Читать книгу The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval - Mark Garnett - Страница 13

While one senses that Major would have spent more time in the Commons if circumstances had been different, Tony Blair’s absenteeism was more in keeping with his character and style of government. Between the elections of 2001 and 2005 he voted in only 7.5 per cent of Commons divisions.² These were years in which Labour enjoyed an overwhelming parliamentary majority, so the absence of the Prime Minister was hardly likely to lead to any shock government defeats. Yet the 2001–5 Parliament also saw revolts over the Iraq War which were ‘the largest rebellions by MPs of any governing party – Labour, Conservative or Liberal – on any type of policy for over 150 years’ (Cowley, 2005, 5). Iraq, of course, was a highly controversial foreign policy issue – and Blair had not only been present during the crucial debate of 18 March 2003, but had delivered an impassioned speech. However, Labour MPs also rebelled in significant numbers over elements of the government’s domestic programme – proposed reforms in education and the health service, and the attempted removal of two chairs of backbench Commons select committees (Gwyneth Dunwoody (Transport) and Donald Anderson (Foreign Affairs)). The latter rebellion, on 16 July 2001, led to government defeats.

The idea that the physical presence – let alone the oratorical powers – of Prime Ministers is unnecessary except on rare occasions of dire need reflects the widespread view that the House of Commons has become a mere ‘rubber stamp’ thanks largely to the discipline imposed by party business managers (‘whips’), enhanced by the increased prevalence of ‘career politicians’ who realize that their prospects will be impaired by a record of rebellion. However, ample evidence suggests that the House of Commons has become increasingly whip-resistant over recent decades. In this context the votes in favour of Dunwoody and Anderson held particular significance, since these results reflected a desire to curb the power of party whips to interfere with the composition of Commons select committees. The idea of truly independent committee chairs was particularly unpalatable to Tony Blair, who had instituted a parliamentary Liaison Committee before which he would appear for lengthy, twice-yearly discussions. If he could no longer control the membership of this Committee his initiative would no longer look like a bright idea; he might even have to fend off some awkward questions.

The leading authority on parliamentary rebellions, Philip Cowley, has tried hard to dispel the laziest assumptions about the supine nature of MPs. In particular, even before the Iraq votes he stressed that rebellions can be highly significant whether or not the government wins the vote. In the 2001–5 Parliament, despite its crushing majority the Blair Government sometimes had to offer concessions to its critics during the passage of legislation; and even this was not enough to buy off the most determined opponents. While votes leading to government defeats provide great copy for reporters – and moments of high drama even for viewers and listeners with limited interest in political issues – serious students of British politics should pay at least equal attention to the votes which never take place, because the government has accepted the certainty of defeat and retires from the field to rethink its approach.

However, while Cowley’s main purpose is to defend MPs from the allegation that the Commons is inhabited by rival flocks of sheep, developments over the last few decades suggest equally interesting conclusions in relation to the executive branch. From this different perspective, it seems that the mistaken view of government MPs as lobby fodder is not restricted to ill-informed commentators. As we have seen, the select few who reach the summit of their political ambitions by ‘kissing hands’ with the monarch and taking on the role of Prime Minister will find it very difficult to retain their old impressions of the humble parliamentary foot soldiers they have left behind. Even a Prime Minister who originally entered Parliament with limited ambitions – a hypothetical case in the period under review, although John Major might be regarded as a reasonable approximation – will tend to assume that, given the right inducements, a sufficient proportion of the flock can be guided back into the party fold. Ultimately, this thought process is underpinned by the belief that a governing party which indulges in public disagreements is likely to lose the next general election. The prospect of a spell in Opposition is deemed to be an adequate deterrent to all backbenchers: those who seek ministerial office will have to recalculate their planned ascent, those who have abandoned their ambitions will no longer be able to find consolation as awkward players in a winning team, while the MPs who never wanted more than to serve their constituents will become impotent onlookers as their opponents implement distasteful policies. Even worse, MPs who allow their party to fight an election in a state of disunity might lose their own seats.

When evaluating the true significance of parliamentary rebellions, it is necessary to take account of the subjects of the votes as well as the scale of non-compliance. Necessarily, contextual factors are impressionistic, whereas votes against a government measure can be counted. However, when contextual factors are taken into account the rebellious propensities of Labour MPs between 2001 and 2005 seem much less impressive than the bare statistics would suggest. Although Thatcher did encounter resistance from ‘One Nation’ Conservatives – and indeed in April 1986 her government was thwarted by MPs from all wings of the party in its attempt to relax the laws on Sunday trading – her internal critics were effectively hamstrung by the party’s refrain that it had always been on the side of ‘free enterprise’, even during the years when it had accepted the broad outlines of the post-war settlement introduced by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments (1945–51). In other words, Thatcher could be seen as a more radical exemplar of a well-worn Conservative theme, and one which had always played very well among grassroots members. For its part, in Opposition after 1979 Labour had accepted many of Thatcher’s reforms by gradual steps; but when the party won its landslide majority of 1997 there was a widespread expectation (among the general public, as well as MPs and party members) of at least a modest reaction against ‘Thatcherism’. Even Blair’s post-election pledge that ‘We have been elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour’ was taken with a pinch of salt; after all, at the beginning of her premiership Thatcher had proposed that ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’, and even her most ardent admirers would have to admit that these reassuring sentiments were rarely reflected in her subsequent decisions.

From this perspective, whereas Thatcher’s most controversial policies were almost invariably attuned to ‘core’ Conservative voters, many of New Labour’s measures represented a direct challenge to the party’s grassroots members and MPs who had embarked on political careers in order to preserve (or extend) the Attlee Governments’ reforms. The first Blair Government (1997–2001) flew an early quasi-Thatcherite kite by asking MPs to vote for a welfare reform – restricting the benefits available to lone parents – which would not have won support from any Labour member if it had been proposed by a Conservative. As such, the tally of Labour rebels – just forty-seven, plus around twenty abstentions in the vote of 11 December 1997 – was remarkably modest. The impression that the episode had been engineered by the government to smoke out and punish potential troublemakers at an early stage was reinforced by media reports that, although the government easily won the vote, the rebels would be subjected to sanctions of various kinds.

In other words, it could be argued that the most significant rebellions on domestic matters during the Blair years were provoked by a government which was working on the assumption that most of its MPs would swallow almost anything which was proposed by the first Labour government in eighteen years. This marked a sharp contrast to the best-remembered parliamentary confrontations during the premiership of John Major, when Tory MPs were the aggressors, even when the government had already met them more than halfway. In fact, shortly after the government’s re-election with a reduced majority in April 1992 there had been a departure from this pattern whose significance has been obscured by the vivid memory of the Maastricht debates.

In October 1992 British Coal announced a programme to close thirty-one out of fifty deep mines, leading to the loss of 30,000 jobs. The President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine, promptly unveiled a generous package of redundancy payments and retraining programmes. Although the closures were explained on grounds which the government had used during the 1984–5 miners’ strike – namely that the pits were ‘uneconomical’ – they were denounced by church leaders and Conservative MPs as well as Opposition politicians and trade unionists. Backbenchers on the government side were particularly outraged because the cuts would affect many of the workers who had refused to join the 1984–5 strike. Thus Tory MPs who were already feeling guilty because of the fall of Margaret Thatcher were now being asked to approve a measure which would threaten the livelihoods of people who had played an heroic part in the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Short of targeting Falklands veterans, the government could not have found a more effective way of alienating its core supporters. The announcement was even less comprehensible because it came just a few weeks after the humiliation of ‘Black Wednesday’ (16 September 1992), when Britain was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS); indeed, the plans had been leaked to the press just two days after that traumatic episode. The government was under attack for its economic management even before that fatal blow to its reputation for competence. Faced with the certainty of defeat over the pit closures, Heseltine cobbled together a package of concessions and was able to win approval for a revised programme once the initial outcry had faded (James, 1997, 186–94).

In his memoirs, John Major claimed that although he had been consulted over the closures and had to accept ‘ultimate responsibility’, he knew by ‘instinct’ that the announcement would be ‘an absolute political disaster’ (Major, 1999, 670). This does not accord with Heseltine’s own account, which describes a meeting chaired by Major in the autumn of 1992; at that time, the general view was that the closures ‘would not prove that difficult to handle’ (Heseltine, 2000, 437). This assumption could only have been based on the experience of the Thatcher years, when the government made numerous grim announcements without suffering sizeable parliamentary rebellions. Yet although the Major Government could claim to have won a clear ‘mandate’ at the 1992 general election, its overall majority of just twenty-one seats left it vulnerable to just a handful of determined malcontents. The obvious lesson, even before the ERM fiasco, was that the government should consult carefully with potential rebels before taking any controversial decisions. Its failure to do so on this incendiary issue, in those circumstances, meant that for the first time in living memory Conservative rebels who forced a government climbdown were likely to be praised rather than pilloried in the right-wing press. The lesson that there are worse things in politics than a reputation for disunity was not lost on Labour MPs, especially since the fate of the coal mines was particularly important to them.

During the Blair years the parliamentary arithmetic was of a kind which made it difficult for the most maladroit government to bring about its own downfall. As we have seen, however, Blair and his colleagues did not fail for want of trying, starting with the deliberate provocation of the 1997 welfare reforms. After Maastricht, Major had effectively surrendered to his Eurosceptic tormentors. At times it seemed as if Blair’s main purpose was to demonstrate that there were no circumstances which could make him equally impotent. Parliament, and the Labour Party in particular, had to be reminded of who was master. As Major had shown, the Prime Minister’s ultimate weapon in any serious trial of strength was the threat of dissolving Parliament. Ideally, recalcitrant MPs would be brought back into line by the merest hint that the Prime Minister might make a particular vote into an issue of confidence in the government. Blair’s mismanagement of his majority is illustrated by his tendency to make this threat explicit. Thus, for example, at a press conference in December 2003 he staked his personal authority on the passage of legislation which would introduce ‘top-up’ fees for university students. Over Iraq he had no need to issue a similar warning – if he had lost the vote authorizing action his position would obviously have been untenable – but since then he had made a veiled reference to his ‘ultimate weapon’ when trying to stave off a rebellion over foundation hospitals (Cowley, 2005, 196–7, 162). Back in 1976, Harold Wilson had written that a Prime Minister who tried ‘to bring his colleagues to heel by the unilateral threat of a dissolution … would be certifiable’ (Wilson, 1976, 40). Whether or not that word was appropriate in Blair’s case, his tactics were certainly reminiscent of the Cold War notion of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – and invited backbenchers to call his bluff. Usually (as in the case of top-up fees) Blair’s confrontational approach was the prelude to a compromise, with rebels winning significant concessions and the Prime Minister staying in office. However, such episodes could only strengthen the feeling that the executive and the legislature were now embroiled in an endemic constitutional struggle, underlying and reinforcing battles over specific policies. This change in Britain’s political culture would not be helpful to any successor who lacked Blair’s elephantine majority – or, more importantly, the enduring personal prestige arising from his record as an election winner.

The experience of Gordon Brown is particularly instructive in this respect. Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart have charted more than 200 backbench rebellions of varying significance while Brown was Prime Minister, including one which took place less than an hour after he had formally taken office (Cowley and Stuart, 2014, 5). Yet Brown had given every indication that he had learned from the bruising Blair experience, and put forward several proposals to address parliamentary grievances. Whatever his intentions, Brown was soon sidetracked by the first signs of a global banking crisis. In fact, if he had seriously sought a more amicable relationship between the executive and the legislature, he had created a formidable obstacle himself, by announcing in his final budget as Chancellor (March 2007) that the lower (10p) rate of income tax would be abolished from April 2008. In the weeks before that measure was due to take effect, Labour backbenchers launched a concerted campaign to force either a policy reversal, or other concessions which would ensure that no one would be worse off as a result of the change. Faced with the possibility of a catastrophic defeat on a Finance Bill the new Chancellor, Alistair Darling, made a timely commitment to allocate extra money to disadvantaged groups (Cowley and Stuart, 2014, 13–16). The impression that this was a government characterized by genuine errors of judgement rather than a Blairite mission to make enemies is reinforced by its defeat in April 2009 on an Opposition Day motion calling for improved settlement rights for retired Gurkha soldiers. Losing the vote was damaging enough, but the government also suffered a public relations disaster, since the Opposition had been invigorated by the indefatigable campaigning of the actress Joanna Lumley, who was far more popular than any current member of the House of Commons.

Against this background, it was difficult to predict the likely effect of the parliamentary expenses scandal which dominated media coverage of politics for several weeks in 2009. On balance, though, the idea that MPs were greedy as well as ineffectual could be taken as a challenge to prove their value, especially in causes which enjoyed considerable public support. It was not, in short, likely to abate the tendency towards conflict between the Prime Minister and Parliament. This was an unpromising context for the creation of Britain’s first peacetime coalition since 1945, as the very fact of joining forces with a political foe was sure to put some strain on Conservative and Liberal Democrat party loyalties during the 2010–15 Parliament. In addition, the coalition was committed to a controversial economic strategy – ‘austerity’ – which the Liberal Democrats had opposed until David Cameron invited them to help form a government.

However, the period of coalition government is more noteworthy for the instances of conflict within rather than between the partners. Perhaps the most curious incident was a vote on an increase in the upper limit on higher education tuition fees (9 December 2010), when the Liberal Democrats divided three ways. The largest number (twentyeight) voted in favour; twenty-one voted against, and eight abstained. In practice the twenty-one ‘rebels’ were showing their opposition to the leadership by voting in favour of a position which had been a prominent manifesto commitment less than six months earlier. On this occasion, the junior partner in the coalition was issuing its MPs with the most direct of provocations – almost tantamount to a slap in the face – and the relatively low level of outright dissent is surprising. Not to be outdone, the Conservative leadership incited rebellion in its own parliamentary ranks by introducing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. On the second reading (5 February 2013), 137 Conservative MPs voted against the measure; 127 supported it. Although this was technically a free vote, Cameron had been a vocal champion of the reform.

By this time, Cameron might have been looking for issues on which he could take a distinctive initiative, because in other respects his agenda was being undermined by unruly MPs on his own side. Anticipating trouble ahead, one of Cameron’s first actions as Prime Minister was to propose changes in the procedures of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, allowing frontbenchers to retain full membership (including voting rights) when the party was in office. This attempt to stifle dissent was carried in a vote of the Committee, but more than a hundred MPs had opposed it, so Cameron thought it prudent to back down (Cameron, 2019, 239).

In October 2011, eighty-one Conservatives defied a three-line whip to support a motion which called for a referendum on EU membership. A year later, the government was defeated when fifty-three Conservative MPs voted in favour of a cut in the EU budget, rather than the inflation-linked increase which Cameron had suggested. Although the vote was not binding on the government, Conservative Eurosceptics let it be known that they would turn out in even greater numbers if Cameron accepted a budget increase of any kind. This was the type of rebellion – a rejection of a position on Europe which was itself designed to mollify Eurosceptics – which had made Major’s life such a misery. In January 2013 Cameron capitulated, offering an in/out referendum on EU membership after the next general election. However, having scented blood Tory rebels wanted to start feasting without delay; on 15 May more than a hundred voted to express ‘regret’ that the Queen’s Speech had not included a government bill paving the way for the referendum.

The most dramatic government defeat occurred on 29 August 2013, on a motion which threatened (but, after a government concession, did not itself authorize) military action against the Syrian Assad regime. The government, which had recalled Parliament in the hope of winning approval for action, lost the vote by 285 to 272. Thirty-nine coalition MPs – thirty Tories and nine Liberal Democrats – joined Labour in opposing the motion. It was an excellent illustration of the executive/legislature split, since many MPs were clearly actuated by memories of Blair’s dubious presentation of the case for action in Iraq in 2003.

Whatever its record in other respects, the Cameron coalition was a golden era for connoisseurs of parliamentary rebellions, which took place over a remarkable range of issues and varied widely in their causes and scale. Apart from dissent within Conservative and Liberal Democrat ranks, there was a significant spat which might have caused terminal damage if Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg had not been fairly laid-back characters who were disinclined to nurse grievances. Again, the trouble arose from the aggression of Conservative backbenchers. On 10 July 2012, ninety-one MPs voted against the second reading of a bill which would have begun a gradual process of House of Lords reform, leading to a mainly elected upper chamber. Although the government won the vote, it was clear that there was sufficient opposition in the Commons to prevent further progress on an issue which had been debated many times and had always seemed likely to end in a compromise. The government decided to withdraw the legislation rather than encounter embarrassing delays and defeats. In retaliation, on 29 January 2013 the Liberal Democrats blocked the implementation of constituency boundary changes which were likely to benefit the Conservatives (partly at the expense of the Lib Dems).

As it turned out, in the 2015 general election the Conservatives were able to pick up plenty of Liberal Democrat seats without the help of boundary changes. The result, for David Cameron, was a blend of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘twin imposters’; he could take personal satisfaction from the fact that his party had increased its popular vote and secured an overall majority despite its imposition of economic austerity, but the margin (just twelve seats) left him even more vulnerable to pressure from his own backbenchers. As it was, his main problem arose not from rebellious MPs, but from a bill whose second reading (on 9 June 2015, little more than a month after the election) was supported by all parties except the Scottish National Party (SNP) and passed by 544 votes to 53. This was the legislation, introduced by the government itself, to authorize the EU referendum.

This is not the place for a detailed account of the parliamentary chaos which descended in the wake of the 2016 referendum. Theresa May’s record of thirty-three defeats – all of which took place after the snap election which was called to strengthen her parliamentary position – lacked the rich diversity of the coalition’s record, but more than compensated in its crop of parliamentary ‘firsts’. Most notably, MPs voted to hold the entire government (rather than an individual minister) in contempt of Parliament, and, on 15 January 2019, inflicted the largest defeat suffered by any government in the democratic era (432–202, on the terms of May’s EU withdrawal agreement).

At times during this prolonged and highly complex saga – which continued under May’s successor, Boris Johnson, until the general election of December 2019 – it seemed that the battle between Parliament and the Prime Minister would find at least a temporary resolution in favour of the former. Parliament as an institution was widely blamed for the months of political deadlock. However, ultimate responsibility for the mishandling of ‘Brexit’ lay with the executive, whose initial determination to trigger the process of withdrawal from the EU without parliamentary consent was a remarkable power-grab which was bound to meet resistance somewhere. It was the courts, rather than Parliament, which thwarted May’s intentions, by ruling against the government in the case of R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (January 2017). Despite this reiteration of Parliament’s constitutional role, within weeks MPs had complied with the executive’s wishes and started the withdrawal process in accordance with Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty. Even though a majority in the Commons wanted the UK to remain within the EU, the triggering of Article 50 was passed by huge majorities – 498 to 114 on second reading, for example. This was a remarkable contravention of the old Burkean idea that MPs should act as representatives, capable of exercising independent judgement, rather than delegates who should bow to public opinion. It was eclipsed on 18 April 2017 when the Commons made a mockery of the 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act (which purported to remove the executive’s discretion in the timing of elections) and approved May’s proposal to dissolve Parliament by 522 votes to 13.

Parliament, in short, was ready to submit to the ‘will of the people’ as expressed in the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum. Although the Prime Minister had supported ‘Remain’, she had contrived to reinterpret the vote into a plebiscite on the power of the executive vis-à-vis the legislature. By calling the referendum when the outcome was at best uncertain, the executive had made a fearful blunder: but some other institution would have to pay the price. However, May botched her opportunistic election, and could only scramble together something which looked like a workable majority thanks to the dearly bought sufferance of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Rather like a series of mishaps in the Grand National, this unexpected result handed the lead back to Parliament; but the divisions which had persuaded May to call an election (in contradiction of previous public pledges) resurfaced whenever Parliament looked set to consolidate its advantage, and by failing to agree on any alternative plan in a series of ‘indicative votes’ MPs effectively refused at the final fence.

Although Boris Johnson initially looked even less likely to reach the winning line, his decision in September 2019 to remove the Conservative ‘whip’ from twenty-one MPs who had voted to prevent the executive from regaining control of the Brexit proceedings gave him the necessary momentum. It looked like a throwback to the 1990s, when John Major had withdrawn the party whip from eight MPs (including Michael Carttiss, who in 1990 had told Margaret Thatcher that she could ‘wipe the floor’ with her opponents) after they had voted against an EU Finance Bill. Major had subsequently allowed the ‘whipless wonders’ back into the fold; but subsequent changes in the party rules meant that MPs who had been deprived of the whip could not stand for re-election as Conservative candidates. It turned out that the rule change was only a secondary factor in the similar circumstances of 2019; more importantly, Major had been trying to exert discipline over Eurosceptic MPs who cared for their adopted cause more than their party, while the opposite was true of the MPs who incurred Johnson’s wrath. In 2019, what might have been taken as a sign of futile vindictiveness by the executive was transformed into a tactical master stroke thanks to the passivity of Johnson’s victims; even the ones who had no intention of standing at the next election seemed to think that their punishment for voting in accordance with their personal views was richly deserved, and four of the MPs who subsequently had the whip restored went on to retain their seats in the 2019 general election as endorsed Conservatives. Their submissive attitude was all the more surprising since it coincided with a furore over another executive power-grab – Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament, which was subsequently quashed by the courts. Instead of rising like lions to avenge the executive’s cynical constitutional ploy, the Commons voted on 29 October to resume their ovine role, authorizing by 438 votes to 20 a general election which the majority of MPs decidedly did not want.

It was never likely that the return of the Conservatives in December 2019, with an overall majority of eighty seats, would put an end to the battle between Parliament and the Prime Minister. However, the lesson of the conflict since 1979 is that even though individual governments might lose the occasional skirmish, through ill luck or mind-boggling incompetence, the executive will always find some way to ensure parliamentary obedience (if not confidence in the literal sense).