Amid the fallout from last week’s chaos in the Commons, one question has gone largely unexplored: is Labour out of the woods on Gaza? Despite all efforts to manoeuvre itself into a safer position, the party seems to have only inflamed things further. Its ostensibly successful face-saving amendment to the SNP’s ceasefire motion – and its apparent pressure on the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, to upturn parliamentary convention – brought about a crisis in the Commons, and has done little to appease angry voters.
The resulting waves of claim and toxic counterclaim are still building: Lee Anderson’s outburst of anti-Muslim rhetoric has led to him being stripped of the Tory whip. No matter how much analysis says otherwise, particularly the sort that treats Westminster as a self-contained theatre of political gamesmanship, Labour’s victory was a pyrrhic one. It was secured in the Commons but lost outside its walls, highlighting an inescapable limitation in the party’s very coding.
