This week I began Business of the House Questions by raising equal marriage, which will be debated in the Commons on Monday and Tuesday. This debate and the subsequent passage of the third reading will ensure that the historic progress on LGBT equality accomplished by the previous government is consolidated.
I continued by raising the Tory crisis over Europe. I noted that, last week, as all the grandeur of the state opening of parliament unfolded, the government presented a united front and revealed … a mouse of a legislative programme. Before the cap on maintenance was even back in the wardrobe, Tory Eurosceptics had tabled a motion regretting their own government’s Queen’s speech. Soon after No 10 said they were ‘relaxed’. By the weekend, the Tory rebellion gathered pace and the cabinet joined in. Both Michael Gove and Philip Hammond announced they wanted out of the European Union but that, sadly, the Liberal Democrats wouldn’t let them have a vote on it. As the Tory party descended into chaos, the prime minister shared with us his unique concept of firm leadership: proclaim that you are intensely relaxed, leave the country, blame the Liberal Democrats, panic and rush to publish an entirely spurious private member’s bill which contains no implementation clause and no money resolution.
I reminded the House that back In 2006 the prime minister said that the Conservative party should stop ‘banging on about Europe’; in 2009 he said that his party’s position on Europe was ‘settled’, and promised that he: ‘Will not have an undisciplined team whoever it is. Full stop’. But last night 116 of his backbenchers voted against him. This was the 35th Tory rebellion on Europe in this parliament.
Also in last night’s rebellion, 13 parliamentary private secretaries voted against the government. I drew the leader of the House’s attention to a clause from the current ministerial code. It reads: ‘parliamentary private secretaries are expected to support the government in important divisions in the House. No parliamentary private secretary who votes against the government can retain his or her position.’ I asked him to confirm whether those PPSs will now be sacked, or is the prime minister going to rewrite the ministerial code?
This whole thing reminds me of what Karl Marx said in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon ‘History repeats itself first as tragedy second as farce’. Well it seems with the antics last night we are firmly in the farcical stage and we have a Conservative party determined to prove that Karl Marx was right.
When the economy is flatlining, when living standards are falling, when people up and down Britain are suffering real pain – They will not forgive a government too focused on its own obsessions to address the challenges this country faces.
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle
When James Wharton stages his Canute-like attempt to prevent Labour from taking back Stockton South, then that party ought to put down an amendment declining to give the
Daft Bill a Second Reading in view of its eschatological timetable (except that the eschaton might come at any moment, and will certainly come at some moment), leading to its entire failure to address immediately pressing concerns such as:
– The total failure of any “Social Europe” ever to save a single job, service, benefit or amenity;
– The EU’s imposition of economic austerity;
– The long, and increasingly accelerated, creation of a militarised EU waging global wars of “liberal intervention” while sustaining a vast military-industrial complex selling arms to all and sundry;
– The refusal of the Council of Ministers to legislate in public and to publish an Official Report akin to Hansard;
– The presence in the Council of Ministers and in the European Parliament of all manner of extremist and politically undesirable legislators;
– The Common Agricultural Policy;
– The Common Fisheries Policy;
– EU control of industrial and regional policy;
– The moves towards a “free trade” agreement between the EU and the United States, to the ruination of jobs, workers’ rights, consumer protection and environmental responsibility on two
continents inhabited by many hundreds of millions of people;
– Social dumping;
– The drastic restrictions of civil liberties necessary in order to make possible the borderless Europe that has always been a stated aim of the EU;
– The centrality of EU law to the proposed privatisation of the Royal Mail;
– The illegality under EU law of any renationalisation of the utilities or of the railways once they have been privatised, although there is no obligation to privatise them in the first place, with the preposterous and pernicious consequence that British railways and utilities can be and are State-owned, just so long as the State in question is not the British State, while the least subsidised railway line in Great Britain has to be returned to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice;
– The impossibility under EU law of using State aid to support two domestic sources of energy, so that it is impossible for this country both to have a nuclear power industry and to exploit
our vast resources of coal;
– The abject incompetence of David Cameron in failing to deliver a real terms reduction in the United Kingdom’s contribution to the EU Budget at this time of austerity, as explicitly required by a resolution of the House of Commons; and
– The role of EU competition law in the ongoing dismantlement of the National Health Service in England.
There are more. But those ought to be enough to be getting on with. A Second Reading Amendment must not be too long. In this case, though, it all too easily could be.
However, would the media pay even so much as the tiniest attention to it? Even if it were passed? Ed Miliband ought to make it clear that if this were not passed, then Labour would vote in both Lobbies on the unamended Second Reading motion, while the Whip would be
withdrawn from anyone who voted in only one of them.
Or would the media just carry on giving coverage to Nigel and Nadine for a laugh? Dare we hope that Nigel and Nadine might be asked what it was about the EU to which they could possibly object? A polite way of asking whether or not they knew even so much as the first thing about politics. Or, indeed, whether or not the media did.
There is only one way to find out.
The Tories may have descended into chaos but in the media we – Labour- were not there. Last weekend on the Tory Euro split, on Gay Marriage , on reactionary Tory Party members – possibly worst time for a Tory leader since John Major – we were not there. Our Media presence was absent, invisible – sorry if we can not deliver hard blows like last weekend we do not look like a Government in Waiting. We were not there.