The Guardian’s Editorial on Starmer’s suspension of seven Labour MPs for voting against his line in Child Universal Credit benefit caps in July 2024 began:
The Labour party is a “broad church”, but there’s little space on its pews at the moment for principled nonconformists.
While the Editorial quotes to effect several academics on why the suspension was a bad thing for Parliamentary democracy and without precedent in post-1945 politics (Boris Johnson aside obviously) it misses the person who most accurately defined Labour’s Broad Church and how it does and does not work.
This is what Ralph Miliband, author of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) had to say:
Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.
At some length four of the seven MPs have had the whip restored, the other three are apparently regarded as being too rebellious. Protest and Survive is a far better principle for times like these than Starmerite pew management
Leave a Reply