Chaos in the Commons: from Brexit to Gaza

The scenes in the House of Commons on Wednesday are worthy of a punch-up in the Italian or Albanian parliaments. They reflect the collapse of parliamentary democracy this century, as first Tony Blair and then his Tory successors dumped three hundred years of Parliament making the big decisions. Instead, they handed that power to populist passions, egged on by off-shore owned media.

The plebiscite has become more important than Parliament. In plebiscite decision-making, the demagogue is the main actor – Johnson, Farage, or the SNP leader Stephen Flynn, screeching like a nationalist banshee in the Commons Chamber yesterday. Then there are press demagogues: Owen Jones whipping up hate against Labour MPs and a party leader he objects to.

Rishi Sunak was handed a majority of 143 over Labour, but now has lost all authority over his party and Parliament. A Prime Minister who can’t control his party or Parliament is usually replaced. That option is not available to the Conservatives, who have removed three PMs since 2016. Sunak limps along with his party in misery, waiting for the giant defenestration of a general election.

There was nothing at stake yesterday. No law was being proposed. No change in government policy could follow a vote. It was performative politics, with parties and factions within parties trying to score points.

The SNP deliberately inserted into its motion the words about a collective punishment of the Palestinians. It was a reference to the Nazi crimes in Lidice and Oradour sur Gland, when the Germans took revenge on resistance attacks by mass killings. This undisguised comparison between the Jews of Israel, some 1200 of whom were massacred by Hamas last October, and the Nazis, who murdered 6 million Jews 80 years ago, was crude and ugly.

In a famous debate in 1914 on the eve of the declaration of war between the empires of Britain and Germany, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, spoke of the need in a democracy to heed public opinion.

There is no doubt that public opinion in Britain has shifted decisively against the current Israeli government. 1,200 Israelis were killed last October. So far up to 30,000 Palestinians may have been killed by Israel. Even if one accepts that accurate figures are not available, as no independent reporter is allowed into Gaza, and even if Hamas militants hide in the general population, the death toll inflicted on the women, children, and elderly of Gaza is unbearable to watch.

Mrs Thatcher thought she could destroy IRA terrorism through military means and keeping the views of the Irish republicans in the six counties of Northern Ireland off television screens. 1,500 deaths later, first John Major and then Tony Blair decided jaw-jaw was better than war-war and began talking to  those who had killed so many British citizens.

Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to learn that lesson. Many fear that the level of deaths in Gaza may begin the process of breaking the umbilical cord that links the creation of Israel in 1948 as a UN member state and the Holocaust. That crime finally forced the world — including Britain’s anti-Semitic Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin — to accept that Jews were entitled to a sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean littoral where they might be safe from centuries of Christian and Islamist Jew-killing and Jew-hate.

But as far as the Commons is concerned, there is nothing that any MP, or any Minister — especially one like David Cameron who authorised the abolition of parliamentary democracy with his Brexit plebiscite — can say or vote for that will have the slightest impact on the conflict.

There are many ways that MPs can express an opinion. Votes on Opposition day motions are one of them. The Labour Party is perfectly well aware that the position of the Leader on Gaza is causing great anguish to many Labour Party members. Whether that will be converted into votes at the general election is far from clear.

During the Iraq conflict Labour MPs were regularly told they would be ousted by local Muslim voters. Once, outside a mosque in my Rotherham constituency where I had been speaking during the 2005 election, I was surrounded by a mob of Islamist-led protestors, shouting to men leaving the mosque: “Don’t vote MacShane. Don’t vote Labour. Vote BNP instead.” I was touched by the idea that a vote for anti-Semitic right-wing extremists of the British Nationalist Party was a good idea for a militant Islamist — but who knows?

There were three motions on offer on Wednesday evening. That is normal politics. MPs can vote for the motion closest to their views. The Speaker was wise to offer that choice. The SNP is not the official Opposition. The Scottish Nationalists could have moved their motion and accepted the vote. It is more than likely that a good number of Labour MPs would have supported it.

The Labour motion was closer to where most of the democracies at the UN are, including Labour-led Australia and liberal-left led Canada, as well as our former partners in Europe. The Speaker and the inexperienced Clerk to the Commons, only in post since last October, were in a dilemma, but common sense would urge all main parties to submit their motions to the Commons.

More than 67 MPs, mostly Tories but including a handful of SNP fellow-travellers, have tabled a motion calling for the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to stand down. That would solve nothing, but shows how the Brexit era Commons has lost all respect for the role of Speaker. The real problem is that the Government has lost all authority over the Commons and Rishi Sunak has lost all control over his party and MPs.

In my 18 years in the Commons (1994-2012) Conservative MPs were much more hostile to Israel than Labour. Brexit-era politics has made some right-wing politicians admirers of Benjamin Netanyahu, but they are out of touch with their own voters on this.

Sunak has a massive majority, inherited from Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory. Yet the Prime Minister did not dare to move his own motion last night. Instead, the Tories walked out with SNP MPs in a student union-style emotional spasm.

The media are trying to keep the story alive by asserting that Sir Keir Starmer threatened the Speaker with being replaced after the election. This is not just implausible but an utterly empty threat, as the Speaker is elected on a free vote of all MPs. If Hoyle decides to run again when he is well past retirement age, he will win easily.

Wednesday night’s excitement will fade away. However, the poverty of leadership of today’s Brexit-era politicians will not. The damage done by the replacement of Parliament by performative and plebiscitary politics (including its latest iteration of “citizens’ assemblies”) will not easily be put right.

Denis MacShane was Minister of Europe under Tony Blair. His new book Labour Takes Power. The Denis MacShane diaries 1997-2001 (Biteback)  describes a similar incident in the Commons in 1998, when Tony Benn and George Galloway shouted and abused the Deputy Speaker, Michael Lord, after he refused to allow a vote on taking action against Saddam Hussein.

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