives these ministers the cover they need to go back to their coalition partners and say they cannot live with the proposal.