Keir Starmer’s ruthless character has been revealed
Last night Keir Starmer changed everything we know about discipline in the Labour Party.
Seven recalcitrant MPs who had decided to support an opposition motion to scrap the two-child benefit cap were immediately suspended from the Labour whip for a period of six months.
On the face of it, this is no more than an administrative process, a slap on the wrist. After all, having to sit as an independent MP for six months is no big deal. They still receive their salaries and still have full access to parliament.
In fact, the suspension of these MPs will send out a serious message to them and to their colleagues: voting against the government whip will endanger your Commons career. The Prime Minister, even before the general election, revealed himself as more than capable – some might say eager – to rid himself of troublesome back benchers, preventing a handful of Left-wingers from seeking renomination as Labour candidates after the election was called. Now he has reminded those parliamentary colleagues who feel they can vote however they wish without reference to the whips that they are endangering their own careers.
Not that an early election is likely, but anyone who does not possess the whip when an election is called is ineligible to stand as a Labour candidate. And reselection of a sitting candidate can happen at any time in a parliament if party HQ wishes it.
Previous party leaders and prime ministers were urged by their chief whips to wield a heavier stick against rebellious MPs; the fact that no one can accurately count the number of times that Jeremy Corbyn voted against his own party’s whip when he was a Labour MP (the figure is in the hundreds) is testament to the ludicrously lax disciplinary regime that prevailed in the past.
It was that regime that disastrously exposed loyal Labour MPs to the criticism of their local parties. If there were no sanctions in place to discipline rebels, why wasn’t their local MP manning the barricades along with other, more principled MPs? What had they to lose, other than a ministerial career?
And it provides cover not just to loyal MPs who share Starmer’s political outlook; it lifts the pressure on the diminishing band of self-identified Left-wingers who might be otherwise expected to form part of the “awkward squad” in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Now that voting against the government whip means a genuine threat to their careers, their supporters can be expected to be much more forgiving if they capitulate to the demands of the leadership, unhappy though they may be at the prospect.
And Starmer’s move means that for the first time in living memory, the Labour whip actually means something. It is more than a pink slip of A4 paper that arrives with the rest of the mail at the start of the week and informs MPs of when they can arrange transport home to their constituencies. Those votes that are underlined three times now mean their support is obligatory, not optional, especially if you have ambitions to be an MP in the next parliament.
There is a sting in the tail, however. Starmer will be the first Labour leader or prime minister in history who can expect the number of rebellions on his watch to diminish to about zero when even controversial measures are decided on the floor of the House. But this new paradigm presents a risk to the unity of the party in a more fundamental way than previous rebellions did.
With Labour having secured a landslide on a historically low level of popular support, voters are showing a worrying tendency to consider supporting smaller parties and independent candidates. In this context, removing the whip from repeat offenders in Labour’s ranks, threatening them with the end of their parliamentary careers, might be just the spark needed to ignite a new civil war in the party.
That may be a risk the prime minister is willing to take; he is insulated, after all, by the complexities and contradictions of the first-past-the-post electoral system. If nothing else, Keir Starmer has brought to an end the self-indulgent disregard that the Left have traditionally been able to display towards their own party.