The ‘shocking tactics’ of Kemi Badenoch

Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’.

What dark perfidy has been done? What cynical political stunt have the Conservatives pulled, staining their hands with such baseness?

Kemi Badenoch has tabled a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is being debated at second reading today.

Let me explain briefly. Second reading is – slightly counterintuitively – the first opportunity for the House of Commons to discuss proposed legislation, the formal question being ‘that the Bill be read a second time’. But there are circumscriptions around the proceedings. MPs debate the fundamental purpose of the bill, and, in the words of Erskine May, the so-called ‘bible of parliamentary procedure’, ‘its whole principle is at issue, and is affirmed or denied by the House’.