Whip smart

We read today that Andy Burnham wishes, were he to become prime minister, to do something about the whipping system. 

Exactly what isn’t clear. In his latest interview with The Times, Patrick Maguire says that Burnham doesn’t “resile from” his previously stated support for abolishing whipping, but the extensive quotations from Burnham which follow don’t ever quite say, explicitly, that that’s what Burnham would actually do. He does think it’s very bad though.

It is a thought so dense it generates an event horizon

Abolishing whipping is a monumentally stupid idea. I worry that I have perhaps referred to too many other ideas kicking around British politics as stupid, and thus left myself rhetorically without the tools to adequately describe how utterly, totally moronic the idea of abolishing the whip is. It is a thought so dense it generates an event horizon. 

For those unfamiliar with the jargon, “whipping” is the system by which political parties get their MPs to vote the same way in Parliament. It is the thing that gradually turned a chamber of hundreds of more-or-less independent representatives into the modern chamber of organised parties; in fact, the whip is the only reason political parties as we understand them today came to be at all.

A parliament without a whipping system could not, in modern conditions, function. The entire basis of our system of government is that the government commands the confidence of the Commons, and the test of that is that it is able to get its legislation through the Commons. There needs therefore to be some system for corralling together a majority of MPs behind a particular programme and making sure they vote for it.

This is especially true in modern times because unlike in the glory days of the London coffee house and the powdered wig, the overwhelming majority of MPs in today’s Commons are elected under party colours. A party can only make an offer to the electorate if it can more-or-less guarantee that MPs elected under its auspices will vote for that programme; if not, the whole thing is nonsense.

Whipping seems often to strike as distasteful those who take a rarified approach towards constitutional procedure. MPs being more independent sounds nice and good, and so they support it, and clutch their pearls whenever that independence is curtailed. Yet beneath this politics of manners there is seldom any coherent notion of how this country is actually supposed to be governed.

By way of example: Jonathan Sumption, an otherwise broadly conservative constitutional commentator, has written that it was outrageous that Boris Johnson withdrew the whip from mutinous Tory MPs who were trying to undermine his government on Brexit. Yet Sumption also deplores the introduction of the referendum to British constitutional life. 

These two positions are incompatible. The whole reason Harold Wilson first resorted to a referendum was to paper over divisions inside his party — because without a referendum, the only way to resolve an issue like Europe is at a general election. And of course, you can only resolve something at a general election if parties have some way of ensuring that all their candidates support the party position. Can you imagine if a pro-Leave Conservative prime minister had fought a general election on the proposition of Brexit, and your local Tory MP was David Gauke? How exactly would you cast a ballot in support of that prime minister and that proposal? 

Now “abolish the whips” is one of those things which is very attractive when you’re being whipped and much less attractive when the whips answer to you, so it may well be that Burnham doesn’t quite end up sawing off his own feet to quite that extent if he does become prime minister.

But the reflex is very much of a piece with other modern fashions which crop up in Burnham’s thinking, such as boundless enthusiasm for devolution. The common thread which unites these approaches is that each of them involves divesting the prime minister of the power to – and thus, the responsibility to — drive change and deliver outcomes. They are the ultimate process policies, the comfort zone of the unambitious and inadequate. Change is hard — so make it someone else’s problem.

Even reports that the various Labour leadership hopefuls are toying with electoral reform springs from the same sad instinct. Yes, it will partly be about survival; First Past the Post can cut incredibly deeply when your polling dips below a certain level. But would also mean that never again would one party have a majority in the Commons — and thus nobody but itself to blame for its failures.