Speaker says he made a judgment call that did not end up where he expected and regrets it
Speaking on BBC Newsnight last night, the SNP’s culture spokesperson John Nicolson denied that the group had purposefully walked out of the chamber together with Tory MPs as the debate ended yesterday.
Nicolson said:
SNP MPs thought the whole procedure was absurd. What SNP MPs did was they went to the lobby, that’s the rooms beside the main parliamentary debating chamber, ready to vote, they were anticipating and expecting a vote.
A number of MPs cross-party said they wanted their constituents to know where they stood on this and the problem with staged shenanigans was that MPs weren’t allowed to express their views in the lobbies and vote.
Senior Labour figures tell me @CommonsSpeaker was left in no doubt that Labour would bring him down after the general election unless he called Labour’s Gaza amendment
The message was: you will need our votes to be re-elected as speaker after election with strong indications this would not be forthcoming if he failed to call the Labour amendment
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