Chris Hinchliff was surprised when he was called into the whip’s office at short notice to be told he was no longer a Labour MP because of his campaign to enshrine chalk stream protections in law.
Hinchliff, 31, who last summer became the new MP for North East Hertfordshire, was suspended from the parliamentary Labour party, along with three other MPs, because of a small rebellion he organised over the planning and infrastructure bill.
He has a couple of rare chalk streams in his constituency that are being polluted with sewage, sucked dry and killed. Hinchliff submitted amendments to the bill that would stop new developments from being able to further abuse these habitats. Fifteen of his colleagues voted for these amendments.
A source on Keir Starmer’s team said the MPs had been suspended for “persistent knobheadery”. Hinchliff looks visibly hurt by the accusation, saying: “I’ll leave that for others to assess … I suppose ever so slightly more seriously about that, it doesn’t surprise me that people use that language. That is the sort of language we persistently see from a certain set of people involved in politics for whom it’s all a personality thing, it’s all a game.”
He added: “The conversation itself was OK. I have no gripes with the whips. But yes, it was a surprise. They said I was having a pattern of behaviour investigated, and I am not sure I accept the characterisation of being a persistent rebel. I am persistent, but I am not a rebel. I have voted with the government, by my calculations, 97% of the time in the over 250 votes I have been present for.”
The day after he was stripped of the whip, the government slipped out some amendments to the planning and infrastructure bill that look very similar to Hinchliff’s own – including one that gives some protections to “irreplaceable habitats” such as chalk streams.
Hinchliff said he was pleased with these and thought the whole situation did not have to happen, as ministers could have met him to discuss the issue and tweaked the bill to allay his concerns.
“I asked time and again for meetings with ministers to discuss some tweaks to the bill. None met with me,” he said. “But these new amendments have significantly addressed the primary purpose of the amendments that I put forward. I think the bill is now in the position that it can go ahead, I want to support the government.”
It has been a bruising experience for Hinchliff, who until he became an MP last July worked in the charity sector, which has HR departments and codes of conduct that preclude the kind of bullying he has faced in Westminster. He has been referred to as a nimby and “Hedgehog Hezbollah” by his colleagues, and accused of trying to thwart Labour’s growth plans with his call for chalk stream protections.
“Look, I’m not trying to get the world’s tiniest violin out to say, ‘poor MPs’,” he said. “But I will say there seems to be a certain set of people who behave in here more like a private schoolboy drinking club than serious professional people thinking about how to improve the country.”
He has had support, though. Many people were disappointed that he was punished for standing up for nature. “I have to say, it’s been really heartwarming, having absolute floods of handwritten notes, emails, Facebook messages of support from people I have met and people I haven’t, from my constituency and wider and in the labour movement and beyond, and that has meant a lot at what would have otherwise been quite a difficult time. It shows there are still some good people out there.”
And it is not just wayward MPs who have faced strong language from some in the Labour party. Newts and bats have had a rough time, accused by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and Keir Starmer of being the cause of Britain’s housing crisis. Now, snails have been added to the list. Reeves this week said: “I care more about a young family getting on the housing ladder than I care about some snails.”
Hinchliff hopes this rhetoric towards nature stops: “In some of my rural villages where I’ve joined parish meetings, that has not gone down particularly well, so it’ll make my life a bit easier if we all just take a step back from that slightly more heated language.”
On Monday, the government announced its plans to abolish the water regulator, Ofwat, and replace it with a stronger alternative to get a grip on the sewage crisis plaguing England’s waterways. Hinchliff thinks this will help his local chalk streams, too. “Fair play to the government. Over the year that I’ve been elected, I’ve had a lot of constituents contact me with pretty angry words to say about the water regulators. So I think looking at abolishing Ofwat in the way that they are is a very welcome move.”
Some of his colleagues have been critical of the government for not considering nationalising the water industry, but Hinchliff is sanguine about the prime minister’s plans: “We didn’t stand on a manifesto of nationalisation. If we find that we cannot resolve the problems in the water system over the duration of the parliament with a privatised system, then I would certainly be very open.”
He thinks that the sector as it stands needs fast reform, which is what the government is trying to do: “For me, actually sort of more viscerally at the moment, is what can the government do to make these bastards pay, basically, and get some of the money back that has been stripped out of our countryside, sweated our assets, and now it’s left to people already struggling with the cost of living to bail them out and solve the problem.”
Despite the treatment he has experienced, he hopes to have the whip restored and will keep campaigning for Labour: “I am Labour through and through. I am determined to be a representative for the Labour party.”
There is no question of him joining the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed new party of leftwing MPs, or the Greens. “I almost swore when you asked me that!” he said. “Absolutely no way will I be joining them. I have been a Labour member all of my adult life.”