Caught Offside

What, we might reasonably ask ourselves, happened in the Commons yesterday? We were watching the Parliament channel - sad old buggers, I hear you say - and although we missed the very start of it all, and the initial departure of the Speaker, we witnessed the whole thing live. Amid the confusion and shouting, the sense of what was going on was obscure to say the least: again the context of the opening of the whole debate would have helped.

From what I've gleaned so far today through the [partial] hindsight of the papers, is that Labour were facing a massive rebellion from their own rank and file which would have seen many of them voting for the SNP motion on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in the absence of any official party stance to the contrary; and so arranged to table an amendment, which seems on the face of it to have been intended to flag a more sympathetic view on ceasefire than has been the party line hitherto, in order to head off the rebellion at the pass. In allowing this unusual intervention, the Speaker also sanctioned, in the spirit of balance, it would seem to me, the Government to table its own amendment, which would have taken precedence, under Parliamentary protocol, over the Labour amendment.

Rightly, the SNP got on their high horse over all of this, as it was their Opposition day, not Labour's, and it looked like they were being sidelined by the English yet again - Celt surprise, once again. Then, the Government summarily pulled the plug on their vote and withdrew - quite literally, along with the SNP, members from the chamber - leaving, they hoped, Labour and the Speaker looking like they had pulled some kind of fast one - which of course they had, but not quite in the coup d'état manner they were characterising it all as, at great volume. As one government minister admitted to The Guardian subsequently, "We're not as angry as we're pretending...".

We today now have the noisome spectacle of Penny Mordaunt accusing Labour of playing politics - which of course they were - whilst maintaining that the Government, as always, occupies the moral high ground by not, of course, ever stooping to such things(!). Chuck into this odious mix that there are now widespread calls for the Speaker - one of the very finest we've had for decades - to resign, and I think that we are more than overdue an immediate General Election to rid the country of a government so weak and corrupt that it stoops to what was effectively an offside trap to trip up the main party of opposition: as it turns out, spectacularly unsuccessfully. As to the SNP, I like and respect the Westminster leader of the party Stephen Flynn as a politician and debater, but I do think he is falling into a bear-trap of his own making by pulling stunts such as we witnessed yesterday, something his esteemed predecessor would never have done...