Think back a touch under nine years, to May 7 1997. Once the massed ranks of the newly-elected PLP had crowded into Church House for their first meeting (no room in the Palace of Westminster could hold them), Labour’s first prime minister for 18 years addressed them on the need for party discipline. Look at the Tories, he said, and see what happened to them. ‘They were all swept away, rebels and loyalists alike. Of course, speak your minds. But realise why you are here: you are here because of the Labour party under which you fought.’
Now scroll forward nine years. Which other post-war government with a majority of over 60 contrived to suffer four defeats within its first nine months? Answer: none. Major’s much-derided Tories suffered just four defeats as a result of backbench dissent on whipped votes in the five years between 1992 and 1997. The third Blair term has managed in nine months what it took Major five years to achieve, despite having a majority three times the size.
This article is being written the week after the government got its ID cards bill (an explicit manifesto commitment) through the Commons only after giving yet further concessions to its critics, and during which it abandoned its manifesto commitment on smoking entirely in the face of backbench opposition.
Again, can you name any other post-war government that, within its first year, allowed a free vote on an explicit manifesto commitment (and that then saw just nine per cent of its MPs vote for the policy which had been contained in its manifesto)? I bet you can’t. And we’ve also seen the government concede ground on other legislation in the face of backbench opposition, including its incapacity benefit reforms, and the still ongoing process of watering down the education bill. For those who remember the Major years, some of this seems familiar.
But according to the last edition of Progress (A Major mistake, January/February 2006), any comparisons between Labour and John Major’s Tories ‘are a load of pants’. A particular culprit in making this mistake is one Philip Cowley,‘the much-cited author of The Rebels’, whose account is ‘overly fatalistic’.
However, the book’s thesis wasn’t especially fatalistic. It was that Labour MPs had been rebelling in unprecedented numbers between 2001 and 2005, something which few outside observers had noticed. The MP-as-sheep cliché was so deeply ingrained that even many of the most experienced commentators were simply unable to get it out of their head. When I tried to point out the extent to which rebellion had become commonplace within the PLP, people would look at me as if I was a slightly slow eight year-old who had ingested too much lead.
And the book went on to argue that it was a little naive to assume that all those rebels would simply knuckle down now. I shan’t name all of those who told me with absolute confidence that Labour MPs would behave differently once there was a smaller majority, and that 66 was a perfectly manageable majority (although like the U-boat officer in Dad’s Army I have taken down their names).
Yet so far 73 Labour MPs have voted against the whip since the May election, and very few of them have done so for the first time. Strip out half-a-dozen new entrants, and you can count the number of new rebels on the fingers of one hand. Today’s rebels nearly all have what police officers call ‘form’. Blair’s current backbench opposition is no uprising of virgins, but just the continuation of behaviour seen throughout the preceding years.
But the real reason that the book cannot be described as fatalistic is that it argued that there was nothing inevitable about the government running into difficulty with its backbenchers. It said: ‘Of course, a majority of 66 could still be sufficient. It’s hardly wafer-thin. If the PLP was treated with a bit of TLC then there shouldn’t be too many problems. Tony Blair’s immediate post-election speech – in which he promised to listen – certainly sounded as if he might take such an approach. But the prime minister always sounds like this. After every bloody nose he gets, Tony Blair sounds conciliatory. The problem is that he then struggles to be conciliatory. It’s just not in his political DNA. It’s like expecting Graham Norton to become butch.’
None of that sounds like fatalism to me – unless fatalism has become a synonym for accuracy.