Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle colluded to turn the Gaza ceasefire vote into a farce

Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle colluded to made a mockery of parliament and turned the Gaza ceasefire vote into a shameful political game.

All of this would have been so much easier had the Labour Party simply taken a clear and unequivocal stance on a Gaza ceasefire from the beginning.

However, the only thing that has remained consistent in Keir Starmer’s positioning is that he outright refuses to criticise Israeli monstrosities.

From claiming that Israel has "the right" to defy international law by cutting off food, water, and energy to civilians to the farcical scenes yesterday over Starmer’s visceral objection to the SNP’s (absolutely correct) use of the word "collective punishment" to describe the killing of 30,000 civilians; the mass displacement of over a million; the clearly deliberate targeting of prominent Palestinian journalists, academics, and medics; and the use of genocidal siege tactics to cut off supplies of water, food, energy, and medical supplies.

In the days preceding the SNP’s Gaza ceasefire vote, Labour were pumping out all kinds of mixed messages. They were carefully considering it, they were going to vote in favour of it, they were going to amend it, they couldn’t vote in favour of it because it’s an election year, Starmer was going to whip Labour MPs into voting against it and sack anyone who didn’t comply …

It was the SNP’s opposition day debate. As the third biggest party they get 3 compared to Labour’s 17, but Keir Starmer decided to hijack it by adding a Labour amendment to soften the wording and cut out reference to Israeli "collective punishment".

Starmer’s hijack plan looked like it was going to fail when the Tories decided to add their own amendment, which means Starmer’s amendment wouldn’t be put before parliament because it’s against parliamentary convention for another opposition party to amend an opposition motion when the government has put forward an amendment.

But then Starmer leaned on the Speaker to rip up parliamentary convention and debate Labour’s amendment anyway.

Labour insiders bragged to the press that they achieved this by threatening to oust Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker after they win the next general election if he didn’t cave into their demands.

It’s beyond question that Starmer had a meeting with the former-Labour Speaker before his decision to rip up parliamentary convention to create such a farcical shambles. There’s no accountability, so we’ll never actually know what the leader of the opposition actually said to the supposedly impartial Speaker to influence him into making such a biased and convention-defying call, but you’d be a fool to take Starmer’s word on anything given his litany of deceptions and lies to date.

So Hoyle debased the political process by calling Starmer’s amendment first, and the Tories walked out of the debate in protest at his bias.

The Tories obviously have no moral high ground whatever given their repeated abuses of parliamentary process over Brexit, Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament, and their repeated briefings of new legislation to the press, rather than to parliament, but the scenes were absolutely farcical, and caused directly by Lindsay Hoyle siding with Keir Starmer when he’s supposed to act with impartiality.

The clerk of the House of Commons Tom Goldsmith had warned Hoyle about the unprecedented nature of his decision beforehand saying he felt "compelled to point out that long-established conventions are not being followed in this case", but Hoyle did it anyway.

But then Hoyle didn’t even turn up to the farcical situation he had created, sending out his deputy to deal with the chaos, only to emerge later to apologise to MPs for what he’d done and claim he was only trying to do the right thing, and centre MPs as the victims in the whole situation by pretending that simply following parliamentary convention would have put them in jeopardy.

This entire farce was caused purely because Starmer wanted to strip out reference to Israel’s “collective punishment" of Palestinian citizens and water down the ceasefire call to give Israel the green light to continue their atrocities.

With the Tory walkout Starmer’s watered down motion was adopted without opposition, provoking a tsunami of Labour crowing about how Starmer had "won", and skilfully avoided the SNP "trap".

You’d have to be the worst kind of partisan political tribalist to actually believe these absurd assertions that the SNP put forward a ceasefire motion purely to embarrass Labour, especially given that the SNP have been clear and consistent in calling for a peaceful resolution from the beginning, and also because the SNP leader Humza Yousaf has Palestinian family.

When your party is being led by a cynical, manipulative, game-playing, profoundly dishonest, constantly U-turning liar like Keir Starmer, then perhaps it’s impossible to imagine others doing things on principle, just because they’re the right thing to do?

The fact of the matter is that Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle colluded to hijack the SNP’s ceasefire call, and turned the process into a convention defying farce.

Anyone who sees that as a Labour victory clearly cares as little about the suffering of Palestinian civilians as they do about respectful debate and the impartiality of the Speaker in parliamentary politics.

Hoyle has made his position so untenable that MPs resorted to chants of "bring back Bercow", and in any sane political system Starmer’s position would be just as untenable after such a blatant abuse of process.

However we clearly don’t have a sane political system. We’re stuck with a depraved rabble who follow the most ludicrously outdated parliamentary conventions to the letter when it suits them, but then rip the processes up to create farcical scenes when it doesn’t.

Despite the protestations of Starmer’s media outriders, and all these vapid 'centrist' assertions that everyone’s equally to blame, the fact is that this whole pathetic shambles came about because Keir Starmer (the so-called human rights lawyer) outright refuses to call Israel’s genocidal actions what they are, to such an extent that he’d lean on the Speaker to dynamite his credibility and abuse parliamentary process purely to avoid it.