Burnham's (Almost) Right

The Member for Makerfield will be Prime Minister. The questions he is asking have promise but his plan is not living up to his proposals. Andy's first attack, the whips.

As Andy Burnham visits HM The King today and walks out with the world at his feet, he will already feel the slight tremors of rebellion. That’s not him, that’s Parliament, it’s the way our democracy is works.

That’s where the whips come in. They’re there to feel the vibrations like a spider on its web to know before trouble starts where it might come from. So when Andy says he wants to weaken the whips. But before I admire his reckless courage, might he just have a point? I mean really, is it possible?

Before the Chief Whip feels my collar and corrects my tone, hear me out. I think there is something in it. Just not quite what he thinks.

This week, as nominations opened for the leadership contest that gave him North Korean-style endorsement, Burnham wrote to Labour MPs promising that under him the whips’ office would be a human resources department. Chronos the spider and other instruments of fear will be banished and debate will be encouraged. The whipping system, he argues, disempowers the elected state making Westminster the servant of Whitehall and MPs spend their careers as cyphers not voices.

He’s not entirely wrong, is he? And let’s face it, the truth is pretty depressing. Just think of everything that goes into choosing a candidate. The hustings, the evenings in village halls and community centres, the questions about experience and ideas and character.

And what’s the point if the winner will blindly follow the whip. Save the time and the money and give each whip one vote for the whole flock. Does a shepherd ask the sheep for a proxy?

Of course that’s not what we need. We need the connection our parliamentary system creates.

Every week I get hundreds of emails and a few letters. There are heartbreaking problems and somewhat unusual rants. Those that matter, really matter to the person who sent them: a child needing a special needs place, a pension dispute that has dragged on and left someone desperate, even a small business drowning in the paperwork some official promised the minister would be “light touch”.

MPs get thousands of messages like this every month and each means there is a direct connection between Westminster and every corner of the kingdom and makes it a place not, despite so many contrary examples, for lines to take but a place to champion the friends and neighbours who are our community. The whole point of our system is that power connects to somewhere and we, those elected to serve, are responsible to them not to Westminster or Whitehall.

Isn’t that what Manchesterism is supposed to be? He’s got the point of our constitution and spotted a weakness that undermines it. Which makes what he says next so very odd.

Andy Burnham says he wants proportional representation and will put it on the ballot for the next election. So he wants to scrap the whips but bring in party lists that mean MPs answer to party apparatchiks who choose them, not the people who elect them.

That’s the reverse of the independence Burnham claims to want.

Today, a rebel can throw himself on the mercy of his constituents, who have been known to reward a bit of spine (though rarely a bit of grift). Under a list system, you lose that. Cross the leadership and you simply vanish. The whips wouldn’t even raise their voices. Why bother? Everyone would know who’s really in charge.

So it’s a bit odd, though completely on brand, to hear Burnham condemn whips for being cyphers while proposing the system that would make them less than nothing. He must know, after a decade in Westminster, that he can abolish the whips if he the party has absolute control over an MP’s future.

The point of the whips, at their best, is not a punishment but ensuring you can keep a promise while maintaining independence. People do not vote for 650 free spirits and not nor can each of them be masters of every schedule and clause of every bill; they vote for a programme, set out in a manifesto, and they are entitled to expect the party they elected to deliver it. An MP who stood on that programme and then wanders off is not a romantic independent. They’re in breach of contract with their own voters. The scandal of recent years is not that whips existed but that they were used to drive through things no manifesto ever promised, dreamt up in departments and defended by ministers who privately agreed with the rebels.

So the answer is not to abolish the whip, and it is certainly not to elect a Commons of list appointees. It is to choose better people.

That’s what Kemi Badenoch has got right. She has asked for candidates with the five Cs: clever, charismatic, able to communicate, full of conviction and, above all, Conservative. Leaders and thinkers, doers and makers. People who know the truth about hard work and where the money actually comes from. Independent minds accept the discipline of a shared programme when they helped shape it and believe in it. That is the difference between an army and a chain gang. Both march in step but only one volunteered.

That really sums up the problem with Burnham’s vibes. He has asked the right question about Westminster and has a feel for the problem but his answer would make everything he complains about worse. No surprise given he was a Whitehall minister for years and never once rebelled. Perhaps he knows better than anyone how the straitjacket feels having stitched a fair few himself.