Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’.
What dark perfidy has been done? What cynical political stunt have the Conservatives pulled, staining their hands with such baseness?
Kemi Badenoch has tabled a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is being debated at second reading today.
Let me explain briefly. Second reading is – slightly counterintuitively – the first opportunity for the House of Commons to discuss proposed legislation, the formal question being ‘that the Bill be read a second time’. But there are circumscriptions around the proceedings. MPs debate the fundamental purpose of the bill, and, in the words of Erskine May, the so-called ‘bible of parliamentary procedure’, ‘its whole principle is at issue, and is affirmed or denied by the House’.
At this stage, detailed changes cannot be proposed. It is not quite a yes-or-no business, however, because MPs can table a reasoned amendment. This ‘declines to give a second reading’ to a bill but also sets out why that should happen, and, if agreed to, stops the bill’s progress and is ‘tantamount to opposing the bill’.
This is grim, grim stuff
The reasoned amendment tabled by Badenoch and the opposition front bench opposes the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill on several counts: it ‘effectively abolishes academy freedoms’ and will therefore compromise standards and accountability; it abolishes freedom over pay, conditions and qualified teacher status, making recruitment more difficult; it limits freedom over the curriculum, stifling innovation and decentralised decision-making; and makes it harder for good schools to expand.
However, the motion also ‘calls upon the government to develop new legislative proposals for children’s wellbeing including establishing a national statutory inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation, focused on grooming gangs’. This is what has kindled the fire of controversy.
The government’s response is essentially that to oppose this measure is to set your face against all measures to improve education and, especially, safeguarding. That is an absurd and arrogant attitude, and it differs not a single jot from the old adage that ‘it’s my way or the highway’. To put in another way, in the words of the predecessor whose painted gaze the prime minister could not bear in his study: ‘there is no alternative’.
There is no emotional weapon Starmer will not deploy. He has already reached for the shroud of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, murdered by her parents in August 2023.
‘If you think about the Sara Sharif case, we know how important it is to take these measures,’ he told the Mirror.
This is grim, grim stuff, compounded by the fact that the prime minister, without question, believes himself to be doing the right thing.
Is there an element of party politics in the reasoned amendment Badenoch has tabled? Of course there is. Our system would grind to a halt without party politics: it is the framework within which our leaders operate, the language they use to differentiate themselves and their policies in the minds of the electorate. It is also a set of circumstances denied to countless millions of people around the world, and we should be grateful for it.
No-one can dispute that the opposition has seen an opportunity to hold the government’s feet to the fire on child sexual exploitation; equally, only the most irredeemably cynical mind would think that politicians on either side do not really care about the bestial abuse of children. That we can leave to Elon Musk’s insomniac barrage of tweets.
The Labour party, however, seemingly cannot help itself. It blinks without comprehension at any opposition to its actions. ‘No MP should be voting down children’s safeguarding measures. It’s shocking they are even thinking about this,’ the Prime Minister said. To him, voting against measures he has proposed is indistinguishable from opposing any measures to achieve the same goal.
The left is often seized by fits of this dictatorship of virtue. Sir Tony Blair was a fellow sufferer. The government means well, in its own mind, and if that is irrefutably true, then it follows that any opposition must mean ill. In Starmer’s brain, ‘unburdened by dogma’, to use his own words, the Conservative party can only be at best careless of children’s wellbeing, at best relishing its weaponisation.
You might imagine the wave of sanctimony which Starmer rode into Downing Street would have beaten itself out against donations, civil service appointments, inept diplomacy and a Budget which shredded the spirit of Labour’s manifesto while delivering a looming recession and record borrowing. But the government does not learn, it simply marches on. Parliamentary opposition is base politics, alternatives are grubby deviation from the government’s shining path.
This is not how to conduct democratic politics. I have watched British politics for more than 35 years, and this high-handedness never ends well.
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