Karl Turner, the MP for Hull, has lost the Labour whip. Described by colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) as “a 24-hour rolling news show all on his own”, Turner has been an outspoken critic of the government on a number of areas, especially its plans to limit jury trials in order to ease the courts backlog.
He was informed by email yesterday that he had been suspended, after conduct warnings, because of complaints from colleagues. The final straw was a podcast appearance by Turner in which he was interviewed by Jody McIntyre, who ran against Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley at the last election on a pro-Gaza platform and was blamed for a campaign that Phillips described as “the worst election I have ever stood in”.
Turner did the interview – about the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s mobile phone – without researching McIntyre. I understand Phillips contacted Turner to ask him why he had agreed to talk to McIntyre and if he was aware of his background. Turner then apologised for an error of judgement after looking into McIntyre’s record.
Turner regrets the association with McIntyre but maintains that the party’s main motivation for suspending him is to silence the loudest internal critic of its jury trials plan. In Turner’s view, the party was looking for a reason to suspend him and found it with this interview. Party sources insist it was not about a policy disagreement and that open debate is welcome within the PLP.
That may all be true. But it is the unfortunate legacy of the government’s own whips operation that quite a few other Labour MPs struggle to believe it. It was only this month that Markus Campbell-Savours got the whip back after being suspended in December for voting against the government’s original plan for inheritance tax relief cuts. Shortly after Campbell-Savours’s rebellion the government performed a major U-turn on the policy and aligned itself with the MP’s position, yet it nonetheless kept him in parliamentary purgatory for another two months. Then there were the four MPs suspended for opposing the doomed welfare bill before having the whip restored months after the reforms had been dropped. Before them, seven MPs were suspended for siding with the SNP against the two-child benefit cap, a position that, again, eventually became government policy. Talk of welcoming debate is heard with scepticism on the backbenches.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: How the powerful profit from disorder]
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