February 22, 2024 - 7:00am
When looking at last night’s chaotic scenes in the House of Commons, straightforward reporting doesn’t do the situation justice. The fact that the Labour Party won a vote on its motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza tells us very little. The real story lies in the chaos.
So what does this strange evening tell us about the nature of power within the Labour Party and British politics? For one thing, it reveals the extent to which the job of speaker has been undermined by the tragic ego of John Bercow. Lindsay Hoyle’s authority in the chair now looks shot and British politics is the worse for it.
But even this isn’t the most important lesson. The fact that the Tories, Labour and the SNP were prepared to raise the stakes over such a parliamentary triviality as a motion with zero real world effect (Benjamin Netanyahu was hardly waiting with baited breath on the result) only shows how precarious each political party now feels.
For a start, it is clear that Keir Starmer has now spent far more of his authority defending Israel than he should have at this point of the electoral cycle, and is skating too close to the edge for a man 20 points ahead in the polls.
As I wrote last week, all the recent by-elections and opinion polls now point to a Labour landslide of 1997 proportions. Yet Tony Blair did not face the kind of sustained challenges to his authority which Starmer has over Gaza. When Israel eventually launches its ground offensive in Rafah, Starmer may have very little choice but to abandon any remaining nuance to shift Labour’s position once again.
The uncomfortable reality for Starmer is that he is now chasing events, not so much leading his party as trying to hold a retreating line for as long as possible. This is a significant problem for him ahead of the by-election in Rochdale, which may well be won by George Galloway, but it is also a significant problem in the longer term as he is forced to manage Britain’s foreign policy with a party increasingly hostile to what that means.
Meanwhile, the fact that the Tories are so angry with Hoyle and are prepared to throw this previously well-regarded speaker to the wolves as a result only reveals how desperate their situation now is. How on earth did British politics get itself into such a lather about such an arcane issue of process? Because the Tories and SNP smelt an opportunity to damage a party they have concluded is on course to defeat them at the next election.
The most interesting questions, though, are the deeper trends at play here. Ahead of the vote I spoke to Richard Tice, the Reform UK party leader, who believed Galloway would not only do very well in the upcoming by-election but lead a slate of MPs into the next election on the issue of Israel’s war against Hamas. His own party’s candidate in Rochdale is the former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, a sign of Reform’s strategy to attract the kind of voters Nigel Farage once successfully wooed at Ukip.
None of these events is likely to affect the result of the next election unless the conflict in Gaza morphs into a war of an altogether different nature, transforming public opinion at home. Yet we may still be seeing the beginning of a new era in politics, with sustained challenges to the Left of the Labour Party as well as the Right of the Conservatives, fought out in a Parliament without a speaker ever likely to be able to assert the authority of an independent referee. The long-term impact of Starmer’s struggles to maintain party discipline over Gaza may be more profound than they look today. Do not write off George Galloway.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.
TomMcTague
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SubscribeThe sectarian politics of a Third World society. MPs clamouring to vote against Israel purely to stave off intimidation against themselves and their families from certain elements in their own constituencies. A leader of the opposition who apparently threatened the supposedly independent Speaker that he would use his majority in the next parliament to remove him from office unless he allowed a vote on the Labour amendment. A permanent member of the UN Security Council whose foreign policy is dictated by the fear of George Galloway. The stench of decay all pervasive.
Never underestimate a Mahommedan wielding his scimitar, or a ‘Political Editor’ pretending the layers of cowardice he describes are somehow a workable response to him.
I was surprised to find that Hoyle, apparently, plans to stand again, at the age of 67. Why not stand down, take his gratuity and ease into the Lords?
Although sadly it does not extend to the Leadership, the widespread shift in Labour is precisely because much of it no longer is in thrall to an ethnic lobby of recent immigrant origin and owing fealty to a foreign state that had been founded in living memory by anti-British terrorists and which had never become a British ally, a lobby largely made up of self-appointed community leaders.
What “ethnic lobby of recent immigrant origin” are you referring to? I’m intrigued.
Not vague enough. Try again.
It seems more third world to me that we are apparently supposed to be outraged by the idea that an opposition motion challenging the leadership should be tabled in parliament.
The rot started in WW2 and afterwards. Many of the toughest and most technically skilled were killed or emigrated overseas or worked overseas. A country is like a loaf of bread, a small amount of raising ingredient causes the dough to rise. One can change the flour content to a large extent but a slight reduction in the raising ingredient and the dough does not rise.
It is difficult to think of any politician or public figure who was in an elite combat unit in WW2 or in National Service and who then was a Chartered Engineer or Foreman in life. I can think of three men who were awarded medals for bravery while serving in the SOE in WW2 and were Chartered Engineers who largely worked overseas post WW2. Just having them as MPs or councillors would have greatly increased the technical expertise and courage of those in politics.
One reason the Institution of Civil Engineers is located close to Parliament is in the 19th and early 20th centuries many Civil Engineers were MPs and it was easy to obtain technical advice on large infrastructure projects.
One example was Murdo MacDonald MP for Inverness, designed railways in Scotalnd , Aswan Dam in Egypt and Indus Irigation project, was Colonel in RE working under Allenby in Egypt and Palestine. By the time Macdonald became an MP he was one of te finest Hydraulic Engineeers in the World and had been a Colonel in the RE.
Great people solve great problems. They have profound minds which enabe them to understand complex problems and the sagacity and courage to implement simple cost effective solutions. We have shallow people who fail to understand complexity; try to be clever by implementing complex solutions; these invariably fail or cause other problems. A good example of what we lack are the Barnes Wallis and Guy Gibson VC type people.
Interesting how amongst all the conflicts in the world, Gaza-Israel-Palestine has become such an issue in the UK. Where was the passion during the Syrian civil war (300,000 to 500,000 killed) or when Iranian women wanted to fling off their headscarves?
Is Gaza now the number one issue, ahead of things such as climate, trans rights, inflation, immigration and whether the UK is better off in or out of the EU?
Isn’t it because Jews are still uniquely blessed/accursed (chose one or both) among peoples (certainly among Muslims and today’s soi-disant progressives) and consequently Israel is regarded in a unique way and held to standards unlike any other country on the planet.
Thus, they can simultaneously be goaded with cries of ‘genocide’ by their various detractors while yet again carrying the can as the ultimate personification of (and scapegoat for) all the sins of the ‘white, colonialist blah blah’ oppressors in the world.
Of course Muslims care as much about the cost of living crisis as they do about Gaza. Of course the rest of us care as much about Gaza as we do about the cost of living crisis. And of course we are all more than capable of seeing the connection, of understanding why no one with our patronisers’ foreign policies ever had economic policies that would be remotely to our benefit.
“…Of course the rest of us care as much about Gaza as we do about the cost of living crisis…”
You speak for yourself. I certainly don’t.
And I think it’s a bloody disgrace that our parliament wasted time on a perfectly pointless debate on Gaza, when their job is to fix the mess here.
I have been around the left for decades, since before student days, they have abandoned any interest in working class/economic issues like housing, etc, and are literally obsessed with Palestine, Diversity, etc, for many it has replaced any notions of W/C solidarity. Oh, apparentlt some have been picketing the great Bernie Sanders talks around UK, as he wouldn’t declare whats happening a genocide(though imo, it will be if they attack Rafah), yet Bernie is leading the charge to cut immediately U.S funds to Israel, what more do they want?
as usual with the PO/MO Left its about language not substance.
“….and whether the UK is better off in or out of the EU“.
I think that last one has become a moot point, given that Britain is out, and is not going back any time soon.
And where is the condemnation of Egypt for building a border wall to keep the Palestinians in Gaza ? Trump suggests it: bad. Egypt does it: silence.
Not saying that Egypt is necessarily wrong. Just pointing to the inconsistent “morality” at work here.
The way that Arab countries, some large and rich, refuse to take in their fellow Arabs and co-religionists is extraordinary.
Not extraordinary. Whenever they’ve done so, the ‘refugees’ have destabilised the country. Lebanon and Jordan still regret allowing them to settle in their countries. Jordan evicted many of them after a coup attempt against the king. Lebanon is still trying to filter out the Arab terrorists from their government.
A plague on both of their houses.
Uhh we protested against Syria? You may recall that, to Obama’s chagrin, the UK could not get approval to intervene.
We also protested in favour of Iranian women.
The difference here is that the press and public are made to care about Israel that is the core reason why there is so much passion in this case. Otherwise the media is willing to ignore thousands of deaths.
You protested against UK and US intervention to prevent Assad’s bombing. You most certainly did not protest on the streets against Assad and Putin’s destruction of Homs and Aleppo. I don’t remember thousands of people marching through the streets week after week for that. The people on the streets screaming for us to do something about Gaza are the same people who campaigned to prevent action in Syria. .
People close to politics will think this is a big deal – most of the electorate will not bat an eyelid.
Oh, and neither will Israel or Palestine.
But there is something very big in today’s omnishambles. The Speaker today justified bending the conventions of Parliament on the grounds that there are now many pro Palestinian agitators who are likely to resort to violent intimidation of their opponents, a threat to MPs which has already been realised; maybe besieging a family home, maybe firebombing an office, maybe worse still. A risk so great that the rule book has to be torn up for their protection. This is surely a bleak watershed moment no? So now what?
I totally agree, it’s all very depressing.
At least the Speaker acknowledged the problem instead of blaming hurty words on the internet.
The German jurist Carl Schmitt had it that The Sovereign in any community is he who decides the exception, which seems to reveal how Hoyle sees himself in relation to the Commons. However, Schmitt saw the authority of The Sovereign as being derived from a community: it would be helpful to know the community upon which Hoyle relies here – candidates seem to be The Commons as a whole, the Government, and the Government-in-waiting (ie the Labour Party, to which Hoyle owes his political career).
I broadly support the Palestinian cause(though not Hamas/Hezbollah, etc) but was quite suprised on a major Y/T post on I/Pal, etc, to see real hostility or indifference to the cause mentioned, the media does seem to promote the idea that everyone is behind them.
What are Y/T and I/Pal?
I assume YouTube and Israel/Palestine.
We have to make the electorate aware that the system they take for granted is under attack. What happened last night was an example of “might is right” triumphing over democracy.
Which part is the attack? The speaker allowing an amendment contra-convention or the SNP and Tories tabling something with the sole purpose of creating a political awkward situation for Labour?
They are not annoyed at the abuse of parliamentary convention but that their ploy (itself abusing parliamentary convention) has been foiled.
The attack was when Starmer took Hoyle out in the corridor and threatened to take away his speakership if he didn’t allow a Labour amendment on one of only four days in the year when the SNP get to put their motions. I believe that Labour have 17 such days..
If Starmer is strongarming people like this when he has very little power, imagine how he’ll be when his hands are on the controls.
Sadly Hoyle has just followed Bercow in thinking the Commons is “all about him”.
Its seems that HOC Speakers are just like Lib Dem leaders. As soon as some limelight appears, they just lose the plot.
For the Speaker to claim that he did this for the protection of MPs, manoeuvring to save themselves from the disgust and contempt of their constituents, when 100k are dead, injured or missing in Gaza, is a stain on British politics that will be noticed, and not forgotten, around the world.
Stop Lying.
Your entire post is False as False can be.
Were you expecting him to say, ‘Fair cop, I did it to save Starmer’?
I’d have more respect for him if he did.
Which particular constituents might you be thinking of here, I wonder?
The ones who don’t like seeing thousands of dead children?
Muslims have killed more Muslims than Jews have killed Muslims since 1948. No Muslim is protesting agamst the Janjaweed
Janjaweed – Wikipedia
By October 2007, only the United States government had declared the Janjaweed killings in Darfur to be genocide, since they had killed an estimated 200,000–400,000 civilians over the previous three years
What about Algerian Civil war
Algerian Civil War – Wikipedia
150,000 total deaths[
This is a bleak day for UK parliamentary democracy. Soon the MPs and liberal elite will be throwing their hands in the air bemoaning a rise in right-wing support. And all because they have allowed a hatred of Jews on the part of Muslims and the left wing to flourish unchecked and skew our political decision making.
Historians will cite today as a landmark in Britains declining moral values and influence. Evil flourishes when democratic representatives shirk their responsibility to act with integrity and honesty.
We’ll probably look back on it in the same way as Romans looked back at the Gracchi. The moment the rot became visible to even the blind. Rivers of blood indeed.
any inkling on your part at all that perhaps a hatred of muslims is flourishing unchecked and skewing our political decision making?
I think historians are more likely to judge harshly the US and UK as few isolated standouts against ceasefires and resolutions to avoid the destruction of Palestine and its people.
Before 1948, no one had heard of the Palestinian people. We heard about Jews a little earlier. But it is not important. It is important to fight the Zionists using approximately the same methods that were used to fight the perpetrators of the plague in medieval Europe.
(a) That’s because the ‘Palestinian people’ didn’t exist before 1948.
(b) By ‘a little earlier’, could you possibly mean ‘for as long as people could read the Bible’?
(c) And what methods would you like to use against ‘the Zionists’?
Gaza Strip is under the control of Hamas, who are militant jihadists. A Palestinian state ruled by Hamas would look like Islamic State.
The extent that bien-pensant ‘leftists’ support this is laughable.
” Yet we may still be seeing the beginning of a new era in politics, with sustained challenges to the Left of the Labour Party as well as the Right of the Conservative”
Is this referring to Galloway or LP M’P’s?
galloway is not left, although some say he is Red/Brown, and even if he was , he is all about George.
Communalism, does seem to be growing now, and he will certainly be at the front of it, and will be a clear and present danger to stable race relations, stoking divisions(as will Damchuk/Reform) etc.
What a way to mark this hundredth anniversary of the first ever rebellion against a Labour Government, by the Reverend Herbert Dunnico, MP for Consett, on a pro-peace principle and because proper procedure had not been followed.
The Government may have had more than one reason for withdrawing its amendment. Today’s debate featured several re-emergences of Tory Arabism, and of course the Foreign Office is in the hands of David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, who are from the background that idolises T.E Lawrence and Sir John Glubb. As is the next King, who will be the most English King of England in a thousand years, although the one after that will have almost nothing else in him, in a curious reversal of the demographic trends in Britain at large. Ethnically, whereas the King is three quarters German, his grandson in the direct line of succession is three quarters English, and will probably be on the Throne in 2066.
I am as critical as anyone of Britain’s alliances with the Arab monarchies, but funnily enough no one has ever asked me to be Foreign Secretary. Those alliances are real, and they are of very long standing, whereas there simply is not one with Israel. The Palestinians will tell you in no uncertain terms that the Arab monarchs had never done a damn thing for them, but this time only the Anglo-American service station of Bahrain has actively come out against them or their protectors. This is the first genocide to be broadcast in real time, and it can be seen in the Gulf as well as anywhere else. On his mother’s side, the next King of Jordan is a Palestinian. The present one, a key British ally, has said “from the River to the Sea”, although he was unlikely to have wanted a Labour Party membership card. Mind you, these days, you never know.
Although sadly it does not extend to the Leadership, the widespread shift in Labour is precisely because much of it no longer is in thrall to an ethnic lobby of recent immigrant origin and owing fealty to a foreign state that had been founded in living memory by anti-British terrorists and which had never become a British ally, a lobby largely made up of self-appointed community leaders. Labour will no doubt claim that the House of Commons had resolved for a ceasefire as it purported to understand that simple word, for the release of hostages, for international aid to Gaza, and for the recognition of Palestine, but of course the eventual vote was meaningless even as Opposition days went. Having voted for a ceasefire last time, Ian Lavery’s name was added without his knowledge to the Labour amendment, which condemned Hamas but not Israel, and which wanted Israel to be “safe and secure” while a Palestinian state needed only to be “viable”. Mary Kelly Foy’s name was also there, yet she is absent following a bereavement. Are there any more?
Of course Muslims care as much about the cost of living crisis as they do about Gaza. Of course the rest of us care as much about Gaza as we do about the cost of living crisis. And of course we are all more than capable of seeing the connection, of understanding why no one with our patronisers’ foreign policies ever had economic policies that would be remotely to our benefit. For example Keir Starmer and Sue Gray, who have today inflicted a whipping operation on the Speaker of the House of Commons, telling him that he would be removed after the General Election if he did not do the procedurally and constitutionally bizarre thing of calling an amendment other than the Government’s to an Opposition day motion. Everyone else has made their points on the Order Paper.
Although they may have been assisted by the fact that Sir Lindsay Hoyle was a second generation Labour MP, as steeped in it as that, Starmer is an inexperienced politician, and Gray is not one in the conventional sense at all. Yet yesterday, we had a Chief of Staff making policy, while today we had her doing this. Gray is very dangerous, and Starmer’s dependence on her is one of the many reasons why so is he.
My comment has disappeared. Again.
Ooh, it’s back now. Let’s see how long it lasts this time.
It’s gone again. Such fun.
What did it say?
Thanks.
It’s becoming clear that a vote for Labour in the Election will be a vote for Islam.
Lord have mercy on all the brain-dead lefties and virtue-signallers who have brought us to this awful point.
That should be ‘Lord don’t have mercy…’ because they know what they do.
I’ve always thought that Lindsay Hoyle is a fundamentally decent man, but he has made a major blunder here.
Indeed. Anyone can make a mistake. I haven’t followed this in any detail, but it appears he’s taken responsibility for it and apologised.
He’s not perfect. But the odds are that any replacement would be worse. Far, far worse.
Bercow was awful… pompous, overblown posturing and slightly less impartial over the Brexit situation than Steve Bray. Hoyles seems a decent bloke and it’s time we started to stand up to the hyperventilating media and punditry crowd or we’ll have nothing left but Bercows in public life.
So we have mob rule by a UK hating government to look forward to?
Don’t these MPs have real problems to solve ?
No one in Israel cares in the slightest what these votes show. Nor will any Westminster vote make any difference. It’s all performative – about how it makes the participants feel. Virtue signalling at its very worst.
If MPs really don’t have anything better to do with their time, perhaps it’s time to cut their numbers by 10% (sadly abandoned from the original plan to equalise consituencies). And keep doing it every 5 years until productivity improves.
For MPs with machete-wielding constituents to worry about it is probably a big deal.
What? The UK votes at the UN? If parliament has called for a ceasefire our government should take that to the UN.
Not sure quite how that relates to my comment …
Unedifying.
A fish rots from the head down.
to Stephen Walsh,
I had the same thought. Why did Hoyle need to say that one reason he did what he did was to keep MPs and their families safe. Safe from whom?
Well, hasn’t Starmer exposed his true colours.
He’s obviously so power-obsessed that he’s willing to chuck longstanding parliamentary conventions to the dogs to avoid any hiccups on his way into Downing Street. Whatever went on between Starmer and Hoyle – Hoyle’s been left twisting in the wind. Another victim of Starmer’s “Operation Downing Street”.
To say that “Starmer” is an anagram of “smarter”, he hasn’t been here.
This unedifying episode is going to come back and bite him and the party he is “leading” (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense). If the Labour party is this fractious on foreign policy issues which are almost certainly going to drag on through a Starmer premiership, imagine what it’s going to be like trying to govern and form policy – even with a comfortable majority.
I can’t help but think it would have been better to have just let the party rebellion and scrap happen and try and lance the boil before the election. Instead, he’s chosen to kick the can…as well as the authority of the Speaker, the SNP, parliamentary convention, and whatever patience the electorate has with him.
Where were the street protests, mobbing of MPs’ homes, mass hate marches in relation to Ukraine, Syria (hasn’t Assad kiled more than 500,000 of his own people?), Yemen, etc., all of which killed many more people than the so-called ‘genocide’ (yeah, tell us another) by the Israelis in Gaza?
And come to think of it, why are there apparently no Muslim countries lining up to provide aide (other than weapons), asylum, etc.? Same old story as in the Boznia/Herzegovina conflict, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
It seems to me that the common thread linking these historical perspectives is a fanatical onslaught on Western democracy, its culture and institutions; Israel being an oasis of such values and governance in an otherwise democratically bleak Middle East political landscape.
Yes, when Muslims kill Muslims (say, in Yemen: tens of times more than deaths in Gaza) it’s “move on, nothing to see here” from our Middle Eastern immigrant community. But when it’s Jews trying NOT to kill not to kill combatants, and doing astonishingly well as these things go, it’s “genocide” from our lovely Left.
Which makes you wonder what exactly is motivating them.
Is it the Marxist’s natural affinity with any organisation that is anti-West (my enemy’s enemy is my friend) or is it an older (in fact, the oldest) racial hatred, thinly disguised as Anti/Zionism
Kept looking for the part about “chaotic scenes” promised in the lede.
I wonder if this wasn’t an old loyalty to Labour (and perhaps severe pressure from Sir Kneel) dressed up as concerns for MPs’ safety.