Wendy Morton, the West Midlands MP for Aldridge-Brownhills since 2015, was appointed to the position by Ms Truss only six weeks ago. She was in charge of maintaining discipline within the Conservative Party as chief whip. It came after Senior Labour MP Chris Bryant requested that the deputy speaker investigate “scenes in the voting lobby” in Parliament. Bryant claims he witnessed MPs being “physically manhandled.” He accuses government whips, who enforce discipline, of bullying and harassing his Tory colleagues over the recent vote. Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, a Labour MP, tweeted that he had “never seen scenes like it” in the voting lobby. He claimed to have witnessed Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg yelling at his colleagues, whips “screaming at Conservatives,” and “dragging people in.” Earlier, despite some Tory MPs threatening to defy the government over shale gas extraction, Labour lost a vote to ban fracking. A majority of 96 MPs voted in favour of the ban, while 326 voted against it. Labour attempted to force the introduction of a draught law prohibiting fracking through a vote in Parliament. Tory MPs were ordered by the government to vote against Labour or face expulsion from the parliamentary party. Three Tory MPs, including former climate minister Chris Skidmore, said they couldn’t “vote tonight to support fracking.” The vote is the first parliamentary test of the government’s fracking plans, but given the size of the Conservatives’ majority, it was never likely to succeed.
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