By Sir Geoffrey Cox
By deciding that Labour should be able to present its amendment, and that its amendment should be voted upon first, Labour was allowed to take over the opposition day debate allocated to the Scottish National Party and effectively set aside the SNP motion demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
There are two possible explanations for Mr Speaker’s decision to abandon the long-standing convention that only the Government should be able to move an amendment to an opposition day motion.
This convention ensures the party moving the motion of its choice on opposition day (which each opposition party is allocated), is guaranteed to have it voted upon, unless the Government carries its amendment, thus expressing the will of the House.
First, he did it to assist his former party leader get out of a bind. It is said that around 100 Labour MPs might have voted in favour of the SNP motion. Secondly, he did it, as he himself says, in a misguided attempt to protect certain mainly Labour MPs from the intimidation that they said would otherwise have followed if they had voted against the SNP motion.
Either reason is unacceptable. If the former, it is an abuse of his office. If the latter, it is an abject surrender to intolerance and tyranny; it meekly offers up the House of Commons as able to be influenced by external threats.
The Speaker has accepted he made a serious error of judgment but the real question is, who induced him into this error? Who persuaded Mr Speaker that he should change the procedures of the House of Commons and permit those mainly Labour MPs to avoid the question the SNP, subject only to the Government’s amendment, was entitled on that day to ask MPs to decide. He says to protect them from intimidation and violence?
We know that shortly before the decision was taken, the Leader of the Opposition met him in his rooms. There, he pressed the case on the Speaker. We can imagine how the arguments went.
MPs should be allowed to vote for a range of views and not be artificially confined to binary formulations that did not accord with their sense of the issues; feelings were running high out there; MPs (the Speaker’s old colleagues) were being regularly threatened in the constituencies outside the House of Commons. The long-standing convention was outdated and needed to be changed. The Speaker had a duty to protect them.
Thus, insidiously, poison was administered. A speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom weakly capitulated before the spectre of intimidation of MPs made fearful by external threats and apparently too afraid to vote with their consciences. He altered the procedures to save them from it, at the expense of another party’s right, and made a mockery of the Parliament and the people he serves.
What message does it send to the enemies of democracy around the world, if they see that the very seat of democracy in the United Kingdom can be so easily moved by such threats?
I am not calling for Lindsay Hoyle to go. He is mortified and realises he got this judgment wrong. But the one who urged the ignominious surrender, for no doubt purely coincidental party advantage, and was seen to have mouthed, “thank you”, as he passed the Speaker’s chair a few minutes later, was none other than Sir Keir, who in less than a year will ask that same people and Parliament to entrust him with the security of the nation.
