The government is about to spell out "a process and a timetable" for dealing with those who have lost out from the abolition of the 10p tax rate. When the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Yvette Cooper, opens the debate on the Second Reading of the Finance Bill this afternoon she will announce that an existing Treasury inquiry into how to help poor households with children will be expanded to include those without children. The inquiry was announced in the Budget and is due to report by the time of the Pre-Budget Report this autumn.
This proposal will also be presented to the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting this evening. Harriet Harman is due to speak but her place could be taken by a more senior minister perhaps even the prime minister himself.
Senior government sources say that ministers cannot afford to make changes now but would if they could. Therefore, Labour MPs will face the choice of either voting with the government or against it and defeating the entire Budget. Such a defeat would, sources say, be regarded as equivalent to a vote of confidence.
Canaries, you no doubt recall, used to be taken down pits to detect noxious gases. If the miners' yellow long feathered friends so much as twitched, trouble lay ahead. If they fell off their perches and dropped to the bottom of their cage, the miners knew they were done for if they didn't get out fast.
The Labour Party now has its own canaries who work in a somewhat different way to those in the mines. To test the health of the party you look at how and whether they can survive together. The odd squabble and pulling out of feathers, means everything's OK. If, however, they peck each other to death, the party looks doomed.
Given the behaviour of Labour's canaries over the last few days, the party ought to be worried.
The canaries in question are:
The backbench MP who has described the 10p tax revolt as his party's "poll tax moment" - Ian Gibson.
The minister who's warned about the "indulgent nonsense" of "private briefings against the Labour leader" - Ed Balls.
And the former minister who, in today's Times, warns Balls that his actions "take us back to the days of faction fighting and party-within-a-party that were so damaging in the 1980s" - Charles Clarke.
Why do I pick out these three? Because, despite their differences, they can often be found together watching their favourite football team, Norwich City - known to its fans as the Canaries. I, for one, will be watching hard in the next few days to see whether they can bring themselves to behave as if they're on the same side.
