by Chris McLaughlin
A new system for expelling from Parliament MPs found guilty of abusing their expenses and a review of the voting system were promised by Gordon Brown in the first stage of an attempted come-back following the collapse of a Labour coup to oust him.
The moves were announced days after Labour crashed to its worst electoral showing in a national poll, having been trounced at the county council elections and left with control of no counties.
The European elections saw Labour, with just 15 per cent of the vote, come third after UKIP, the BNP win two seats to take its highest profile elected position yet, with access to hundreds of thousands of Brussels funding.
The drubbing led to a visibly shaken Mr Brown confessing to a crowded meeting of MPs and peers on Monday evening that he had weaknesses which would have to be addressed.
In spite of speculation that he might face a critical mass of MPs willing to sign a plea for him to go, critics such as former Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who called directly for him to resign for the sake of the party, were heard in silence.
After just five of 21 speakers spoke out against him, Mr Brown was treated to the parliamentary seal of approval, cheers and the banging of desk lids, as he had on arrival in the Commons committee room.
With sceptics warning that the battle had been won but the war was not over – “a leopard does not change its spots”, said one – Mr Brown was effectively placed on probation until the annual Labour Party conference in September.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Mr Brown said there needed to be a new system of “recall” for MPs who fail to meeting tighter rules on financial probity, which could lead to their expulsion from Parliament.
He also said the Government would soon set out proposals for taking forward a review of the first-past-the-post voting system while stressing that it was “essential” to maintain the link between constituencies and their MPs.
The move follows growing support among ministers and MPs for the alternative vote system in which voters indicate preferences and votes are transferred until a candidate tops 50 per cent. But Tory leader David Cameron mocked Mr Brown’s “sudden conversion” to alternative voting, asking whether it had any link to the fact that Labour had done so badly at the polls.
Fears that fresh faces in the Cabinet and the promise of constitutional change were compounded by midweek polls which still showed public impressions of Labour as divided, corrupt or unclear what it stands for.
National Executive Committee member Peter Kenyon, who is to write on constitutional change in next week’s Tribune, said: “These promises sound rather hollow. We don’t have internal party democracy, so what hope for parliamentary democracy?”
