There is, today, a very generous and supportive piece by Sunder Katwala of the Fabians on their blog bewailing our closing down.
For those who are interested, the position is this. Over the last decade or so, this research has been generously funded by two bodies, the Leverhulme Trust, who funded the study into the 1997 Parliament, and then the ESRC who funded the study into the 2001 Parliament. We managed to stretch that funding into the 2005 Parliament too, and then with bits and pieces of cash – from the University of Nottingham – limped on till the end of the Parliament.
We’ve put in two bids to the ESRC to continue the project into the next Parliament – where we agree with Sunder, there is the potential for things to be really interesting –but both have been unsuccessful. There’s nothing too surprising about funding bids being turned down – money’s scarce, competition’s stiff and the majority of bids fail. No academic should get huffy about grant bid failures; they’re just part of life.
What was a little surprising – to us, and to some observers– was that these bids were to a specially created ESRC pot, called the Follow-On Fund, designed to allow projects to continue where they have a potential public impact. And, whatever else one thought about the work, it was difficult to argue that it didn’t manage that, given the way it was religiously used by journalists and MPs. One of the reviewers of our ESRC last end-of-award report described it as probably the best disseminated project in ESRC history. But still we applied twice, and got turned down twice.
It was ironic that at an ESRC organised event to praise social science recently both Sunder and Tony Wright used revolts as an example of exactly the sort of work the ESRC should be funding, and yet we’d just been turned down (again).
All the people involved in this project would like to carry on, but without funding, it’s difficult to do projects like this. The funding buys some research assistance to do the painstaking work checking and cleaning the data, as well as keeping comparative records, and provides teaching cover.
I know of at least one person who is pleased, though. Just before the election, a senior member of the Conservative whips office asked me whether it was true that our funding had ended, and we wouldn’t be around to report on any divisions within the Conservative Parliamentary Party. When I confirmed it was, he replied, with a smile: ‘Oh good’.
UPDATE: There's also a very supportive leader in the Guardian, off the back of Sunder's piece.
Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be posting up various end of parliament stats, as we bring the website to its conclusion.
We start with Labour -- and the finding that this parliament can safely claim to be the most rebellious of the post-war era.
The session that just ended, that of 2009-10, saw a total of 48 Labour rebellions, out of 135 divisions, a rate of 36%. In itself, this is the third highest final session since 1945, beaten only by the 39% achieved in 2004-05 session and the 36% (but marginally higher once you examine the decimals places) of the 1978-9 session.
But when you add those 48 revolts to the 300+ that had occurred in the preceding four sessions, it means that the 2005-2010 Parliament easily goes down as the most rebellious in the post-war period, whether measured in absolute or relative terms. In absolute terms, there were 365 Labour revolts between 2005 and 2010, more than in any other parliament since 1945, and easily more than what had been the record (the 309 between February 1974 and 1979). In relative terms – a more meaningful comparison, given that the parliament was shorter – there were Labour rebellions in some 28% of divisions. Again this easily tops the 21% achieved in the second Blair Parliament, 2001-2005, which was itself a post-war record. There were also, just for the record, more Labour rebellions in this parliament than in 1997-2001 and 2001-2005 combined.
We give some more Labour stats over at the Election 2010 website, and more will follow here as and when we get them processed.
We're not finished yet. Two biggish Labour rebellions last night on the Digital Economy Bill (containing 23 and 20 Labour MPs respectively), and including some unusual names, including Eric Joyce, Mark Todd, and Tom Watson.
On twitter Watson reported: 'First time i've ever broken the whip in the chamber. I feel physically sick'. To which Evan Harris helpfully replied: 'Dr's advice - like exercise,it hurts less the more you do it. No pain no gain. Am out of cliches'.
We suspect that's our last rebellion reported on this site. Some headline stats to follow, and then it's all over.
The end of the Parliament approaches. So does the end of this website.
The research project from which is sprang was meant to end in 2005, and we've managed to keep it hobbling on, with various scraps of money (mostly from the University of Nottingham) until now.
We think there's a pretty obvious need to keep the project going, especially with the possibility of a small Labour majority/hung parliament/small Conservative majority after the election, and given how much folk in Westminster use it. But we've now had two attempts to get money from the ESRC turned down -- despite applying specifically to a fund for projects with the potential for impact from beyond academia -- and so it's time to call it a day. We're going to stick up some summary stats for the parliament once it's officially over, plus whack up links to the most useful papers we've done, and then it'll be archived, as a record of the period from 2004-2010.
In the meantime, if you found this useful, you might like this, a much broader, but hopefully still useful attempt to engage academics in communicating with the wider world.
As a result of server problems, which kept us off-line for a while, we missed writing up the rebellion in late-Feb when on 24 February there was the largest rebellion so far this session: 27 Labour MPs voted in favour of a Labour backbench new clause in the name of Alan Simpson during the Report stage of the Energy Bill that called for an Emissions Performance Standard (EPS) for every new electricity generating plant. The rebellion reduced the Government’s majority to just eight, and yet, with the exception of the excellent LeftFootForward website, barely anyone in the media reported it.
And we also missed the revolt on 1 March, which saw 24 Labour MPs vote against the annual renewal of control orders. No great surprises in the names of the rebels. Except one. David Davis was the only Conservative MP to join the rebels in the no lobby, casting his first rebellious vote against David Cameron’s leadership.
Just as we suspected, last night's supposed Labour rebellion on AV ended in a damp squib. Most opponents of electoral reform reasoned that it wasn't worth sticking their necks out on a bill that probably won't be passed anyway. In the end, a measly three Labour diehards - Diane Abbott, Kelvin Hopkins and Meg Munn - voted against Jack Straw's plans to hold a referendum on AV by October 2011. They were joined by one Lib Dem, Paul Rowen (Rochdale). But all the other Liberal Democrat MPs who voted supported the Government, meaning that the clause passed by a massive majority of 178.
Of more interest was the subsequent vote on the single transferable vote, proposed predictably by the Liberal Democrats. The Tories (equally predictably) opposed the amendment, but four Labour MPs joined the Lib Dems in the aye lobby: Jim Cousins, Dr Doug Naysmith, Andrew Smith... and James Purnell. That is Purnell's first ever vote against the party whip. Who'd've thought it?
As long as it doesn’t lose you £100 in bets (see below), sometimes it’s good to be able to plead total ignorance. And we are in exactly that situation with regard to the forthcoming vote on AV.
The key variable here is what happens to the PLP, which has been long divided over electoral reform. Way back in 1993, when Labour was contemplating PR under John Smith, the late Derek Fatchett's First-Past-the-Post group attracted the support of 86 Labour MPs, including John Spellar, Bruce Grocott and Gerald Kaufman, while Jeff (now Lord) Rooker, chairman of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, had 62 backbenchers supporting him, including Peter Mandelson (then cast into the outer darkness by Smith) and Dr Tony Wright.
Since then, these splits have not gone away – but there’s relatively little evidence on which to base any estimates of current forces within the PLP.
Things will not have been helped by the fact that plenty of the current whips office – note the name of John Spellar in the above list – are opponents of electoral reform (in general) or AV (in particular), and several of them have been known to have been making their opposition clear behind the scenes.
However, in terms of winning a vote, the Government has several things in its favour, including: grudging support from the Lib Dems (‘a very small step in the right direction’); the fact that this isn’t a vote on AV itself, but merely one on having a referendum on the subject; and the fast approaching election. The last always makes MPs more likely to bite their tongues at the best of times, but in this case it also leads plenty of Labour MPs to doubt anything will happen, suspecting (as do we) that the bill won’t get through parliament before the election is called, and will then get lost in the election wash-up. In which case, what’s the point of bothering to go to all the trouble of voting against it?
There's a Far Side cartoon in which (from memory) a student asks to be excused on the basis that his head is now full. We know the feeling, and sometimes (often?) wonder how useful all the things we know about parliament are. Surely all that space taken up with knowledge about, say, Harry Cohen's voting record could be better utilised with a deeper understanding of art, or music, or whatever.
But every now and again it does prove useful to know things. This, last Tuesday, was just such an occasion. And as a result, the Macular Disease Society will be £100 better off. Who needs art, anyway?
Two doesn’t make a trend, but yesterday (Monday, 11 January) saw the Conservative frontbench oppose the principle of Government legislation for the second time this year. As we reported in our recent briefing paper (pdf), the Conservatives only opposed four bills in the whole of the last session.
The latest Conservative frontbench reasoned amendment – declining to support the Children, Schools and Families Bill – also attracted three Labour rebels: Jeremy Corbyn, David Drew and John McDonnell. Small fry, but some Labour MPs, including Kate Hoey (who abstained on Second Reading), also expressed concerns over the Government’s plans to regulate home education. Those plans – outlined in the Badman Report – have also been opposed in a large number of petitions presented to the House by Conservative MPs. The Government also intends to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) (‘sex education’ to you and me) compulsory, which we suspect may also provoke a rebellions from socially conservative Labour MPs worried about introducing sex education into Church and faith schools should the Bill make it to Report stage before the general election.
Standing Order 14 allows for at least 13 Fridays for Private Members’ Bills. Last week, however, the Government moved a motion to reduce the number of backbench Fridays from 13 to eight, on the basis that the 2009-10 session will be a truncated because of the impending general election. Eight days would be, pro rata, roughly the correct amount for a short session and on the last two occasions when we’ve had a fifth session – in 1991-92 and 1996-97 – the Conservative Government of the day moved similar motions to restrict the number of backbench Fridays, and neither were contested by the Opposition.
This time around, however, Peter Bone, the Conservative MP for Wellingborough was having none of it. He moved an amendment to restore the 13 days for backbench business. Seeing the scale of support for Bone’s amendment, Sir George Young, the Shadow Leader of the House, allowed his backbenchers, though not his frontbench, a free vote, as did the Liberal Democrats. But while all the Lib Dem MPs present voted for Bone’s amendment, the Conservatives split nearly in half: 30 Tory backbenchers supported the amendment, while only 27 Conservatives (24 of them frontbenchers) opposed it. Bone’s amendment, however was heavily defeated by 254 votes to 78, with Labour whipping their side against Bone’s amendment. Only three Labour MPs – Paul Flynn, Kelvin Hopkins and Austin Mitchell – defied the whips.
This debate (and vote) matters because it reflects wider backbench concerns over the Government’s failure thus far to debate Building the House, the Wright Report into the Reform of the House of Commons, which reported back in November. Wright’s proposals include the creation of a backbench Business Committee to protect backbench time, together with a House Business Committee, responsible for putting a weekly agenda to the House for its decision. Such plans mean challenging the Executive’s current hold over what gets debated.
In our eagerness to mention that the Conservatives had actually opposed a Government bill at Second Reading, we neglected to mention that four Labour backbenchers – Diane Abbott, Katy Clark, Jeremy Corbyn and Linda Riordan – also opposed the legislation, objecting to the scale of cuts potentially required.
Frank Field, who abstained on the Bill, however delivered a very different, bone-chilling prediction (in the manner of a latter-day Enoch Powell) about the perilous state of the public finances. Comparing the debate in the political parties over how to lower the deficit to the ‘phoney war’ that led up to world war two, he claimed that voters did not 'have any idea how serious the financial position of this country is, or how massive the cuts will have to be if we are to return to some semblance of order to our national accounts'.
Field said that the country was living in ‘cloud cuckoo land’, unaware that the Government had been printing money, most of which had been used to buy Government debt. What happens, Field, asked when the Government stops printing money? What did the Government have up its sleeve if it faced a ‘gilt strike’ on the international money markets? ‘Please God’, Field intoned, ‘I hope that this Government have a lot up their sleeve'.
One nugget that we spotted, when going through our end-of-session calculations last year, was the extent to which the Conservative frontbench voted against a mere four bills at Second or Third Reading in the last session -- just 15% of government legislation. This is part of a parliament-on-parliament decline since 1997. We provide the details in this very short briefing note (pdf).
The note's been written up in today's Times. The Conservative explanation is that this is all Gordon Brown's fault: "He wants to manoeuvre us into a position where we are seen to be voting against motherhood and apple pie. So rather than vote against the Bill as a whole we try to change it later. There is a lot in the Equality Bill that we did not like at all, but they would have loved it had we been put in a position where we were opposing equality. Brown has also been trying to get us to oppose the 50p tax rate. But we won’t play his game.”
We think there's something in this. But, as our note shows, the decline began before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister: the Conservatives opposed just 21 and 22 percent of legislation in the 2005 and 2006 sessions of this parliament, when Tony Blair was still Prime Minister. So there's also something else going on.
David Taylor, who died on Boxing Day, was one of the leading Labour rebels. First elected in 1997, he progressively became more rebellious: he cast just five dissenting votes against the whips during the first Blair term, 39 in the second, and by the time of his death he’d already rebelled 76 times during the current parliament. He went from being the joint 72nd most rebellious Labour MP in 1997-01 to being the eighth most rebellious in this parliament.
He was a man of deep religious convictions, leading him to vote in a socially conservative direction when it came to matters of conscience and because the Labour Whips’ Office has preferred in recent years to whip many such issues, he found himself casting yet more dissenting votes on matters as diverse as the deregulation of the gambling industry and whether clergymen should be allowed to exercise free speech when it came to expressing their opposition to homosexuality. Indeed, his last dissenting vote – on 2 December – saw Taylor support an amendment to the Equality Bill that would have provided exemptions for religious organisations in employment matters on grounds of sexual orientation.
However, Taylor will be remembered most by the anoraks on the Revolts team as a serial abstainer. The procedures of the House of Commons give MPs just two formal options: to vote aye or no on whatever question is before the House. MPs occasionally get around this by voting in both lobbies – but David Taylor did it in earnest. By the Christmas recess, Taylor had registered no fewer than 33 deliberate abstentions in this Parliament alone, the most recent being in protest at the Government’s policy on disability benefits for the elderly during a Conservative Opposition Day motion on 8 December.
When the House of Commons returns in January, and we start casting our eyes over division lists yet again, there will be a huge gap, not just in the aye or no lobbies, but where David Taylor’s name was often to be found – in both lobbies.
