Tag Archives: Julian Smith

Cabinet discipline is poor because May cannot threaten to sack her ministers

Theresa May’s cabinet is the most ill-disciplined in British political history, according to chief whip Julian Smith. What does he expect?

So many Conservative MPs have resigned from her government – and so many are emphatically opposed to her current direction on Brexit – that she can no longer fill all the vacancies in government ministerial posts.

She cannot threaten her ministers with the sack, so they have no reason to kowtow to her; they can say and do whatever they like and she’ll have to bribe them if she wants them to support her.

Or she can threaten them with a claim that their misbehaviour is splitting the Conservative Party.

Current indications show that neither option is working.

The chief whip, Julian Smith, has said the cabinet is the “worst example” of cabinet ill-discipline in British political history.

Source: Smith: Cabinet is ‘worst example’ of discipline – BBC News

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Tory chief whip and chair should both resign after breaking ‘pairing’ arrangement to win crunch vote

Tory chief whip Julian Smith, who demanded that Brandon Lewis break a ‘pairing’ agreement, and Jo Swinson, whose agreement was broken.

This is a betrayal of democracy.

Pairing is a longstanding convention in the House of Commons, where the whips of the government and an opposition party agree to allow MPs from one side to miss a vote because of personal reasons or official business. The other party agrees to hold back one of their MPs from voting so the two absences cancel each other out.

I was under the impression that such arrangements were treated as sacred; Parliamentary democracy is meaningless without them.

So I doubt the truth of the Tory statement that they have been broken 66 times in the current Parliament – 52 times by opposition parties. It’s easy to say but where is the proof?

Meanwhile we have clear evidence that the Tories have been abusing voting rules left, right and centre – for example, forcing Naz Shah to be wheeled through the lobby in a wheelchair while she was ill, because they refused to allow her vote to be counted otherwise.

The incident demonstrates the contempt Conservatives have for democracy.

They will go to any lengths to push their policies through, and if it means betraying the principle on which the Mother of Parliaments is built, that means nothing to them.

The Conservatives have been forced to admit that their chief whip asked MPs to breach Commons voting conventions in knife-edge Brexit votes on Tuesday, as opposition parties demanded he quit and queried the accuracy of the prime minister’s account of events.

Party sources conceded on Thursday night that Julian Smith had asked several Tory MPs to break pairing arrangements but most had refused to do so. The only one who did obey the instruction was paired to a Liberal Democrat MP who was on maternity leave.

They admitted that Smith had wanted some MPs to break “short-term” pairing arrangements, where a Tory is asked to skip a vote because an opposition member is unable to attend for good reason, but had made an error in asking the party chairman, Brandon Lewis, to vote because he was paired with Jo Swinson – who only recently gave birth.

Smith was under intense pressure to see off a Tory rebel amendment on Tuesday’s trade bill, which called for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU if a free trade deal could not be negotiated quickly. The Conservatives narrowly won by six votes.

Labour called for Smith and Lewis to resign, and accused Theresa May of giving the Commons a misleading account of events when she said at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday that Lewis’s vote “was done in error”.

Source: Jo Swinson pairing row: Conservatives admit chief whip asked MPs to break arrangements | Politics | The Guardian

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This man is profiting hugely from the Tory sex scandals

Gavin Williamson: If anybody has benefited from the Tory sex scandal, it isn’t women – it’s him [Image: David Mirzoeff/PA].

Isn’t it ironic that former Conservative Chief Whip Gavin Williamson has been appointed as the new Defence Secretary after Sir Michael Fallon’s resignation?

You see, Mr Williamson is the man who, we’re told, compiled the weekly “Ins and Outs” reports on Tory MPs’ sexual offences. Sir Michael’s name was on the Tory sleaze spreadsheet apparently compiled by the whips’ office and it is now being alleged that further claims were made about his behaviour to minority prime minister Theresa May yesterday afternoon (November 1), right before the former Defence Secretary resigned.

It also looks very much like a case of life imitating House of Cards – not the US knock-off starring the now-disgraced (due to a sex scandal) Kevin Spacey, but the superior BBC version of the 1990s, in which fictional chief whip Francis Urquhart uses the sexual indiscretions of fellow MPs to climb the Parliamentary heirarchy, eventually becoming prime minister. And it is said that Mr Williamson has prime ministerial ambitions himself.

Already, Twitter is abuzz with information about him:

As I write this, some Tory is on the BBC News spewing tripe that Theresa May has been strong, having zero tolerance for the kind of behaviour that has triggered this minor reshuffle. It is ridiculous. Michael Fallon is just one of dozens of Tory MPs who stand accused, and she has done nothing about it at all. The allegations themselves merit suspension. Just look at the contrast with Labour:

The new Chief Whip is the former Deputy Chief Whip, Julian Smith (who?).

And the new Deputy Chief Whip is none other than Esther McVey.

That’s right – Fester McVile is in the whips’ office. This woman was ejected from the Wirral West constituency in the 2015 elections, in response to her abominable treatment of jobseekers, the sick and disabled as an employment minister. She spent a couple of years shoehorned into a cushy job as chair of the British Transport Police Authority before being parachuted into the Tatton constituency after George Osborne quit to become a newspaper editor (among multiple other jobs).

What a revolting development.

Meanwhile, the lashing of Sir Michael Fallon continues. People in his Sevenoaks constituency – and the usual commentators – are angry that he seems to think his behaviour fell short of the standards expected of a defence minister – but was fine for a constituency MP. They want to know why he hasn’t resigned from politics altogether:

https://twitter.com/JoyOfTheSNP/status/925831307334074368

But there’s no need to have any fears for the future of this particular Tory gold-digger. He’ll land on his feet, according to some:

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