It was absolute chaos trying to figure out what happened here, what the Speaker did wrong, and why so many people were angry, especially the SNP. Can someone explain like I’m five? Thanks in advance.
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The SNP positioned themselves well on the lead up to today to put labour in a difficult situation, vote with the SNP or vote with the conservatives against a ceasefire declaration (both those parties would then be able to vote for a different ceasefire declaration but that’s not the headline the SNP would push, the first vote was objectively whether to adopt the ceasefire or reject it)
In order to get his own party out of the awkward situation, the speaker took a highly unusual but technically legal course of action which was to allow both the government and main opposition to offer amendments (HIGHLY unusual on an opposition day, usually only one amendment is allowed and it’s usually the governments one).
This unusually course of action allowed Labour to replace the SNPs ceasefire statement with their own before having to vote yes or no to passing the resolution. The conservatives smells opportunity and then pulled their own amendment which partially collapsed the speakers plan and meant the labour language went straight to a final vote while the house was still arguing over if the speaker could do this (UK law is very precedent based, so if no speaker had done something before but the law didn’t expressly forbid it there is often a grey area).
End result, labour got what they wanted, SNP got snubbed, conservatives took about as much hurt as they expected to today but managed to throw labour into a controversy so overall good day.
The main cause of the controversy is that the speaker is a labour MP, for any other party it would just look odd but taking an unusual path through an issue which so blatantly helps your own party does stink of bias. As I said it’s all technically legal, the stars aligned (it was an SNP opposition day, labour got their amendment submitted before the conservatives did), but: tabling two amendments on an opposition day is strange, and seeing as tabling the conservative one first wouldn’t have gotten labour out of the situation, the question lingers as to whether the speaker knowingly took an unusual course of action he wouldn’t have if it didn’t save labours bacon.
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