Clean hands and collective responsibility
You would not believe, to hear them, that they were at heart of new Labour project for at least a decade,” she said.
They were members of the Cabinet for the last five years. And yet, at hustings after hustings, they tell you ‘they disagreed with this, they disagreed with that, they don’t know why we did this, they don’t know why we did that’.
- Diane Abbott, speaking about her rivals for the Labour leadership in an interview with the BBC.
Abbott is by no means the first person to come out with this sort of criticism of Labour ex-Ministers, but it never fails to irritate me. It’s really not complicated. Governments in the UK operate under Cabinet Collective Responsibility, meaning that as a member of the government you have to publicly support and defend any decision the government makes, or you have to resign. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise either that any of the four former members of the last Labour government disagreed with some of the decisions it made, or that they’re only choosing to make this disagreement public now that they’re not in power anymore. As a minister, that’s exactly what you’re meant to do. And what’s more, if what you care about is bringing about positive social change – something you’d at least hope is pretty important to someone who goes into politics – then staying in government, rather than returning to the backbenches, is almost always going to be the best way to achieve that, even if the government you’re part of is making some decisions you think are wrong. There are clearly going to be situations when resigning is the better option – for example, Robin Cook was right to go over the Iraq War in March 2003 and Clare Short was wrong to stay on 2 months longer, but staying on because you believe you can mitigate a bad situation is surely understandable. Implying that former ministers are being dishonest when they say they disagreed with a decision which they didn’t resign over is just disingenuous and immature.
Reader Comments
Spot on. It frightens me the extent to which many on the eft pretend this isn’t an issue or can be ignored.
Yes. Owen is right to an extent.
But I’m not sure that either the Milibands or Balls really grasp the extent to which they are percieved to have f***ed up, should apologise for f***ing up and come up with a clear programme for the future that will correct the old f*** ups.
Yes, they were in the cabinet and yes they had a duty within that to support the government. But similarly, since they were in the cabinet they presumably had some influence over what the government decided. [If they had no positive influence, they should have resigned]. As such, they have to accept some responsibility for some of what occurred.
In reference to Abbott’s precise wording, if they are indeed saying “they don’t know why we did this” about something significant, then they are either lying or failed in their responsibilities when in cabinet. If a government is about to make a significant decision and members of the cabinet have not asked the prime minister why he intends to act in this way and subjected him to some degree of questioning about that, then they were either lazy, too easily intimidated or unwilling to take responsibility.
It’s not like Balls or the Milibands were junior ministers with no power, for, as Mandleson’s diaries indicate, if our dear vulcan former foreign minister had resigned, he probably would have toppled the Brown government.