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Toughing it out on 90 days |
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Written by Austin Mitchell
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08 November 2005 |
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Packed PLP meeting for Blair’s speech. Low-key performance. Stony faced reception (no-one wants to give anything away). Blair is circling the wagons and toughing it out by taking a stand on 90 days internment. This makes fools of the Whips who were persuading people to vote for 90 days on the understanding that he’d reduce it at report stage. It also undermines Clarke who promised full consultation but has had to spend the day going round with a police escort letting him explain why 90 days is essential.
Indeed, several members seem to have had emails, letters or calls from their local Chief Constables singing from the same hymn sheet. The first time the machine has been used to pressure MPs. Correction - second. They did the same with WMD.
Blair sets out the need for his reform programme. It's to steal the ground from the Tories and shift the centre of gravity in politics. The 90 days is essential to this because the Tories will be shown as opportunists voting against the police and the Liberals as wishy-washy. We alone will be trustworthy.
"We must go forth and do better." "This programme is the only base on which we'll be re-elected." "Tory strategies for getting back into power never work unless part of the Labour Party. Help them." "A test is being set. Others have been and the reason we're still here is that every test set we've passed."
So it's the dissenters who will bring the Tories back to power. The loyalist chorus from the PLP backs this. One woman consulted her pensioners and 80% of them were for 90 days. Probably they'd have favoured "90 more days" for anyone with a brown skin.
Dissenters are few and heard impatiently because the PLP is now a rally not a forum for discussion. Particularly Paul Flynn who asks about Tony's timetable for going and gets show trial treatment. Shona denounces dissent as disloyal, as weakening the Party and helping to bring the Tories back to power. She can only be talking about me. Three Moslem Members (to my surprise) back 90 days, though one is walking very carefully across egg shells to do so.
In Tony's eyes "The Programme" is a seamless web. To undermine one part is to destroy it all and bring the Tories to power by dissent in the Party.
Nonsense. The traditionalists don't like the programme. Forcing it on them will produce the rows.
Tony's immune to that and the PLP is a loyal forum, immune to reason and when the Leader feels vulnerable (as he must) it becomes protective.
So it's not going to stop Tony. Only the trade unions can do that. The immediate test is 90 days; I'll abstain. My guess is Tony'll win it but exhaust credit by doing so. By the Tony test "some of it is all of it" and he'll be unbearable. We sentence ourselves to the rest by voting for this.
You may ask why, when Jack Straw is coming back from Moscow and Gordon Brown from the Middle East for the 90 Day Detention vote, I am going to Grimsby.
I have a full and complete answer. It is
(a) Grimsby is more important;
(b) Er... That's it.
It's a more pleasurable form of abstention. I'm not going to vote for 90 day detention. Sorry Charles. It's not you. You've gone up in my admiration but HMV policies aren't right.
PS. Thanks for your letter apologising for the loaded questions in your letter of last Friday. Questions like "Do you agree that the Police should have all the powers they need to beat the shit out of drug-crazed terrorists who would otherwise kill and maim thousands of defenceless women and babies by blowing up crowded crèches all over the country?" are not exactly scientific. Seventy per cent of the public and 100% of Sun Editors may want 90 days but that's less than the population who want hanging, castration of paedophiles and public floggings. |
