Notes on Boris' Backbench Blunder
The Tories backbench revolt means a whole lot more than a threat to the Prime Minister's leadership.
Of all the effects of this week’s backbench rebellion of 98 Conservative MPs, one is the most profound.
No, it isn’t the crystallisation of the sense that Boris Johnson’s time may soon be up. Let’s wait and see how today’s by-election turns out.
And no, it isn’t the fierce re-emergence of “proper Conservatism” from across the political spectrum of the Tory party. Although you know when Theresa May and the Spartans are in the same division lobby, something is surely up.
Instead, the revolt was symbolic of a concrete movement of authority for decision-making out of the hands of Boris Johnson and back to Parliament.
Going forward, parliament will be central to the deciding of further lockdown restrictions, where a wide range of views can once again be aired, instead of a government using the weakness of its opposition to do whatever it wants without challenge.
And, if like me you are fearful of executive overreach and the avoidance of proper political scrutiny, that is actually quite comforting.
For there is a problem here no one seems to want to talk about. Labour is quick to try to call out the government’s anti-democratic tendencies, but Labour’s broken-record accusations of “Tory sleaze” fall on deaf ears, and are trivialising something important.
The updating of civil servants with legislative instructions that haven’t been given parliamentary consent is unambiguously undemocratic. So too is the announcement of new restrictions, budget details, policy prescriptions, etc, to the media or a press conference before they have first been delivered to parliament.
Enemies of the government seem to use Speaker’s rage at the latter point as yet another stick to score a cheap political point, but Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s position is far from partisan. You can’t have a parliamentary democracy without a respected parliament.
Brexit has shifted how many conceive of Parliament’s proper relationship to the executive, and some go so far as to see it as an obstacle to executive ambition.
But make no mistake, the pandemic makes clear the necessity of a strong parliament, empowered by a strong, impartial speaker, to hold the government and its excesses to account when Her Majesty’s Opposition is either not willing to or not capable of.