At least one Catholic Cabinet Minister is threatening to revolt against the Government over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. There is anger that it appears to be violating the long-held principle of allowing a free vote on matters of conscience

Gordon Brown was prime-minister-in-waiting when he visited the Vatican in February last year, and handed the Pope a book of his father's Church of Scotland sermons. Government sources said that the meeting could not have gone better. Brown confided that he found the experience highly moving, according to one of his officials. Vatican representatives were said to be impressed with the chancellor's seriousness.

Back in Britain, the Catholic Church was hopeful that the Brown premiership would mark a clean break from months of sparring against what appeared to be an increasingly secularist agenda post-9/11. Under Tony Blair there had been an unsuccessful attempt to force Catholic schools to accept a quota of non-believing pupils, and Catholic adoption agencies had been denied an exemption from legislation allowing homosexual couples to adopt children.

Brown's first utterings as prime minister augured well. After entering Number 10 last June, he immediately announced a rethink over "super-casinos". He also declared himself to be in line with Pope Benedict on the importance of international development, holding out the hope that this prime minister - a quieter, less showy Christian than his predecessor - might emerge as an unlikely ally of the Church and the considerable number of Catholic Labour MPs.

This week, that hope was dimmed as two approaches - in Rome and Westminster - to another policy area neatly crossed over and headed in opposing directions. Speaking to the in-house Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's second highest official for sins and penance, Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, placed bioethics at the head of a new list of "social" sins. On that subject, "there are areas where we absolutely must denounce ... violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation", the bishop said. That the Vatican is firmly opposed to stem-cell research involving the destruction of embryos is of course not new. But the explicit emphasis - along with twenty-first century issues such as environmental damage - was.

Around the same time in London, a fresh argument within the Labour Party reached its height over the Government's unprecedented refusal to allow free votes for its Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, soon to pass through the House of Commons (no date has been set) in what Brown and Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, see as a key part of the Government's programme of scientific advancement.

The last time an Embryology Act was passed in Parliament was in 1990, when the Commons was offered a free vote up to the third reading, as is usual - by tradition if not law in our un-codified constitution - for matters relating to "conscience". This tradition emerged during the mid-1960s over the abolition of the death penalty, after which a free vote on the subject was put to MPs every few years. It has since been used, of course, over abortion - an issue which has been pushed back on to the agenda in connection to the embryo plans - and, under Tony Blair, on the banning of fox-hunting. Whips imply that the new embryo bill - which will require votes on a number of detailed amendments - is, crucially, not in the traditional mould of a conscience issue.

Controversially, the bill will allow for the creation of animal-human embryos by injecting human DNA into an animal egg cell from which the animal DNA has been removed. The resulting hybrid embryo would be used in medical research, before being discarded. But the Government is stressing other elements of the legislation, relating to boosting medical research which, it says, justifies the use of the whips.

The former minister Denis MacShane, who was raised a Catholic, explained: "I believe the systems and safeguards in place are right [in the bill]. As it is a government decision and involves giving guidance to universities and medical research bodies as well as public money, I don't think it is reasonable to say it is all a matter of conscience."

Others, however, disagree. The senior Catholic Labour MP John Grogan - no classic rebel - told The Tablet that it was "definitely" a matter for the "informed conscience" of individual MPs. Nonetheless, while the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are refraining from applying the "whip" to the votes, Labour has already controversially done so in the Lords, where the bill has completed its third reading. Now it is proposing to do the same in the Commons, to the fury of several ministers as well as some MPs.

Accordingly, sources close to three Cabinet ministers - the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly; the Welsh Secretary, Paul Murphy; and Des Browne, the Defence Secretary - have made their concerns known. Following reports that the ministers were among a group of Catholic MPs who will defy the Government, and tense behind-the-scenes meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the chief whip, Geoff Hoon, came up with what he thought was a compromise: a "special standing orders of the Labour Party" would be invoked, an arrangement where MPs could be absent from Westminster, and thus abstain from the crucial votes.

However, according to a well-placed source close to one of the three Cabinet ministers in question, "this simply won't wash". At the time of writing, the source was maintaining that the minister would be compelled to go ahead with actively voting against the bill.

Hoon has said that the compromise option means that "[no MP] will be required to vote against their conscience". But as Greg Pope, the Catholic Labour MP for Hyndburn, says: "I have had hundreds of letters from constituents about human-animal hybrids. The idea that I turn round to them and say the chief whip has given me the day off from voting will cut no ice at all." Another influential backbencher, Jim Dobbin, agrees, and has scheduled a meeting with Brown to tell him so.

Intriguingly, Grogan believes the Government will yet have a change of heart. Describing the current compromise position as "clumsy", he said he would be "amazed" if ministers did not cave in to demands of a free vote. "I think [the Government] will have to concede to the principle of free votes," Grogan told me. "If they don't it could yet even see one or two ministerial resignations on the matter."

In similar vein, a government insider confirmed that such a climb-down is indeed under consideration. The source said there is acceptance that the Hoon compromise "is not going to work". Unlike similar battles such as that over the "watering down" of faith schools in 2006, anger over the current refusal to allow a free vote is not confined to Catholics. At the end of last week, an extraordinary letter appeared in The Times, signed by 100 university professors - some Catholic, some non-Catholic.

"We the undersigned do not hold a single common view on the substantive proposals in the present bill," the professors explained. "We do, however, hold a common view that the Government and the other political parties should not erode the precedent of a ‘conscience vote' on controversial bioethical legislation." The letter concluded: "Votes on amendments to this bill should not be whipped."

After publication, Brown's position was said to remain uncompromising: there will be no free vote and any minister who votes against the Government will leave its ranks. But with rumours persisting that at least one minister is preparing to do just that, it is looking possible that Gordon Brown, like Tony Blair before him, will find himself forced to step back from the brink of an unexpected confrontation with a strand on Labour's benches that is increasingly learning how to fight back.

Back to homepage