Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
In the Australian system even a single rebellion against your party can mean the whip is withdrawn but in the UK we’re much more used to MPs ‘crossing the floor’ and voting against their party.
In fact there’s been a fair amount of coverage on Lib Dem Voice of Mark Pack’s research on the number of backbench Lib Dem MPs who have rebelled against the government since the last election.
One could argue that MPs have a duty to vote with the party that helped get them elected and ultimately the party that people voted for. Or in the current situation of a coalition perhaps MPs should seek to vote with the spirit of their party’s manifesto? But if all MPs did that, how would coalition work?
Even very recently the party’s activists have been lobbying our Lords to enact a policy that wasn’t decided until after the election by our conference. Should this bind our parliamentarians, in either house, since it wasn’t necessarily what people voted on?
There is also of course the famous quote from Burke:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
What do you think? When should an MP or peer rebel against their party? And what principles should they set their judgement to rebel or not against?
*Hat tip to Stephen Tall for the idea for this debate.
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17 Comments
There’s a huge amount for them to consider, especially in coalition: their consciences, party policy (and the “main thrust of party policy”), liberal principles, their constituents, argument in parliament, political “positioning”, maintaining the coalition and the compromises, wins and losses within it, and the internal compromises of any Bill.
I think if I stood and got elected in 2010 (purely for the sake of argument) I would have fell at the first hurdle. I could not have supported the decision made on 7th May 2010 that George Osborne was right to support economic austerity as soon as he got in. I suppose if I voted against the budget I would have lost the whip, and as a new MP I would have found that to be devastating.
Assuming instead that I would have been successfully lent on by Alastair Carmicheal, I would like to see evidence that Nick and Danny would have fought their corner in the so-called “quad”. I do not think they have. We consider it a win that the government is not reducing housing benefit by 10% for those who have been unemployed for over a year, but why did Nick and Danny agree to this policy in the first place?
This government cannot get through Tory policies in Parliament unless the Lib Dems agree to them. They do not have a Parliamentary majority. Given that it is too late as far as economic policy is concerned then we should simply insist on the coalition agreement, which is what our party voted on. That did not include reform of the NHS of which virtually every independent organisation connected with the NHS seems to vociferously oppose.
We should say to the Tories if the policy is not in the coalition agreement, and is not Lib Dem policy, then we will not support it and you will not get a majority for it unless you can persuade the Labour party to support it. A lot of their policies are taken from New Labour, so who knows they might succeed.
It’s the same dilemma for both the MP and for the local councillor. But the area I know about is as a councillor.
There’s no straighforward answer. The councillor must balance what they said they thought was best before the election, against what they now think is best, perhaps after having better information. I think key here is that, if they’ve changed their mind, this should be an honest change of opinion, or for it to be part of a negotiation to achieve something else that they’ve been campaigning for. And they should try to be as open as they can about what has happened.
Someone who is elected on one platform, and then totally reverses their position without explanation, will lose the trust of their electorate. Someone who changes from a tentative position one way, to a different one on the basis of new evidence, may be unpopular, but I think they are doing the right thing.
If their party forms the council administration, there’s an obligation to the community to help form a stable and coherent administration. I often felt I had an obligation to go with the majority in my party group, even if I disagreed with it.
What was quite humbling is that, weeks later, it often turned out that the group had been right, and I’d been wrong. And I was glad I hadn’t treated it as an issue of principle, which meant I should rebel against the group.
Of course it’s different for MPs. The consequences of a fracturing government can be more serious than for a fracturing council administration. On the other hand, backbench MPs probably have less influence on government policy than backbench councillors on administrations, so it’s hard for them to follow a whipped line which they don’t feel they’ve had any input into.
I have used that Burke quote myself. Unfortunately the good people of Bristol took a different view and kicked him out of his seat at the first electoral opportunity after he said it…
When asked unnecessarily to vote against an electoral pledge?
Personally, I’d definitely have voted against the government on tuition fees (although as doing so supported both party policy and the platform I’d have been elected on I don’t count that as rebelling) and the welfare reforms last week too (when Ming Campbell and Paddy Ashdown are seen as ‘rebels’ you know something’s gone badly wrong.)
The problem all elected people have is this definition of who we are – are we elected to represent the area, or are we elected as delegates to vote on things as we see them? I had this conundrum a couple of years ago, when I supported the closure of a road in my ward which the local Community Council opposed. I subscribe to the “delegates” viewpoint – you’re never going to be able to satisfy everybody in the ward, and you really just have to accept that and move on.
One thing I have noticed is that, since deciding not to stand again in May, I’ve been much more able to make my own mind up about things and look wider than just the local voters, because I don’t have to worry about trying to get re-elected (and, frankly, it’s not a seat we’re likely to hold at the moment anyway.) There’s discussion about a housing development, which some aren’t too happy about, but which will deliver a new school and new facilities to my ward – if I was seeking re-election, I’d be less inclined to support it and more inclined to oppose, but now I can make my own mind up and say what I think.
Geoffrey,
You are entirely right when you say that this government cannot get through Tory policies in Parliament unless the Lib Dems agree to them. They do not have a Parliamentary majority. However, you appear to blithely overlook the fact that the contrary is even more true.
In coalition, we horse trade with them, they horse trade with us, and given that there are more than four of them in the Commons for every one of ours, you should expect them to win more often.
And yes, some pretty unpleasant things are being done. God knows, I’d rather we didn’t. But given that a large chunk of government activity is about redistributing money from people who have it to people who need it, wasn’t it obvious that some of that expenditure would have to go?
If the alternative is to sit on the sidelines whilst Labour or the Conservatives go ahead and make a whole bunch of unpleasant cuts anyway, or worse still bicker each other to a standstill whilst failing to actually do anything to address the deficit, then I want nothing to do with it.
“If the alternative is to sit on the sidelines whilst Labour or the Conservatives go ahead and make a whole bunch of unpleasant cuts anyway”
I think that’s a bit of a straw man of an alternative. We don’t know that either Labour or the Conservatives, on their own, would make *worse* cuts to disability benefits, and I suspect they wouldn’t. The Conservative leadership has even been heard to say that they think they can go further with us there than they would do on their own.
That’s not to say for a minute that we should be on the sidelines – I think we have to be in government, but better-organised.
When you just know the NHS bill will not work. You cannot make a wrong thing righter, so do it now.
Anytime their conscience dictates that they should?
i’d abolish whipping as it currently stands personally.
@Mark, all I am saying is stick to the coalition agreement. That is what both parties agreed to do. No need for horse trading, in fact don’t do it because it is where we do the horse trading where we seem to lose out. Of course if the Tories can be persuaded to support LD policies then fine. But we shouldn’t support theirs.
As a general case, representatives have a duty to represent their party, their constituents and their own beliefs. How they reconcile those things if they are different is a function of how successful their party is in accommodating discussion and dissent. It’s not always easy in a council group but much harder in the Commons and similar places. Different representatives will often come to different answers and there is a need for tolerance by everyone else.
Peers have “only” two of those things to worry about.
But Coalition complicates the matter when there is a difference between government policy (negotiated and agreed by the party leadership/systems) and party policy.
In general, the more discussion that can happen before votes take place the better, and as openly as possible. Given the pressure of the parliamentary timetable that is not always easy. It woul dhelp if the processes of decision-making in the coalition were better known and understood even among parliamentarians.
Tony Greaves
“In coalition, we horse trade with them, they horse trade with us, and given that there are more than four of them in the Commons for every one of ours, you should expect them to win more often.”
More than five of them, in fact. So the logic, apparently, is that we end up with a government that is 85% Conservative, with policies to match. If the parliamentary arithmetic had been just a bit different, we might have ended up with a government that was 80% Labour, with policies to match – depending on which way the Lib Dems had decided to jump after the election was over.
Maybe the best thing that will ulitmately come out of all this is that we revert to a two-party system in which voters are offered a straight choice between two alternatives, and the outcome is decided by the electorate instead of at the whim of a minority party?
In a sense there is a simple answer: “When the benefits to those things the MP believes in and wants to achieve outweigh the disbenefits”.
In a truly democratic society a public representative speaks and votes according to the majority view of his or her constituents. As well as introducing a proper right to recall (not the watered down version that gives Parliamentary committees the final say) we also need a right to mandate our MPs and they should face stiff penalties for non-compliance.
The party label simply gives an idea of what a candidate stands for but no voter agrees with every single policy in their manifesto and there will always be matters not covered by the manifesto that come up.
@Jonathan Crewdson: In our representative democracy we elect representatives to a legislature as individuals; we assume that they have minds of their own and thus trust their judgement in how they choose to vote; if we don’t like how they have voted, or otherwise behaved, we can always thrown them out at the next election. The idea of legally mandating MPs to vote a particular way is dangerous as it totally undermines this concept by saying they are not allowed to think for themselves. Equally I do not think we should have a right to recall an MP just because of the way he voted on any piece of legislation. And how do you know what the majority view is on an issue? The only way to be sure is by referendum, but in that case why bother with the representatives at all? We might as well do away with them and just make the referendums themselves the binding determiners of legislation.
Similarly, to give any kind of legal force to party discipline is a bad, bad idea. Again, we might just as well do away with the idea that they are individuals and institute a formal block vote system, where the whips cast party block votes on behalf of all their parties’ MPs.
And do we really want the results of parliamentary votes to be challenged in court? Imagine the situation where an interest group seeks to delay the implementation of legislation voted in by a close vote by trying to have a court declare some MP’s vote unlawful. No, this is not acceptable. In a representative democracy, we have to accept that our representatives have minds of their own, and if we don’t like how they vote, we can show our displeasure at the next election.