Lib Dem Voice launched our new website – How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP? – at the party’s spring conference on Friday.
LDV has identified 10 key votes from the 2005-10 Parliament – ranging from ID cards and freedom of speech to freedom of information and trial without jury – in order to rank all MPs according to how liberal or authoritarian their record is. All MPs are marked out of 100: the higher their score the more authoritarian they are. The lower their score the more liberal is their voting record.
24 Lib Dem MPs recorded a perfect zero score of 0/100, meaning they had voted on the liberal side of the argument in each of the 10 Commons debates we looked at. Here is the roll-call of liberalism:
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=1 Don Foster Bath Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Alan Beith Berwick-upon-Tweed Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Stephen Williams Bristol West Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Jenny Willott Cardiff Central Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Paul Holmes Chesterfield Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Dan Rogerson North Cornwall Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Chris Huhne Eastleigh Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Phil Willis Harrogate & Knaresborough Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Andrew Stunell Hazel Grove Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Lynne Featherstone Hornsey & Wood Green Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Norman Baker Lewes Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 John Leech Manchester, Withington Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Evan Harris Oxford West & Abingdon Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Andrew George St Ives Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Lorely Burt Solihull Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 David Heath Somerton & Frome Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 John Pugh Southport Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Paul Burstow Sutton & Cheam Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Jeremy Browne Taunton Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Adrian Sanders Torbay Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Robert Smith Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Alan Reid Argyll & Bute Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 John Barrett Edinburgh West Liberal Democrat 0%
=1 Alistair Carmichael Orkney & Shetland Liberal Democrat 0%
Do please use How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP? and its built-in social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to spread the news about how liberal or authoritarian your MP is.
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15 Comments
Have you calculated what the average score for each party is?
James
24 is 38% of 63 MPs. What is the record of the other 39?
I can see names in here I wouldn’t describe as particularly liberal. I have yet to do a proper analysis of LDV’s ranking technique, but the results published so far seem wrong to me.
A lot of Lib Dem MPs have very low percentages, but didn’t turn up to a couple of votes. David Howarth is on 3%, for instance, because he missed the votes on the DNA database. If he had voted he would be one of the perfect zero scorers, to be sure.
Annette Brooke also only missed one vote and scored 3% as a result. I imagine there may be one or two highly authoritarian Members who missed a vote as well and so failed to score a “perfect” 100%. Perhaps the thresholds at both ends of the spectrum should be given a small margin to cater for an unavoidable absence.
We’ll be publishing the list of all 63 Lib Dem MPs and how they scored tomorrow – tho if you can’t wait til then it’s easy enough to see for yourselves here: http://rank.libdemvoice.org/ranked/
As mentioned, no Lib Dem MP has ever voted on the authoritarian side of the argument in any of the 10 votes we analysed – those without perfect zero scores simply didn’t turn up to one or more of the 10 votes.
James – good idea about getting average scores for the parties. Will try and find a quick ‘n’ easy way to calaulate.
The key failing of LDV’s ranking is not the ranking of LD MPs but the spurious ‘liberalism’ it attributes to Conservatives. While the Tories may have adopted opposition to key authoritarian Government policiesin the last Parliament, enabling some of them to score well on the 10 votes LDV has picked out, the idea that these people, who enthsiastically supported Thatcher in their youth, are in any way liberals is absolutely laughable. They just happen to have voted against the Government. If there had been a Tory Government after 7/7, most of them could probably have been induced by Prime Minister Michael ‘something of the night’ Howard to lock up their own mothers on the basis of hearsay!
LDV should stop headlining this silly and very rudimentary analysis, and highlight instead the very real divide on social liberalism between Tories and Liberal Democrats.
Terry – can you tell us, please, the Commons votes from the 2005-10 Parliament we should use to do this?
If you look at the 10 votes we picked (with Chris Huhne’s team’s help) they are all substantial civil liberties issues. It might be convenient from a campaigning pov if the Tories had voted in an authoritarian way – and you may be right that that’s exactly what they would’ve done if in government – but the fact is they voted against encroaching on civil liberties in many (but by no means all) key votes.
We could add in social liberal issues – if people will find the votes from the last Parliament to enable us to do this! – but personally I think these are separate issues, and it’s not a good idea to mix them up in the way you suggest.
Chris Huhne Eastleigh Liberal Democrat 0%
That’ll be the bloke who supported the Home Office’s decison to ban a Dutch MP from entering the UK for saying something unpopular about an old book.
Perhaps looking at voting records in isolation isn’t the best way of divining how liberal an MP is.
iainm – Chris Huhne later recanted his position on Geert Wilders, as he wrote for LDV here: http://bit.ly/ayVzFo – “the best chance of once again plunging him into a deserved obscurity – at least in the UK – is to avoid giving him the oxygen of controversy.”
I was somewhat surprised when I saw that the smoking ban wasn’t an issue deemed relevant to the liberal/authoritarian ranking but then I remembered that most of the Lib Dem MPs voted in favour of a ban… Was that the only reason why it wasn’t included? I do understand, there is an election coming up afterall.
Will there be an editors’ post explaining why these votes in particular were chosen and why others – e.g. the votes on the smoking ban and the Lisbon treaty referendum – were not?* (Surely the Lisbon treaty vote is just as relevant as the Freedom of Information/MPs’ expenses one?) I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the selection, just curious as to the editors’ understanding of what being liberal actually entails.
*Apologies if there is one already.
Harry – we selected votes where we felt it was clear what the liberal position is – chiefly civil liberties issues.
We did think about the smoking issue, but – though I personally opposed the ban – we agreed there are liberal reasons in that case why people could be in favour of the ban. (The ‘freedom from harm’ principle).
As for Lisbon, I just don’t think it fits with liberal/authoritarian dichotomy. There are liberal arguments why people could be in favour of the treay and/or referendum, or against it. But I certainly wouldn’t define someone as authoritarian on the basis of their Lisbon views.
Stephen Tall –
Thanks for the swift response. It’s reassuring to know it was up for discussion at least! I see your point: if it was included, people might be arguing whether the liberal MPs were those who voted in favour or those who voted against! That’s the funy thing about the ‘freedom from harm’ principle: pretty much everything can be argued on some level to ‘harm’ someone else. Liberalism ain’t easy!
Ah yes I’d agree that it doesn’t really fit with the liberal/authoritarian split. My comparison was aimed more at questioning the selection of the MPs’ expenses bill. To me the two votes seemed more about decency and honesty in public life rather than lib/auth. Having said that, after a second look, I guess you could see the expenses bill as an authoritarian attempt to censor. (The referendum vote would be relevant because it was a manifesto pledge – at least in some form – and keeping manifesto pledges is quite important to democracy.)
The MPs who voted for the smoking ban voted for a bill that went well beyond what was necessary to prevent harm to others. It absolutely was an authoritarian/ liberal dichotomy and the party’s support for it was a disgrace. The fact that something is popular does not make it liberal, no matter what vaguely liberal-sounding justifications they managed to retro-fit to the decision.
That’s one way of looking at it, IainM. Others might say that the bill didn’t go far enough to prevent harm to others, and that the party’s support for it was a betrayal of liberalism in the face of the neo-authoritarian Big Tobacco pressure groups.