Technically yes although there is a precedent of sorts when Speaker Bercow bent the rules to read the word 'another' as allowing him to call unlimited amendments, despite that not being the normal reading of the SO.
I think the issue is making it public. If he had called the Whips in the day before and told them to not play silly buggers because this is serious, he would have had the moral high ground. Instead he's attempted to justify his decision post hoc which looks shifty and tbh he doesn't have the skills to do.
I don't have strong views on whether he stays or goes. But I'm very surprised no Tory on a semi-marginal is on maneuvers to avoid a challenge at the Election
I think this is a bit harsh, but I agree that mistakes were made. However, the mistakes were not procedural but were political (unusual for a former Whip to be so flat-footed...)
It was obvious from a long way out that the SNP were trying to 'trap' Labour (mainly because they told everyone that that's what they were doing). What was needed - and what seemed to be lacking - was the Speaker anticipating the problems. Could he, for instance, have leaked a comment to the effect of "this is all very serious .... heightened emotions ... no time for cheap politics ... consider whether rules relevant in cases like this" and, crucially, signposted to the usual channels that he would do this, whether they liked it or not?
By seemingly not anticipating he boxed himself in by giving the impression he was doing Labour a favour. As I say, it was poor politics (not helped by his general inability to convey complex information in public).
Were the mistakes not procedural? I'm no expert in Commons procedure, but the analysis which I've read asserts that Hoyle's decision was unprecedented?
Yet in my opinion, the central point is that Hoyle admitted that procedures were changed in response to threats. Whatever else can be said in Hoyle's favour, I think this is a red card offence.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by this argument, but it's certainly more persuasive than the SNP's claims that Hoyle deliberately spurned them. (I can see why they're spinning it this way, because it plays perfectly into their "Westminster hates us" narrative; but it has the unfortunate flaw of not being true.)
We agree! I would only add one slight twist - I think Hoyle should resign even if he'd provided a different explanation. The problem is there are no satisfactory explanations for what he did:
- Scared of violence: terrorists now run the country, this is bad.
- Helping out his old party: the very thing he agreed not to do, this is bad.
- ??? Is there a third?
This is the second time now Labourite speakers have simply ripped up the rules the moment they saw an opportunity to help their preferred political causes, and it seems a global trend. The cases against Trump seem to defy legal logic, but he keeps losing anyway. Mann vs Steyn involved Steyn winning on all points of law and the jury ordered him to pay $1M regardless. The Ampel coalition in Germany talks constantly about banning their opponents on absurd pretexts. Also something easily noticeable in the working world, where left wing managers routinely do things that harm their employers, and which they agreed not to do, in order to advance left wing causes.
I am seriously starting to wonder if it's possible to actually put left wing people in positions of power and expect them to follow any rules at all. We keep getting burned by left or center-left people who seem moderate and reasonable, sometimes even for years, and then one day suddenly everything previously agreed on or written down goes out of the window. Hoyle's behaviour in this regard isn't a big surprise, it fits the type. You really need people who prefer pre-agreed systems over the ad hoc decisions of enlightened intellectuals, and that's one of the core philosophical divides between left and right.
I think most of this is reasonable, right up until the last bit where you say "at least those on the right follow the rules". They don't! Boris Johnson ignored all the rules he imposed on the rest of us during the pandemic. He then repeatedly defied ministerial codes to cling onto power as long as he possibly could. Liz Truss ignored the OBR, the BoE, and ironically despite her free-market pretensions the markets themselves, ploughing ahead with crazy reforms that had no support either inside the house or beyond it. The Tories have also fiddled with the voting system to prop themselves up - introducing ID requirements that are *flagrantly* tilted towards Tory demographics (why is the pensioner's bus pass acceptable but a young person's railcard isn't!?), as well as changes to the mayoral voting system and the eligibility for overseas voters. Tories were also at the head of a campaign encouraging their voters to take the law into their own hands and destroy ULEZ cameras.
And of course, across the pond it's a thousand times worse. At least nobody seriously entertains the notion that Rishi Sunak will get his supporters to use violence and intimidation to try to keep him in Downing Street after an election loss.
So, yes, you have a point about folk on the left bending the rules to their own benefit; but the idea that this isn't a bipartisan phenomenon is for the birds.
No, the right are definitely more trustworthy when it comes to following rules. My whole lived experience is perfectly consistent in that regard.
Johnson, if you recall, got booted out of No 10 for what he did. It was taken seriously. And Johnson is in no way right wing! Like most of the Conservatives he is and always has been a drifting centrist who just wants to be liked, with few if any real convictions and what few he may have had went down the drain when he married Carrie.
Liz Truss didn't break any rules. The OBR and BoE are themselves rule FOLLOWERS, not rule setters. They answer to the PM. The British left has spent years trying to change that basic constitutional arrangement by telling politicians they are supposed to follow the "independent experts", but the constitution remains unchanged, and to the extent quangos have any independence it's because they're allowed to.
Voting ID is really out there, I never even heard of this complaint do you seriously think the difference between bus passes and railcards matters at all? But it's probably something dumb like one having a photo and one not. At any rate this is not a counter-example because of course the politicians in power get to change the law, that's the whole point of their existence. They are making the rules, not breaking them.
It's pretty telling that you couldn't find examples of actual rule breaking except for Johnson, who paid the price for it by losing his job soon after (and that, in an environment where even the scientists proposing the rules were also breaking them with wild abandon, he was hardly unique in that regard). Just listing all the ways British quangos go off the reservation and abuse their positions would take all day, that's before even getting to the politicians.
"Johnson is in no way right-wing" is a No True Scotsman if ever I saw one!
On Liz Truss - I guess the Prime Minister can change the rules however they see fit; but she trampled over fiscal rules she didn't like on a nonexistent mandate, and millions of blameless mortgage owners suffered the consequences. Changing rules that everyone else has followed, without getting permission from the electorate to do so, and with absolutely disastrous consequences, is pretty close to breaking the rules in terms of outcomes.
With regard to voting rules, that one really isn't so much breaking the rules as changing them in an utterly self-serving way, I'll admit. Still pretty venal though, and I'm sure if boring liberal centrist type did it you'd be outraged by it.
It could be a No True Scotsman fallacy I guess, but if there's any way to argue that it's not a fallacy it would be by appeal to the wider judgement of the market. Conservative votes have collapsed because the voters no longer believe it's actually a right wing party, despite what it says on the tin. A big part of this happened during the Johnson period where people compared words vs actions, and much conservative commentary was reduced to "what happened to him? Did Carrie steal his balls?". If you look at what Johnson actually did, it was all pretty indistinguishable from New Labourism. You could argue about Brexit but theoretically at least Labour was on board with implementation of the referendum. After that it was green, woke, more spending, totalitarian collectivist health policies etc. The gap between Johnson and a Blair/Starmer type was wafer thin.
Re: Truss. Again, the OBR doesn't set rules at all, it's just supposed to review and recommend. So Truss didn't even change any rules because there were none to change. She ignored the OBR but for better or worse that's normal - the OBR is completely incompetent and constantly makes predictions that are then falsified soon after, so I wouldn't hold ignoring it against any government, Labour included. And sadly, when has any government in the past 25 years implemented a responsible budget anyway, something the Office for Budgetary Responsibility "rules" would presumably be supposed to enforce if they existed? Last time the budget balanced was ~2000, I think.
It's perfectly reasonable to be outraged by changing rules in ways you don't like, and you're totally correct that if/when Labour change the franchise in a totally self-serving way, then I'll be outraged by that. But that won't be an example of breaking the rules, it'll be making them. And yeah it's a pretty major flaw of democracy that in recent years left wing parties can now reduce elections to rubble by winning once and then just importing enormous left wing voter bases and giving them the franchise. That's something classical democracy doesn't consider as a possibility :(
Ironically, it feels like this conversation is kind of proving my point. There's an implicit rule in debate that a counterpoint should be a refutation of the point. When it's not we say it's a non-sequitur. In this case you responded with a bunch of examples of rule breaking that weren't actually rule breaking, but which felt close enough to you. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about with activist judges, regulators, quangos etc. The rules say X and they do something else whilst claiming it's close enough. To what extent can such institutions be trusted?
If the Conserative vote has collapsed because it's not right-wing enough, why are those voters going to the Labour Party instead? Your analysis obviously flatters the preconceptions of the Daily Telegraph's editorial team, but is completely out-of-kilter with reality. In practice the pandemic temporarily forced the Tories to abandon their right-wing agenda and as a result the party rode high in the polls (hard to believe now but in 2021 there were persistent rumours that Keir Starmer might be sacked); but as things turned to normal and the Tories kept getting more Tory to the point of self-caricature, their support evaporated.
I think we are dancing on the head of a pin with regards to what consistitutes breaking the rules. Clearly when you can change the rules on a whim, it's quite easy to avoid breaking them even as you do something that would constitute breaking the rules if anyone else did it. It's easy to verge into "when the President does it, it's not a crime" territory here.
If I understand the polls correctly, they aren't going to Labour. The swing to Labour isn't a real swing in the sense of Labour converting voters, their own vote numbers aren't moving up much. What's happened is conservative voters are saying they'll either stay home or vote for Reform.
I didn't bring up MPs as examples of rule breakers originally, you brought that in (except Hoyle, who as speaker isn't a normal MP). The problems are elsewhere with people who are trusted to run institutions according to their formal rules and missions, yet don't.
Technically yes although there is a precedent of sorts when Speaker Bercow bent the rules to read the word 'another' as allowing him to call unlimited amendments, despite that not being the normal reading of the SO.
I think the issue is making it public. If he had called the Whips in the day before and told them to not play silly buggers because this is serious, he would have had the moral high ground. Instead he's attempted to justify his decision post hoc which looks shifty and tbh he doesn't have the skills to do.
I don't have strong views on whether he stays or goes. But I'm very surprised no Tory on a semi-marginal is on maneuvers to avoid a challenge at the Election
I think this is a bit harsh, but I agree that mistakes were made. However, the mistakes were not procedural but were political (unusual for a former Whip to be so flat-footed...)
It was obvious from a long way out that the SNP were trying to 'trap' Labour (mainly because they told everyone that that's what they were doing). What was needed - and what seemed to be lacking - was the Speaker anticipating the problems. Could he, for instance, have leaked a comment to the effect of "this is all very serious .... heightened emotions ... no time for cheap politics ... consider whether rules relevant in cases like this" and, crucially, signposted to the usual channels that he would do this, whether they liked it or not?
By seemingly not anticipating he boxed himself in by giving the impression he was doing Labour a favour. As I say, it was poor politics (not helped by his general inability to convey complex information in public).
Were the mistakes not procedural? I'm no expert in Commons procedure, but the analysis which I've read asserts that Hoyle's decision was unprecedented?
Yet in my opinion, the central point is that Hoyle admitted that procedures were changed in response to threats. Whatever else can be said in Hoyle's favour, I think this is a red card offence.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by this argument, but it's certainly more persuasive than the SNP's claims that Hoyle deliberately spurned them. (I can see why they're spinning it this way, because it plays perfectly into their "Westminster hates us" narrative; but it has the unfortunate flaw of not being true.)
I just think this is a red card offence and he's admitted doing it. I can't look beyond that...
We agree! I would only add one slight twist - I think Hoyle should resign even if he'd provided a different explanation. The problem is there are no satisfactory explanations for what he did:
- Scared of violence: terrorists now run the country, this is bad.
- Helping out his old party: the very thing he agreed not to do, this is bad.
- ??? Is there a third?
This is the second time now Labourite speakers have simply ripped up the rules the moment they saw an opportunity to help their preferred political causes, and it seems a global trend. The cases against Trump seem to defy legal logic, but he keeps losing anyway. Mann vs Steyn involved Steyn winning on all points of law and the jury ordered him to pay $1M regardless. The Ampel coalition in Germany talks constantly about banning their opponents on absurd pretexts. Also something easily noticeable in the working world, where left wing managers routinely do things that harm their employers, and which they agreed not to do, in order to advance left wing causes.
I am seriously starting to wonder if it's possible to actually put left wing people in positions of power and expect them to follow any rules at all. We keep getting burned by left or center-left people who seem moderate and reasonable, sometimes even for years, and then one day suddenly everything previously agreed on or written down goes out of the window. Hoyle's behaviour in this regard isn't a big surprise, it fits the type. You really need people who prefer pre-agreed systems over the ad hoc decisions of enlightened intellectuals, and that's one of the core philosophical divides between left and right.
I think most of this is reasonable, right up until the last bit where you say "at least those on the right follow the rules". They don't! Boris Johnson ignored all the rules he imposed on the rest of us during the pandemic. He then repeatedly defied ministerial codes to cling onto power as long as he possibly could. Liz Truss ignored the OBR, the BoE, and ironically despite her free-market pretensions the markets themselves, ploughing ahead with crazy reforms that had no support either inside the house or beyond it. The Tories have also fiddled with the voting system to prop themselves up - introducing ID requirements that are *flagrantly* tilted towards Tory demographics (why is the pensioner's bus pass acceptable but a young person's railcard isn't!?), as well as changes to the mayoral voting system and the eligibility for overseas voters. Tories were also at the head of a campaign encouraging their voters to take the law into their own hands and destroy ULEZ cameras.
And of course, across the pond it's a thousand times worse. At least nobody seriously entertains the notion that Rishi Sunak will get his supporters to use violence and intimidation to try to keep him in Downing Street after an election loss.
So, yes, you have a point about folk on the left bending the rules to their own benefit; but the idea that this isn't a bipartisan phenomenon is for the birds.
No, the right are definitely more trustworthy when it comes to following rules. My whole lived experience is perfectly consistent in that regard.
Johnson, if you recall, got booted out of No 10 for what he did. It was taken seriously. And Johnson is in no way right wing! Like most of the Conservatives he is and always has been a drifting centrist who just wants to be liked, with few if any real convictions and what few he may have had went down the drain when he married Carrie.
Liz Truss didn't break any rules. The OBR and BoE are themselves rule FOLLOWERS, not rule setters. They answer to the PM. The British left has spent years trying to change that basic constitutional arrangement by telling politicians they are supposed to follow the "independent experts", but the constitution remains unchanged, and to the extent quangos have any independence it's because they're allowed to.
Voting ID is really out there, I never even heard of this complaint do you seriously think the difference between bus passes and railcards matters at all? But it's probably something dumb like one having a photo and one not. At any rate this is not a counter-example because of course the politicians in power get to change the law, that's the whole point of their existence. They are making the rules, not breaking them.
It's pretty telling that you couldn't find examples of actual rule breaking except for Johnson, who paid the price for it by losing his job soon after (and that, in an environment where even the scientists proposing the rules were also breaking them with wild abandon, he was hardly unique in that regard). Just listing all the ways British quangos go off the reservation and abuse their positions would take all day, that's before even getting to the politicians.
"Johnson is in no way right-wing" is a No True Scotsman if ever I saw one!
On Liz Truss - I guess the Prime Minister can change the rules however they see fit; but she trampled over fiscal rules she didn't like on a nonexistent mandate, and millions of blameless mortgage owners suffered the consequences. Changing rules that everyone else has followed, without getting permission from the electorate to do so, and with absolutely disastrous consequences, is pretty close to breaking the rules in terms of outcomes.
With regard to voting rules, that one really isn't so much breaking the rules as changing them in an utterly self-serving way, I'll admit. Still pretty venal though, and I'm sure if boring liberal centrist type did it you'd be outraged by it.
It could be a No True Scotsman fallacy I guess, but if there's any way to argue that it's not a fallacy it would be by appeal to the wider judgement of the market. Conservative votes have collapsed because the voters no longer believe it's actually a right wing party, despite what it says on the tin. A big part of this happened during the Johnson period where people compared words vs actions, and much conservative commentary was reduced to "what happened to him? Did Carrie steal his balls?". If you look at what Johnson actually did, it was all pretty indistinguishable from New Labourism. You could argue about Brexit but theoretically at least Labour was on board with implementation of the referendum. After that it was green, woke, more spending, totalitarian collectivist health policies etc. The gap between Johnson and a Blair/Starmer type was wafer thin.
Re: Truss. Again, the OBR doesn't set rules at all, it's just supposed to review and recommend. So Truss didn't even change any rules because there were none to change. She ignored the OBR but for better or worse that's normal - the OBR is completely incompetent and constantly makes predictions that are then falsified soon after, so I wouldn't hold ignoring it against any government, Labour included. And sadly, when has any government in the past 25 years implemented a responsible budget anyway, something the Office for Budgetary Responsibility "rules" would presumably be supposed to enforce if they existed? Last time the budget balanced was ~2000, I think.
It's perfectly reasonable to be outraged by changing rules in ways you don't like, and you're totally correct that if/when Labour change the franchise in a totally self-serving way, then I'll be outraged by that. But that won't be an example of breaking the rules, it'll be making them. And yeah it's a pretty major flaw of democracy that in recent years left wing parties can now reduce elections to rubble by winning once and then just importing enormous left wing voter bases and giving them the franchise. That's something classical democracy doesn't consider as a possibility :(
Ironically, it feels like this conversation is kind of proving my point. There's an implicit rule in debate that a counterpoint should be a refutation of the point. When it's not we say it's a non-sequitur. In this case you responded with a bunch of examples of rule breaking that weren't actually rule breaking, but which felt close enough to you. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about with activist judges, regulators, quangos etc. The rules say X and they do something else whilst claiming it's close enough. To what extent can such institutions be trusted?
If the Conserative vote has collapsed because it's not right-wing enough, why are those voters going to the Labour Party instead? Your analysis obviously flatters the preconceptions of the Daily Telegraph's editorial team, but is completely out-of-kilter with reality. In practice the pandemic temporarily forced the Tories to abandon their right-wing agenda and as a result the party rode high in the polls (hard to believe now but in 2021 there were persistent rumours that Keir Starmer might be sacked); but as things turned to normal and the Tories kept getting more Tory to the point of self-caricature, their support evaporated.
I think we are dancing on the head of a pin with regards to what consistitutes breaking the rules. Clearly when you can change the rules on a whim, it's quite easy to avoid breaking them even as you do something that would constitute breaking the rules if anyone else did it. It's easy to verge into "when the President does it, it's not a crime" territory here.
If I understand the polls correctly, they aren't going to Labour. The swing to Labour isn't a real swing in the sense of Labour converting voters, their own vote numbers aren't moving up much. What's happened is conservative voters are saying they'll either stay home or vote for Reform.
I didn't bring up MPs as examples of rule breakers originally, you brought that in (except Hoyle, who as speaker isn't a normal MP). The problems are elsewhere with people who are trusted to run institutions according to their formal rules and missions, yet don't.