Labour has been accused of bullying its own MPs after the party named and shamed rebels who refused to oppose the government’s austerity measures.
Email inboxes of the 21 MPs who did not fall into line with John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, were deluged with complaints and abuse from hard-left activists yesterday.
Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader who has promised a “kinder politics”, accused the MPs of being disgraceful and “on a par with the Tories”. They demanded immediate resignations from those who refused on Wednesday to vote against government plans to run a budget surplus in normal times.
The MPs, who included the prominent Blairites Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall, were also singled out on social media, with one widely followed hard-left Twitter account calling the abstainers “Tory lites” and a “waste of space”.
This followed the unprecedented decision by the Labour whips’ office to publish the names of 21 MPs who had failed to vote against the government’s fiscal charter. Thirty-seven Labour MPs failed to turn up to the vote in total but the party whips’ official Twitter account singled out what one rebel described as “the guilty men and women” who did not have permission from the party to abstain. The decision to publish the names is understood to have been agreed by Mr Corbyn’s office.
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One of the rebel Labour MPs said: “I’ve never seen the whips’ office behave like this. They put our names up in lights on social media, effectively telling the Corbynistas to come and get us — they have duly obliged.”
Meanwhile, Labour frontbenchers stepped up their private criticism of Mr Corbyn, warning that there could be principled resignations soon, although some acknowledged there was still little sign of a plan for how to deal with the new leader.
The targeted online vitriol is the first sign of a concerted hard-left attempt to fight mainstream MPs on the internet, amid signs that a new strategy is taking hold. Labour Party Marxists, a faction that purports to be inside the party, has published a six-point plan to ensure that Mr Corbyn’s agenda is widely adopted. “As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with disciplinary threats, constitutional changes and reselection measures,” it said.
The naming of the MPs came after Mr McDonnell was criticised over a U-turn on Monday when he withdrew his support for George Osborne’s fiscal charter. He had admitted on Wednesday that his change of stance was “embarrassing”.
The online attacks yesterday came in stark contrast to the apparent attitude of the whips. They did not appear to take any action against the rebels despite the three-line whip. This led to suggestions that Mr Corbyn’s party was effectively outsourcing party discipline to a social media mob.
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The online forum Labour Young Socialists used the list in a Facebook post to call on constituency Labour parties to deselect the group. A Labour spokeswoman denied that the party deliberately intended to name and shame the rebels, insisting that the publication was intended to help the media to work out which of those who abstained had done so because of an agreed prior engagement.
A former aide to Mr Blair quit the frontbench yesterday to take up a Commons role. David Hanson, who was parliamentary private secretary to the former prime minister, left his role as foreign affairs spokesman to join a panel of MPs who chair some parliamentary debates. He did not criticise Mr Corbyn’s leadership in his departing statement.