Corbyn reaches his hundredth resignation
There has been a lot of discussion about "Tory Splits" on Europe but the reality is that the fault lines on Europe go through most of the parties, including Conservative, Labour and the SNP rather than between them.
The Conservatives have divisions on Europe but managed to keep the show on the road this week and avoid losing any votes in the House of Commons.
Yes, the government had to make some concessions. You know what? Given that the country is pretty evenly divided on the issue and the Brexit vote wasn't an overwhelming margin like 70:30 but a knife-edge 52:48 I think it is actually right that there should be a degree of compromise with both sides trying to see the other's points of view.
Let's just consider for a moment the splits on the Labour side.
Where the largest Conservative rebellion was 3 MPs, the largest Labour one featured 90 Labour MPs in two opposite directions - a three line whip has been set to abstain on whether to remove from the EU withdrawal bill a House of Lords amendment supporting European Economic Area (EEA) membership. Instead of abstaining, 75 Labour MPs voted to keep that amendment and 15 voted to scrap it.
Must confess I have more sympathy for the Labour 90 MPs who actually voted for a position in either direction than with those who obeyed orders to sit on their hands and do nothing.
And six of those 90 MPs had been members of the Labour frontbench team and resigned from it to be free to vote for or against the amendment.
This takes the number of resignations from Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench team past the 100 mark which is really quite an extraordinary number. I doubt if any British party leader in recent parliamentary history has suffered remotely such a large number of resignations. Guido Fawkes has a list of 103 resignations from Corbyn's team (some of which could be considered sackings) here.
The Conservatives have divisions on Europe but managed to keep the show on the road this week and avoid losing any votes in the House of Commons.
Yes, the government had to make some concessions. You know what? Given that the country is pretty evenly divided on the issue and the Brexit vote wasn't an overwhelming margin like 70:30 but a knife-edge 52:48 I think it is actually right that there should be a degree of compromise with both sides trying to see the other's points of view.
Let's just consider for a moment the splits on the Labour side.
Where the largest Conservative rebellion was 3 MPs, the largest Labour one featured 90 Labour MPs in two opposite directions - a three line whip has been set to abstain on whether to remove from the EU withdrawal bill a House of Lords amendment supporting European Economic Area (EEA) membership. Instead of abstaining, 75 Labour MPs voted to keep that amendment and 15 voted to scrap it.
Must confess I have more sympathy for the Labour 90 MPs who actually voted for a position in either direction than with those who obeyed orders to sit on their hands and do nothing.
And six of those 90 MPs had been members of the Labour frontbench team and resigned from it to be free to vote for or against the amendment.
This takes the number of resignations from Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench team past the 100 mark which is really quite an extraordinary number. I doubt if any British party leader in recent parliamentary history has suffered remotely such a large number of resignations. Guido Fawkes has a list of 103 resignations from Corbyn's team (some of which could be considered sackings) here.
Comments