The uber-Thatcherite Tory MP is once again spamming Parliament with low quality legislation, but why does he do it?
If Tory MP Christopher Chope had been a Millennial teenager, he would have been on 4Chan’s /b board in the mid 2000s, trying to convince people that drinking bleach is good for you. Faced with a lack of any real power as a backbench MP, he seems to spend his time being one of those people who enjoy throwing a spanner in the works to get a bit of attention.
Like John Hayes, who I reported on earlier this week, Chope is MP for one of the safest Tory seats in the country, and this undoubtedly encourages him to grind his particular axes, knowing he will suffer no consequences at the ballot box.
Chope is known for his opposition to Private Members’ Bills (PMBs), which are a way for MPs who are not members of the Cabinet to propose laws. He says that he objects to PMBs not being debated at Second Reading in the Commons, which he says is undemocratic. Due to this objection he has blocked bills to criminalise ‘Upskirting’ and Female Genital Mutilation, and to pardon Alan Turing.
Chope even angered his own colleagues in November 2021 by blocking ratification of a report on Owen Paterson’s breaches of lobbying rules. Again, Chope claims he is acting on principle as a cover for simply objecting to the substance of the motion. According to The Guardian, “Ministerial aides have called Chope an “absolute twat” in private WhatsApp messages”.
As this good Medium post by Katy Preen details, Chope has a habit of using parliamentary procedure to object to legislation he doesn’t like, while claiming to act out of virtuous principle. Preen says “By objecting, talking bills out, and submitting volumes of his own PMBs, Chope is trying to break the system. And while he claims to want these bills to be debated and receive proper scrutiny, his actions ensure the opposite.”
One of Chope’s tactics to trash the PMB system is to submit dozens of his own bills which have no chance of succeeding, but might potentially push the government to pursue such extreme ideas in future. In 2020, he proposed 41 of them in a parliamentary session.
Chope submitted 17 Private Members’ Bills for the 2021/22 Parliamentary session, including the BBC Licence Fee Non-Payment (Decriminalisation for Over-75s) Bill, British Broadcasting Corporation (Privatisation) Bill, Channel 4 (Privatisation) Bill, Covid-19 Vaccine Damage Bill, Green Belt Protection Bill, Illegal Immigration (Offences) Bill, National Health Service Co-Funding and Co-Payment Bill, and NHS England (Alternative Treatment) Bill.
As well as wanting to privatise the NHS, BBC and Channel 4, he also wants to troll people who are concerned by the climate crisis with his Anxiety (Environmental Concerns) Bill. According to the Bournemouth Echo he reportedly said of the bill that,
“Eco-anxiety is something which is recognised in the United States and in this country as being a mental health condition for which you can get treatment… It can lead to people deciding not to have children due to damage to the planet.”
This is a law that would “place a duty on the Secretary of State to reduce anxiety about environmental concerns among the general population”. A completely separate Bill submitted by Chope (Anxiety in Schools (Environmental Concerns) Bill) would “make provision for guidance to schools about reducing anxiety about environmental concerns among pupils and staff”.
How does he think this would work? Would teachers be forced to tell students that the climate crisis isn’t real? The law seems like legalised gaslighting of people’s genuine concerns.
Another Bill in 2021 asked for an “independent audit of the costs and benefits of meeting the requirement under the Climate Change Act 2008 for net United Kingdom carbon emissions to be zero by 2050”. Campaigning against Net Zero targets has become a key tactic of climate change denialists like the Global Warming Policy Foundation, whose events Chope has attended.
Hypocritically, Chope doesn’t object to Private Members’ Bills pushed by other backbench Conservative MPs like Peter Bone, which rather gives the lie to the idea that he opposes PMBs on principle.
In 2019, Chope wrote that “The Private Members Bill process is under challenge from single issue pressure groups each of which wants their own Bill to be given priority.” Meanwhile, Chope acts as a single person pressure group pushing extreme Thatcherite economic ideas in dozens of his own bills and stopping serious issues like sexual harassment and abuse getting a fair hearing.
In a recent reading of his NHS Co-Payment Bill, he refused to give way to requests to speak by his own Conservative colleagues four times, talking out his allotted 15 minutes promoting even further NHS privatisation seemingly to just take up time. The content of these no hope bills also seems aimed at dragging the Conservative Party further right by getting people talking about them.
His extreme Thatcherite economic ideology also makes him an ally of certain business interests. He has taken a number of donations from tobacco companies and their lobbyists, and has a long record of anti-environmentalism. He’s also been recently asked a very leading Parliamentary question about how many people died after receiving a Covid-19 vaccination.
The willingness of some on the fringes of the Conservative Party to entertain and promote vaccine scepticism shows how far right conspiracy theories get laundered into the mainstream right.
The fact checking organisation Full Fact criticised Chope’s statements on Covid vaccines, saying that he “made a number of misleading statements about the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Yellow Card scheme, which collects reports of suspected vaccine side effects. He also made claims about hospital occupancy and the number of families affected by serious vaccine side effects, which are not substantiated by official data.”
They added that “Some of Mr Chope’s words have been picked up by social media accounts opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine and are being used to spread misinformation.”
Chope seems to be engaged in a dishonest attempt to strangle opposition legislation he doesn’t like by abusing Parliamentary procedures in a way that even his own colleagues are becoming fed up with. He’s like a disruptive Facebook user spamming your local community group with Breitbart articles about how the libs want to destroy the local war memorial. or your very right wing boomer uncle who can’t stop posting YouTube conspiracy theory links and going ‘Why ISn’t THe MediA CoVEriNG THis?’
Chope does not even have a Twitter account, but he doesn’t need one, because he is able to post far more powerful discourse in the form of legislation and Parliamentary questions. For someone who doesn’t seem to be very online, he is also a good example of an older conservative man who seems to be becoming even more radicalised by anti-vaxx misinformation coming from the far right.
John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward
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