Sir Keir Starmer took belated revenge for the damaging welfare rebellion earlier this month. By acting against four of his most prominent Labour critics, he sought to ram home to backbenchers that publicly-expressed dissent and fundamental disagreement with the party line won’t be tolerated.
On Wednesday afternoon the hammer fell. Labour MPs Rachael Maskell, Neil Duncan-Jordan, Chris Hinchliff and Brian Leishman were all stripped of the whip, with no timeline for return. Their behaviour will be monitored in the meantime; they are expected to vote alongside the Government as a pre-condition for an eventual return to grace.
Government insiders had warned discipline was coming; they’d been mulling it over since the day after the crunch vote early this month. “The rules are very clear. There can only be one whipping operation,” a senior Government source told The i Paper on 2 July, the day after the welfare rebellion.
But whips had taken their time to look into the behaviour of individuals, deciding that organising rebels, and repeated breaches of the whip, were where they drew the line for discipline. The four suspended MPs had also rebelled against the Government on other legislation including the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the Public Authorities Bill.
“We had to deal with people who repeatedly break the whip. Because everyone was elected as a Labour MP on the manifesto of change and everybody needs to deliver as a Labour Government,” Starmer said at a news conference on Thursday.
But immediately Labour MPs began questioning why the relatively defenceless and junior MPs were disciplined when it had been senior colleagues – including Treasury Committee chair Meg Hillier and Work and Pensions Committee chair Debbie Abrahams – who had been organising an earlier amendment to change the welfare bill. In the end neither rebelled against the Government, but by then the bill had been pulled to pieces by last-minute concessions.
The pause between rebellion and discipline led some in the party to believe no retribution would be coming at all. The vacuum led to bizarre scenes. One rebel proposed a weekend-long investigation into their behaviour would be enough to satisfy whether they had broken party rules. This suggestion was met with bafflement by party managers. “You can’t rebel on a Wednesday, and everything is fine by the Monday,” a source told The i Paper.
Maskell, an evangelical Christian, released a statement on Thursday in which she said she had a “positive conversation” with Chief Whip Sir Alan Campbell on Wednesday. “There are lines I can’t cross because of where I come from in politics with my faith,” she said, referring to her decision to rebel on the welfare vote. Meanwhile, a party source described the conversation as “long and circuitous” and agreed Maskell’s religious beliefs were “behind all her troublemaking.”
But the die had already been cast. A piece she authored in the New Statesman headlined “How to organise a government rebellion” had hardly endeared her to senior members of the party, even if they conceded she is not an MP trying to climb the greasy ministerial pole.
Yet while some members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the trade union movement suggested the act of disciplining the rebels showed how weak Starmer is, what is more surprising is that some Labour MPs had urged the whips to throw the book at the rebels.
“You can’t go around being all holier-than-thou and say you have the moral high ground when none of us wanted to vote for this,” one Labour MP told The i Paper, referring to MPs who rebelled on the welfare bill. “Nobody got elected to make people poorer.”
An insider said i,that in the fortnight since the shambolic welfare vote some Labour MPs had been “behaving like they’re Billy Big-Bollocks” seeking to have up to 40 of their colleagues disciplined for breaking the rules. In the end their pleas were overruled by wiser greybeards who could see ahead to the consequences of creating dozens of parliamentary martyrs who’d be prepared to rebel again on forthcoming issues such as the two-child benefit cap.
Even so, in Parliament there was a degree of irritation, with a quote that appeared in The Times on Wednesday evening. A party source told the paper that the rebels had been suspended for “persistent knobheadery”.
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“How is that helpful?” a senior Labour MP questioned, speaking to The i Paper. “It now becomes about that phrase rather than what these people have done wrong.”
In addition, three other Labour MPs have been stripped of their trade envoy roles. But speculation that any of the suspended will join former Labour leader’s Jeremy Corbyn’s group of pro-Gaza independent MPs is wide of the mark.
The farce surrounding former Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s attempts to “co-lead” the party with Corbyn – he denied wanting to take charge – took the wheels off any momentum that might have been gained from her move. In fact, the episode reminded Labour MPs of the chaos and indecisiveness of the Corbyn years and the hard left’s obsession with procedural process.
“I am committed, rock solid, to the Labour Party,” Leishman told the Daily Record newspaper on Thursday. “The Labour Party is my home. I’m not happy about the way that a lot of things have been done, but I’m a Labour Party member and I’m proud to be one.”
More widely, some MPs who might flirt with the idea of joining Corbyn and co, and disaffected Labour activists, are reluctant to shrug off Labour’s longtime association with the trade union movement by supporting an up-and-coming movement.
However, there are fractures emerging between Labour and the unions. Fire Brigades Union general secretary Steve Wright called the MPs’ suspensions “an outrageous and authoritarian act” and said it would “use its influence as a Labour affiliated union to seek to force the party hierarchy to reinstate those who have been suspended.”
Westminster, meanwhile, is not a happy ship. Some Labour MPs now describe their links with the Government as “contractual”, arguing that although Starmer and his team got them elected, they are unlikely to serve a second term. “How long does a contract bind you?” one Labour MP wondered aloud to The i Paper. “I’m also trying to serve my constituents the best I can; I’ve got a contract with them too.”
Wednesday’s bloodletting also led to widespread speculation among Labour MPs that No 10 could follow up with a wider reshuffle to allow Starmer to reassert his authority over the wider party. But that’s understood to be unlikely in the short term.
Meantime Labour MPs are still reeling from how the Government has had to allocate billions of pounds to deal with the Afghan data breach cover-up, with estimates of the cost to the taxpayer ranging from £6bn to £7bn.
“We’ve been grubbing around for £100m here and there and now we’ve just spaffed £7bn up the wall,” a Labour MP lamented, staring gloomily into their pint of lager on Wednesday evening. “What happens to future spending?”
If Starmer has 99 problems, the rebels are just one. Parliament breaks up next week, and for No 10 the summer holidays can’t come soon enough.
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