MPs & protest. A tradition of the Freeborn Englishman
A reported reason why the Speaker called a Labour motion on Gaza in the Commons on February 21st when a SNP motion was meant to be the subject of debate, was that Keir Starmer had persuaded him that MPs who didn’t back an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza (despite the verbiage Labour’s motion did not)would face protests and ‘threats’.
There is no doubt that social media has amplified the possibility of making unpleasant threats and not just to MPs. In recent times several MPs have been murdered, one by a fascist and another by someone with health issues.
MPs safety is a reasonable concern but they are representatives not delegates and need to be able to listen to and respond to the views of constituents. The Parliamentary system of whipping militates against this but if Parliament can’t reflect the mood in the country, and protests and opinion polls suggest the mood is for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, then there is a serious democratic deficit.
Protests around elections and MPs are part of the tradition of the Freeborn Englishman, as much as attempts to prevent them are part of a different reactionary tradition.
In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson writes of the 1803 Election held after a brief respite from wars with France, where several Jacobin candidates came forward.
In Lancaster a ‘Jacobinical mob’ was addressed by a lady who told them the ‘contest was between shoes and wooden clogs, between fine shirts and coarse ones, between the opulent and the poor and that the people were everything if they chose to assert their rights’
While in Nottingham a reformer was elected with William Cobbett, at this point on the side of reaction, commenting that the crowd was a ‘republican revolutionary mob’. The Commons voted to unseat the victorious candidate on the basis that electors had been intimidated by rioters
All part of Our Island Story, whether Government and Opposition currently in Parliament like it or not
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