‘Mad’. ‘Disgusting.’ These are the words Rory Stewart, the great centrist king over the water, uses to describe Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to expel Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party. He goes on: ‘Jeremy Corbyn, whatever you think of him, is a major figure who represents a very significant part of Labour history and heritage.’
Well, it’s a view. And perhaps it is not surprising, since Stewart was one of the Conservative MPs Boris Johnson expelled for collaborating with the opposition against the government’s Brexit policy in 2019.
It’s still an odd association for Stewart to make. It would not be difficult to draw a clear distinction between the way Stewart and his comrades opposed their party over a matter of constitutional policy, and Corbyn, expelled over his refusal to accept the scale of the anti-Semitism which wracked the Labour party under his leadership.
But notwithstanding the specific charges levelled at the Rt Hon Member for Islington North, Stewart’s distaste for the way he and 20 other Tory MPs lost the whip seems to be a widely-held view, and not just amongst the usual chorus of FBPE fanatics.
Even Jonathan Sumption, a prominent conservative constitutionalist who recently spoke out in favour of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, argues in his book Law in a Time of Crisis that the expulsion of Stewart, David Gauke, Sir Nicholas Soames, and their colleagues was a shocking impropriety on Boris Johnson’s part.
To those of a more progressive bent, it is a simple thing to combine the expulsion of these MPs with the prorogation row to paint a woefully inaccurate portrait of a prime minister prepared to shred the constitution to get his way.
Yet the withdrawal of the whip is perfectly proper. More broadly, it is essential to the proper functioning of parliamentary democracy – the very model high-minded critics such as Sumption and Stewart claim to prefer over the vulgar, plebiscitary model which delivered Brexit.
Sumption is an especially interesting case in point. In his book, the former Supreme Court judge argues powerfully in defence of various traditional constitutional arrangements, and takes a caustic view of many of the innovations introduced over the past few decades, not least Harold Wilson’s decision to break the seal on the use of referendums to decide (and avoid responsibility for) difficult questions.
That’s a perfectly coherent and respectable position – that in a parliamentary democracy it is the right and duty of our representatives in Parliament to make crucial decisions, not delegate that responsibility to the electorate on an ad hoc basis. This view was perhaps best expressed by Clement Attlee in 1945:
‘I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism.’
What Sumption seems not to realise, however, is that in the absence of a referendum the way controversial issues are settled is via a general election – which is precisely what Johnson sought in 2019. And the only way an election can actually settle things is if the parties are able to have a coherent platform to which all their candidates have pledged themselves.
It’s important here to remember the sheer scale of the mutiny Stewart and his confederates were engaged in. They weren’t just voting down government policy, but actively working with the opposition to hijack the order paper and impose a completely separate policy on the government.
As I argued at the time (and as Oliver Letwin frankly admitted, unhelpfully for his defenders), that meant setting up a single-issue executive conducting its own policy and imposing it on ministers.
In so doing, they bypassed all the formal and democratic accountability mechanisms built into the constitution. That was the real constitutional outrage of the 2017-19 parliament. The Commons, empowered by the absurdity of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, could impose policy on a government without replacing it. It raised the spectre of ministers being treated like civil servants, carrying out the whims of the Commons on the basis not of coherent and transparent party discipline but varying issue-by-issue combinations of MPs.
Johnson was in fact not nearly as muscular in his response as he should have been (he ought to have advised the Queen not to grant assent to the Benn Bill, and forced the Commons to either install a new government or assent to an election).
Withdrawing the whip from Stewart et al was the bare minimum he could do, and perfectly in line with historic constitutional norms. Boris Johnson behaved no differently than John Major did over Maastricht. But some people seem unable to accept that there is a big difference between a constitutional outrage, and not getting your own way.
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