The current Labour government’s majority is a very healthy 156 and taking in to consideration those that do not vote (Speaker, Deputy Speaker, Sinn Fein and so on) this turns into a working majority of 166. For the Government to be defeated, 84 Labour Members of Parliament would need to rebel and vote with the opposition parties. Even allowing for MPs that have been suspended or lost the whip, Labour currently has 403 MPs. Added to this, 176 MPs are on the so called “Payroll vote”, where they are obliged to vote with the government. This would appear to be a pretty comfortable position for the Labour Party’s leadership, after all 2024 saw the third largest majority in electoral history. In legislative terms as Ben Worthy has pointed out,Labour is a steamroller.
And yet, only a year on from the election there was a very real possibility of Labour being defeated at second reading, when around 120 backbench MPs signed a reasoned amendment to the Welfare Bill which if passed would have effectively stopped the Bill in its tracks. Phil Cowley highlighted in the Financial Times that this was unprecedented for a new government in its first year. And since 1900, there has been just one occasion when a government with a secure majority in the Commons has lost a bill in its entirety at its second reading. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government went down to defeat over a doomed attempt to liberalise Sunday trading hours.
After backtracking by the government and subsequent dilution of the provisions in the bill, 49 back bench MPs still rebelled when it came to the vote. The episode was significant for the Party leadership, with the rebels containing malcontents well beyond any leftwing ‘usual suspects’ and led by influential committees chairs such as Dame Meg Hiller (who accepted the concessions). With such a large majority, policy divisions within the governing party were bound to become the most interesting political dividing lines of this parliament. That the party leadership chose to pick an internal fight on welfare was actually consistent with the actions of former Labour governments according to Tim Bale. From Roy Jenkins re-imposing prescription charges in 1968 to Gordon Brown’s single parent benefit cuts in 1997, Labour governments have – deliberately in Bale’s view – engineered internal conflict over welfare reform.
It was perhaps expected that after 14 years out of office and with 231 new Labour MPs out of the 411 elected, the Party in parliament would be cohesive, compliant, and unlikely to cause much trouble for the whips. Although welfare reform is clearly a policy shift which generates division and rancour, there may be other factors at play. With nearly one in every five seats won at the general election – 115 in total – by a margin of 5% or less of total votes cast, many Labour MPs are sitting on particularly vulnerable electoral bases. Despite the large overall majority, the vote share of only 34 per cent at the election showed little positive affection for Labour in 2024 and polls indicate that this has slumped in the 12 months since the election. Labour MPs on small majorities may see value in distancing themselves from mainstream party policy and an unpopular leadership.
Rebels new or old?
Of course, rebellion against your own party in power is not new. As Phil Cowley has chronicled over the years, both Labour and Conservative governments have had to manage dissent from within their ranks. Tony King in 1976 highlighted the reality of governing when he pointed out the group that most obviously holds influence at Westminster is backbenchers in the Commons, as government of course needs their votes to retain its parliamentary majority (however large it may be). Once backbenchers grasp this simple fact, they realise that they do have significant power whereby even the credible threat of rebellion can be sufficient to prompt a rethink.
The figures on dissent do however indicate a greater propensity for rebellion after the 1997 election. In the first four postwar parliaments, no more than 10 percent of divisions saw dissenting votes cast against the whip by government backbench MPs, and during two sessions in the 1950s, not even one such revolt occurred. Rebellion then increased noticeably during the 1970s, dropping slightly during the Conservative premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major (Cowley and Norton 1999). After 1997, it again increased significantly, from rebellions in 8% of divisions in 1997–2001 to a postwar record of 28 percent in 2005–2010 (Cowley 2005; Cowley and Stuart 2014b), subsequently surpassed by a new record of 39 percent under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government 2010–2014 (Cowley and Stuart 2014a). Large rebellions have increasingly become a fact of life. Blair’s Iraq rebels numbered 139, Theresa May was defied by 118 Conservatives over Brexit (again, as a percentage of the parliamentary party, this was even larger than the Iraq rebellion). John Major, David Cameron and Boris Johnson all suffered revolts of over 90.
Starmer and Blair – rebel management compared
Although both main parties have had to deal with dissenting MP’s – the Conservatives during the Brexit years effectively had a party within a party when attempting to cope with the organised dissent of the ERG – it is worth comparing the rebellion experience under Starmer with Blair, who had a similarly sized first term majority. Such large majorities may in theory be easier to manage, as the whips should not have to work as hard to get MPs through the lobbies. Afterall, over 100 Labour MPs could disappear out of the country and still votes would be won. Starmer, like Blair though, has faced the challenge of keeping backbench MPs on message and active, with perhaps less opportunity for ministerial careers or active roles in parliament. Blair had a similar influx of new MPs (101 out of 418). The sheer size of the party in parliament means that the party dominates select committees, public bill committees and so on. It also means that although two party adversarial politics across the despatch box continues, dissent is focused on internal divisions – as this is the most likely avenue for policy challenge rather than opposition pressure.
Many MPs in both 1997 and 2024 were unexpected victors, propelled into the Commons on the national swing, and having realised that they may only be in Parliament for a single term, started after a year to find more independent voice.
Discipline is not always easy to enforce; the pagers deployed in Blair’s time contrast with the WhatsApp groups now providing means to organise. Starmer suspended the whip from seven dissenting MPs as early as the government’s first King’s speech (over an amendment to remove the two-child benefit cap) and the response to the recent Welfare Bill rebellion has been to remove the whip from four of the identified ‘persistent ringleaders’. No similar action was taken when 47 MPs rebelled over single parent benefits bringing Tony Blair’s honeymoon period to an abrupt end in 1997.
Rebel yell: More, more, more?
Once MPs get a taste for rebellion having crossed a line by heading into the opposition lobbies – or by gaining concessions by threatening to – they will come back for more, as Cowley has documented. The deployment of what was previously regarded as a nuclear option (suspension of the whip) so early may indeed backfire on Labour Party managers if it is meant to threaten MPs to fall into line in the future.
Rebellions are now a feature of contemporary parliamentary politics and in themselves demonstrate the shifting political landscape within parties, often providing a focal point for external policy advocacy and internal challenge. The larger and more organised the dissent the harder it is for party managers to control or discipline MPs. Party managers would be well advised to work with their own party in parliament than against. Afterall MPs (particularly on welfare reform) may be responding to concerned constituents and feel duty bound to make a stand reflecting the former Chief Whip to Margaret Thatcher, Tim Renton’s observation ‘The concept of a freely elected politician being whipped to make him forget his principles and vote instead for a measure that he does not agree with strikes at the heart of representative democracy’.
Of course, most of the time MPs vote along their own party lines, however rebellions over key policy priorities can lead to sustained internal opposition and coalesce around formalised challenges to the leadership. Starmer may yet deploy a similar line used in 2003 by Labour whips over Iraq asking potential rebels ‘Do you support regime change in Baghdad or Downing Street?’. Such threats it is worth noting, did little to stop the 139 Labour MPs voting against the Tony Blair’s government.
Mark Bennister.
Mark Bennister is an experienced academic researching comparative political leadership, prime ministerial power, governance, public policy, and accountability in parliament. He is a Visiting Reader at Queen Mary, University of London, an Affiliate Research Fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, and Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Lincoln.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.