Until it respects its backbenchers, the government will not turn things around
4 min read
If the government wants to avoid another year of confrontation and chaos, it should start treating Labour MPs as allies who want to help, not nuisances to be ignored.
It has been a bleak midwinter for our party. There is no point denying the fact that Labour is now catastrophically unpopular, and we are facing an electoral wipeout on a scale even more emphatic than that suffered by the Tories in 2024.
The Prime Minister has emphasised his determination to turn this around in the new year ahead. But if the government is to succeed in this ambition, it will need a far healthier relationship with our parliamentary democracy.
If the government learns to treat its backbenchers as allies who want it to succeed without necessarily endorsing its every notion, rather than seeing us as a nuisance to be kept in line, it will find that many of the errors which have plagued it become avoidable.
From the sudden abandonment of Labour’s core universalist values on the Winter Fuel Payment and seeking to arbitrarily cut welfare support for some of the poorest members of our society, to the idea of digital ID cards and the abolition of some jury trials, there was no discussion prior to these announcements being made and nothing in our manifesto to support such policies.
And from the logically flawed attacks on protections for nature in the planning system, to proposals for drastically reforming Agricultural Property Relief, and the misstep over business rate changes for local pubs, each of our major policy blunders has been made despite ample private and public warnings from Labour’s own MPs.
Time and again, only organised opposition and the threat of a backbench rebellion have succeeded in correcting the government’s course to a more sensible position. In the end, with U-turns only coming at the eleventh hour, after months of ministers asserting their unshakeable determination to proceed regardless, we appear stuck in a cycle of chaos and self-inflicted errors.
The Prime Minister’s position would be far more secure if we stopped pretending that party loyalty in Parliament means accepting an unspoken doctrine of cabinet infallibility. A more open, mature and constructive approach that takes the concerns and proposals raised by backbench MPs seriously would serve far better than the hunched, tetchy and defensive response to challenge often exhibited by the government so far.
The apparent anxiety amongst some at the top of the Labour Party that there are Trotskyists behind every Early Day Motion or amendment to a bill is laughable. The fundamental purpose of backbenchers is to act as critical friends, and that means using every tool at our disposal to challenge and scrutinise policy on behalf of those we represent. And if the result of MPs carrying out our basic functions is that we may not be reselected, then all bets are off. You can’t control those who’ve got nothing to lose.
Objecting to elements of a government bill and using parliamentary process to challenge or alter it is not disloyal – it is our most useful function for ministers. They inevitably spend most of their time cooped up in Whitehall, surrounded by bureaucrats and apparatchiks who are no doubt very clever, but do not represent the views of the public as we do. Stress testing ideas in the Commons and acting on our feedback is the government’s best chance to keep its policies from collapsing on impact with public opinion.
A political approach that values parliamentary democracy would welcome and seize on, rather than resist, the ideas put forward by backbench MPs. For example, having a range of MPs on Public Bill Committees, encouraged to treat it as a space for genuine change rather than a tedious formality, would be a healthy step which could avert many problems further down the line.
To avoid another year of bitter confrontation and debacle, the passage of legislation should be approached with a more joie de vivre and less determination to ensure, at all costs, that the final product is as unchanged from the original as possible.
Instead, the objective should be to bring as many MPs as possible on board through a spirit of cooperation and respect, rather than relying on the whips to ensure a cowed and submissive Parliamentary Labour Party, which will pass legislation in spite of concerns.
Much though some political advisors and commentators may wish it, we do not have an elective dictatorship in this country. It should not be easy to pass legislation, even with a landslide majority. As Labour backbenchers, it is still our duty to jealously guard our constituents from poorly designed changes to their lives. It’s a dirty job – but someone’s got to do it.
Chris Hinchliff is Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire and Neil Duncan-Jordan is Labour MP for Poole.
