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Going to try to do a #nuance on this increasingly popular opposition line: "we'll abstain but do things to it in committee." Fans of parliament (?) will remember this one from Harman's interim leadership and abstention on the then welfare bill in 2015. https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1313030663956828160
And that points up a problem with it, of course: parliamentary votes - especially at second reading - are the big, symbolic ones, and whether you think it's right or not, they lodge in people's minds more than bill committee work. Politics has an irreducible symbolic component.
That abstention laid a lot of the groundwork for people to say 'well, I don't like what the Labour Party seems to stand for - managerial vacuity and principle-free manoeuvering - so I'll vote for the kindly-looking socialist who seems more in touch with its roots.'
But, the line is not unreasonable. Oppositions can make serious change in bill committees, & govt members are sometimes more pliable after abstention. But this is more often true if:
1. It's not an ideologically controversial bill.
2. Government doesn't have a thumping majority.
1. It's not an ideologically controversial bill.
2. Government doesn't have a thumping majority.
I don't think either applies here, and because condition 2 is true it even impels government members to be less pliant on relatively routine matters of legislation. (Not that there are too many of those these days.)
Nonetheless, maybe the opposition are just optimistic. But there's another part of the calculus, which is simply political, which is: is this a trap? That was, I think, the logic behind the whipped abstention and PPS firings on the so-called torture bill a few days back.
I assume the LOTO logic was: don't let Starmer's big conference speech be swallowed by a "Human Rights Lawyer Hates Our Brave Boys" controversy, especially because the government majority means they couldn't actually do anything about it.
Now, you might think there are red lines here. You might think it's worthwhile to take a stand against this stuff because it keeps the idea that this stuff is and ought to be politically controversial, and that controversy ought to be represented in public life.
And the LOTO job is (or ought to include) deciding which of those battles are worth fighting even though you lose them, because the principle is so overwhelmingly important, & which you compromise on. In both cases, I (unsuprisingly) would want the party to push back harder.
(Partly because I think the logic is wrong: it falls back on a Labour Party reflex, which is that gas-and-water socialism might be saleable to the electorate, but the apparatus of human rights & internationalism is soft hopeless cosmopolitan decadence. But that's another story.)
But FWIW, the idea that Corbyn never made these kind of compromises is not - imo - supportable. Obvious case is on Trident renewal, where he subjugated his own (correct, in my view) principles because he recognised a fight that he was going to lose & would damage him politically.
