Margaret Colley on the parliamentary discipline of a party that treats abstention as a position
Wednesday. The Vote. The Aftermath.
I have been covering Labour’s parliamentary behaviour long enough to have developed a taxonomy of the ways in which Labour MPs oppose their own government without formally opposing their own government, which requires a certain ingenuity that I have come to respect even while disagreeing with it. Last night’s vote produced the variant I think of as the Principled Abstention With Accompanying Statement, in which an MP does not vote against the government’s position but releases a press release explaining in considerable detail why they would have voted against the government’s position if they were going to vote, which they are not, but want it known that if they were, their reasons would be substantive and not at all connected to their majority size.
The Principled Abstention With Accompanying Statement is actually a reasonable instrument in some circumstances. The problem with Labour’s version of it is its frequency, which suggests that either the government is consistently producing policy that its own members find difficult to support in public, or that the Labour Party has developed a culture of performative dissent that allows MPs to maintain credibility with their constituencies while preserving their ministerial career prospects. Both diagnoses could be correct simultaneously, which would explain a great deal.
What the Whips Office Makes of All This
The Whips Office, which manages parliamentary discipline with the specific combination of charm and menace that the role has always required, is described by current Labour MPs in terms that suggest the menace dial has been turned up and the charm dial has been turned down, which is either evidence of a government that knows its majority is secure and does not need to be nice about it or evidence of a government that is more anxious about its backbenches than its public presentation suggests. The observable evidence is ambiguous between these interpretations. The London Prat on parliamentary politics this week. The vote passed. The statements were released. The whips noted everything. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
