Why has Labour decided to give John Bercow at least a stay of execution as Speaker? Emily Thornberry was asked about whether Bercow should go following Dame Laura Cox’s damning report on bullying and harassment in the House of Commons, and argued that she shouldn’t go. She told Sky News:
‘I think this is absolutely not the time to be changing Speaker. We don’t know for example with regard to Brexit as to what is going to happen, whether there’s going to be technically an amendable motion or not, whether it’ll be the Speaker’s discretion as to whether it is. We do need to have all hands to the deck at the moment.’
You have to give Thornberry some credit for being totally honest about Labour’s motivation here. The party thinks that Brexit is more important than ensuring that people in the House of Commons can come to work and feel safe from bullying and harassment. This seems rather strange given Labour has generally acted as though it would rather Brexit would just go away and it didn’t have to make any key decisions on anything. But it is also nakedly self-interested in deciding to ignore the implications of the Cox report, which were that the current senior leadership of the Commons is not capable of changing the ‘toxic culture’ that employees find themselves stuck in.
I argued yesterday that even if Bercow went, it wouldn’t guarantee a change in culture. But Cox’s conclusions suggest that he is at least partly responsible for the problems she describes. This means at the very least that it will be very difficult for victims of harassment to have confidence that Bercow is the person to change things. Bercow came into the office of Speaker promising to restore the reputation of Parliament after the expenses scandal, and he has indeed dedicated himself to that task. It would surely be more effective for a new Speaker to promise to change the culture of Parliament as their priority. If nothing else, it would be much easier for a new Speaker to chide MPs for ‘bullying behaviour’ in the Commons, as Bercow has done frequently. Those sorts of criticisms will now look somewhat hypocritical – to use an unparliamentary term – coming from someone who has been accused of being part of a culture of indifference to complaints of bullying and harassment in Parliament.
Cultures become toxic because people let them. The Labour Party seems quite happy to entertain the possibility that the Commons culture can continue to leave staff feeling they have nowhere to turn, merely because there is short-term political advantage in doing so. This is hardly a surprise, given the party’s handling of its own complaints process, which has been riven with factional interests, disgracefully slow, and disorganised. But it is a sad state of affairs when something as basic as preventing bullying takes second place to party political interest.
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