Jeremy tries to bully the shadow cabinet over Syria. The shadow cabinet majority bullies him back. Jeremy invokes rank-and-file support by text message and a dubious online survey. The shadow colleagues are supported at an angry meeting of backbench MPs. Who is right on this one?
Not the policy, discussed here yesterday. Honest women and men can honestly differ as to what’s right or wrong in extending RAF bombing of Isis-held Iraq (by invitation) to Syria. Today’s Guardian editorial aligns this newspaper with the Corbynistas, assorted Tory columnists, Stop the War, the Daily Mail (and me). Awkward or what?
No, I mean the constitutional propriety: who calls the shots when MPs vote at the end of a Commons division? In our overhasty times, there’s a lack of collective memory here, reinforced by widespread unfamiliarity with both the conventions, the rules (different things) and the realities of politics.
Three quick points:
1) Labour has dug itself into a serious hole, but its current mood of crisis can pass if both sides give it time to heal. “Keep Calm and Carry On”, is always a good motto.
2) The Tories have problems too, not least the fate of Lord Feldman, its talented chairman ensnared in the “Tatler Tory” affair. Give them some room on page one.
3) The voters are watching all these shenanigans and will not be greatly impressed, whatever view they take of bombing Syria. In the end they decide, not grandstanding MPs or comic plotters in the leader’s office.
So who is right? The classic starting point is always the famous letter written in 1774 to his Bristol (then England’s second city) constituents – read it here, it’s short and brilliant by the Whig politician and Tory hero Edmund Burke, about the duties of an elected representative. He should listen respectfully to the electorate’s view, to work hard for them. “But he owes you not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
I still think that Burke gets to the heart of the matter, as in much else, including Napoleon, whose rise to military dictatorship he predicted before anyone had heard of Lieutenant Bonaparte (Burke died in 1797). MPs are not delegates, either from their constituency activists, always a pretty rum self-selected crowd, or from the wider electorate.
No, they are representatives, elected to exercise their judgment on great issues of the day.
Once in a while very ordinary people, who have never made much impact on public life, unexpectedly combine to show extraordinary insight and wisdom at a crucial juncture – war and peace, economic retrenchment, issues of liberty v security. Public gratitude is sometimes deferred.
By that test a decent MP can also tell their party whips to get stuffed too. “Sorry, but this matter is too important to me to put party loyalty above my strongly held beliefs.”
Until very recently Jeremy Corbyn was famously one of those. It can merely be a grandstanding posture (not in Corbyn’s case, I think) or an admirable stand on principle. That is what makes his new role as party leader, not a career ambition he planned for until the August surge of support, so difficult. Even without the maths, in the end the 500-times repeat rebel had to concede colleagues a free vote. It would have saved time and pain to do so last week.
Whips usually know the difference between coat-trailing and conscience. Grudgingly, they respect the latter, not that they have much choice. The serious dissident is what the Geordie-born Russian agent, Colonel Rudolf Abel, calls the Tom Hanks character in the new Spielberg/Cohen Brothers thriller, Bridge of Spies. He is a “standing man” who will not be beaten down. There are always a few of them, never enough.
But there is a price to pay for conscience and independent judgment. Whips can punish an MP in both serious and petty ways: no ministerial job, or committee seat, a phone call to the constituency chairman, a leak of gossip to the Daily Brute, refusal of a night off for the daughter’s 21st.
The standing man or woman – I see Labour’s Kate Hoey as one of this awkward squad, as Tory Ann Widdecombe was – can cope with that, such slights are a badge of honour.
But constituency activists, the people who knock on doors and stuff envelopes so that their MP can get the glamour of being a big cheese, have rights too. They can protest at the MP’s conduct, call him or her to account, on go on doorstep strike. And, of course, they can deselect the MPs as their candidate – a Bennite tactic in the disastrous early 80s which Momentum types (some old enough to know better) are currently trying to revive.
That is their right in any party, even those who know how absurdly unrepresentative of the voting public their “activists” (inactivists?) are. It is salient in our own times when the public mood is crudely hostile to the political class; more so when newspapers, mostly owned by tax-shy foreign oligarchs of one kind or another (the Mail’s Lord Rothermere is a British non-dom for tax purposes), foment discontent, some of it deeply unwarranted, even hypocritical. They have even managed to be unfair to Corbyn and Co, pretty difficult when you think just how inept the leader’s crew has often been in such a short time. Inexperience is only a partial excuse.
High speed 24/7 social media accentuates the unforgiving lynchmob mood, so does the intolerant polarisation of attitudes so evident in the US these days in which Twitter frenzies also play a part. Healthy societies thrive on compromise and mutual respect, as David Cameron seems to grasp, albeit only intermittently. I don’t think the Corbynistas do, though Jeremy is a gentle soul personally.
To reflect the new mood, unthinkable 50 years ago, parliament this year passed a modest Recall of MPs Act, which predictably didn’t satisfy the populists – read thee details here.
The chief driver was the 2009 expenses scandal, pretty sordid in some ways, but mercilessly exploited by less-than-holy media and itself the product of a cowardly decision by successive cabinets (Mrs T a major offender) to avoid media “MPs’ pay” storms by taking the expenses route, so familiar in many other walks of life.
My view is that the voters, not the whips, activists or the election courts, should decide who their MP should be, and that the voters should take the long view. In the spring of 1939 Tory activists in Epping were so cross with their MP for disloyalty to the prime minister that they plotted (I once confirmed this with a plotter’s by-now-elderly son) to deselect him: the rebel’s name was Churchill.
Either way it can be pretty rough justice in which good MPs are swept away for policy reasons they opposed, when rogues are repeatedly reelected, as Robert Boothby was for decades in Aberdeenshire because he effectively protected the local fishing interests in ways Edmund Burke might have disapproved. But in every parliament a handful of locally admired saints survive the swing against the odds.
That’s due process. Corbyn’s MPs are entitled to make their stand, as he once did. Their activists are entitled to threaten them, perhaps encouraged by “Citizen Smith” plotters in the ranks and hierarchy, faintly sinister, faintly comic, rarely able to plot their way out of a paper bag for long.
Why not? Because, however imperfect, we still live in a fairly accountable and open political system. Voters are watching and exercising their independent yeoman judgment once every four or five years, as MPs have to do more often.
And, of course, any MP who thinks themselves unfairly ousted, carries the political equivalent of an Isis grenade. He or she can resign their seat and force a byelection against their usurper; they can contest the next election as an independent, with the attendant chance of splitting the Labour vote.
The voters then get the last word amid grave uncertainty. By chance such a test is already under way in Oldham – here’s my colleague Helen Pidd’s verdict. The late Michael Meacher did not trigger it on purpose. A Corbyn loyalist, he just died at an awkward moment for his new leader.
A major part of politics is a series of accidents known as Sod’s Law, a piece of legislation beyond human repeal. Labour MPs and their detractors each have some power. They would be wise to hang together if they can, for fear of hanging separately.
