It's revolting

Over at www.revolts.co.uk, and in several books, Philip Cowley has for numerous years been documenting the increasing tendency of MPs to rebel against their leaderships. From a low-point in the 1950s, when MPs were so placid that there were two entire parliamentary sessions when not a single vote was cast against the Conservative Government by any MP taking the Tory whip, to the current situation where there is a rebellious vote against the Government by its own MPs in about 1 in 3 divisions, MPs have exhibited a clear trend towards increasing independent-mindedness.

Not that you would know any of this from the media, which for the last decade has been consistently portraying Labour backbenchers as mindlessly loyal, and hapless lobby-fodder. One critic of Cowley's analysis has been Roy Hattersley, who memorably trashed Cowley's book documenting the 2001 parliament and its rebellions (a book I heartily recommend, incidentally). Cowley ran a competition on his site, offering a prize for the reader who could come up with the most grossly distorting quotation from Hattersley's review. The winning entry read something like: "Cowley is right... Damn it all... Cowley is right..."

Overall, their can be little doubt that Cowley's underlying thesis is correct: while party cohesion remains the norm, the rise of the career politician has created a breed of MPs who, if they have passed the point where ministerial office is a likely career development, and at times even if they have not, are quite happy to disregard the party line if they disagree with it strongly. But Hattersley's criticism is undeniably based on a political truth: it is no surprise that the Labour governments of Blair and Brown have suffered some enormous backbench rebellions, because never before has a party enacted a programme in government that is so regularly at odds with the wishes of its members.

Much Labour policy has run against the grain of the Labour Party: to cut a long story short, its macroeconomics have been essentially Thatcherite, and a lot of left-wing unhappiness on the backbenches has flowed from that. Tough decisions (and often incorrect decisions) on benefits, foreign policy and education in particular have provoked serious unhappiness, with lesser but still significant unrest on other subjects too. This has not been widely publicised, for the most part, for two reasons: firstly, a lot of this dissent does not show up in the division lobby, as the Government is often forced into making concessions to its backbenchers in order to secure their votes - thus the Government wins the division, and MPs who are condemned by the media as lobby-fodder have in fact often won some major policy changes. On other occasions, the Government's majority - particularly before 2005 - has been so enormous that rebellions could not defeat it, and in any case if Labour MPs hate a particular measure, the Tories would often be willing to support it (the invasion of Iraq being the best example).

But the 10p tax row suggests that all of this is starting to come back and bite the Government. Firstly, its reduced majority has left it with no choice but to make a major policy concession over the Budget: if it had come to a vote on an amendment to retain the 10p tax band, Labour MPs might just have voted the Government's policy down. And as the Government would have failed to get its financial package through the Commons - and therefore would not be able to raise the money it needs to meet its spending commitments - Brown would have had no choice but to call an election. Of course, this was never very likely - a lot of those MPs would have lost their seats, and Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

But even so, Brown didn't have much choice other than to blink: Frank Field and co. were pushing the line that the vote was not one of confidence; now this is clearly nonsense for the reasons I have just explained, but it is an argument that might just have left enough Labour MPs (it would only need about 30) feeling able to vote the Government down with a clear conscience, consequences be damned.

But this is almost certainly just the start. The Government is likely to lose its majority at the next election, and possibly be slung out of office altogether. Brown is unpopular: even after the 2005 election, Labour MPs returning to Westminster were shocked at having taken such a load of grief on the doorstep - something most of them would never have experienced in their political lives before; they are only going to get more from here on in. The inevitable result will be that they put ever more pressure on Brown to correct what they will no doubt perceive as the policy course that is costing them their support.

Now, as with Blair, however unpopular Brown gets within his own party, they will never be able to oust him while he is PM: the rules of the Labour Party are deliberately structured to make a leadership challenge almost impossible when in office, and difficult even when the party is in Opposition. But, also in common with Blair, the unspoken truth about Brown is that he is not politically astute. Labour were gifted large majorities in the last three elections by Black Wednesday: as I'm sure I have posted here at some point in the past, it is clear that the electorate will not tolerate a catastrophic collapse of macroeconomic policy in peacetime, and by being forced out of the ERM the Tories were destroyed electorally for a political generation (same thing happened when Labour went hard left in 1983: their economic policies were perceived as catastrophically bad, and they lost the 1983, 1987 and 1992 elections by large margins).

So Blair and Brown have no experience of being at the top of political parties in choppy waters: we saw it with Blair, when his kamikaze management of the parliamentary party led him to defeat on the issue of detention without trial, which was totally avoidable (and also casts doubt over the judgment of the then Chief Whip, one Jacqui Smith); and we are now seeing it with Brown, who is again falling into totally avoidable mantraps with tax policy.

The big question, long term, is how Labour will recover from their political collapse: can the New Labour regime cling on in any sense, or will that entire generation of politicians be cast out? If the latter, who will replace them? Or if the former, can the likes of Miliband or Parnell lead the party credibly, and make it electable?

This latter question is important: if Labour lose the next election and the Tories get in, it's unlikely that Labour will be cast into the wilderness in quite the same way as the Tories were in 1997 or Labour were in 1983: with a Tory government likely to inherit a bleak economic outlook, difficult public finances and a small parliamentary majority it's entirely possible that its record in office might not be good enough to secure re-election, and Cameron's credibility might become quite tarnished quite quickly. But if this is how things pan out, will Labour be in any position to take advantage in, say, 2014?