Mark Pack

Labour splits three ways in Parliamentary vote on carbon budget

By | Tue 28th June 2011 - 7:54 am

Labour MPs yesterday split three ways in a Commons vote on one of the government’s key environmental proposals

The committee vote came in the House of Commons on the statutory instrument (SI) for the fourth carbon budget, on whether or not to accept to accept the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendations that total emissions in 2023-27 should be set at 1950 MtCO2 (a 50% reduction from 1990 levels).

Labour MPs Dennis Skinner and Geoffrey Robinson voted against, Nic Dakin and Ian Mearns abstained and the other Labour MPs voted in favour, as did all the Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs.

Aside from the oddity of the three-way split, the vote also shows once again how even on topics where Labour official policy is in line with the Liberal Democrats, it is Conservative parliamentarians (even if only reluctantly following coalition agreements) who are regularly a more reliable source of support than Labour ones. As on electoral reform, the progressives in Labour are frequently very thin on the ground.

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3 Comments

  • Adam 29th Jun '11 - 11:19am

    OK, so Labour has four MPs who rebelled in two different ways. Seriously, there are good reasons to be disapproving of Labour (such as their continued authoritarian line on DNA retention), but this really isn’t it, and it just looks petty of us to be harping on about such things. We have the odd rebels too, these days.

  • Malcolm Todd 29th Jun '11 - 4:16pm

    Oh, come on. 98% of Labour MPs back our and their party’s policy and you’re calling it a ‘split’, which shows that ‘progressives’ (whatever they are) are ‘thin on the ground’? Tendentious hardly covers it. ‘Desperate’ might be better.

  • Malcolm Todd 30th Jun '11 - 4:28pm

    As Mark’s just pointed out on his site, I misread this: it was a committee vote, so four MPs is more than half of the Labour party’s members involved in that vote. Apologies, Mark.

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