Blair faces test on defence vote

Labour's disciplinary line: MPs expected to abstain but backbench troops may well mutiny

Tony Blair's tough disciplinary line for Labour MPs will be tested in one of the first votes in the Commons when the House returns after the summer recess on 14 October.

The Labour leader is expected to order his troops to abstain in the annual vote on the defence estimates, to avoid being cast as being "weak on defence". Already one MP has said he will defy the whip. Llew Smith, MP for Blaenau Gwent, told the Independent he would vote against the defence estimates. "If the whips' office is going to start disciplining people when we're on a three-line whip to abstain, then I'll be disciplined for voting against a Tory government, and the leadership must ask where they're taking the party," he said.

Mr Blair's drive to assert discipline over his MPs in preparation for government was rejected by several other backbenchers yesterday.

David Winnick, MP for Walsall North, said: "I hope we're not going back to the pre-Harold Wilson days of harsh discipline. In 1955 Hugh Gaitskell tried to have Nye Bevan expelled. In 1961 Michael Foot and four others had the whip removed. A democratic party should allow debate. Once you start threatening to take the whip away it causes nothing but trouble."

Mr Smith, who succeeded Foot and Bevan as MP for the South Wales mining seat formerly called Ebbw Vale, said: "What the party needs is not discipline but socialism."

Leadership hints last week that the review of the rules of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) would produce a harsh new disciplinary code were accompanied by veiled threats from Donald Dewar, Labour chief whip, that persistent rebels would be suspended from the PLP.

He said that backbench MPs would have new rights if Labour were in government, but added: "Along with those rights must go responsibilities to sustain that government." Asked whether he would withdraw the whip from those who did not, he said: "I certainly hope it doesn't become a common feature."

A senior Labour whip pointed out that the PLP already put Labour MPs under a duty "to refrain from personal attacks upon colleagues orally or in writing".

But he said there were "gaps" in the rules, in that there was no requirement for MPs to be contactable, and no general requirement not to bring the party into disrepute.

The reforms are defended by Nick Brown, deputy chief whip, in an article in next month's Fabian Review, in which he says: "It is a matter of co- operative working, not of thought-policing." He adds: "Sniping in the press, the leaking of sensitive party documents and the practice of unattributed briefing should have no part in a cohesive political party serious about governing the country."

But Ken Livingstone, one of the objects of the Labour leadership's disapproval, told the Independent that attempts to suppress public disagreements were a "sneak's charter". He said: "Everyone will talk off the record, and they'll be nastier comments. It is bizarre to go down that road."

Most alarming for Labour backbenchers was the suggestion, made by a spokesman for Mr Blair, that the "liaison committee" of front and backbenchers, which acts as a channel of communication during a Labour government, was being "reviewed".

Under the last Labour government, this committee was a tame body, consisting of seven ministers, including James Callaghan, the prime minister, six backbenchers elected by the entire PLP, one elected Labour peer and the chairman of the PLP.

Most of the internal opposition to the Labour government came from the party's national executive. Mr Blair has taken action to avert a repeat of that conflict too. Tom Sawyer, general secretary of the party, has floated a number of ideas for changing the role and structure of the national executive if Labour is in government after the next election.

Suggestions include a requirement on it to support a Labour government, diluting trade union representation with councillors and grassroots representatives of local parties, and moving to quarterly rather than monthly meetings.