Memorandum from Professor Philip Cowley,
University of Nottingham (M22)
STRENGTHENING THE
ROLE OF
THE BACKBENCHER
The purpose of this paper is not to offer a
series of detailed proposals to "strengthen" the role
of the backbencheryou will doubtless get plenty of thosebut
rather to place current debates in some broad context, and (in
passing) to be mildly sceptical about one or two often-cited proposals.
In particular, by placing today's debates in some historical perspective,
it is intended to be an antidote against any outbreaks of excessive
historical romanticism on the part of the Committee.
THE CONSTITUENCY
The press note that accompanied the launch of
the Committee's inquiries talked of an MP's "primary"
role being at Westminster. The Leader of the House said: "Now
we intend to spend some time looking at the central part of the
work of a Member of Parliamentin Westminsterhow
the role of backbenchers in the work of the House can be strengthened
and how the quality and topicality of debates can be improved".
Whilst many of us might wish that to be true,
it is no longer clear that all MPs do see their "central"
or "primary" role as being at Westminster. The recent
study by the Hansard Society into the 2005 intake of MPs
found that they reported spending a full 49% of their time on
constituency work. For one MP the figure was an eye-watering 97%.[1]
Factor in some of the time the Hansard Society allocated
to "other" taskswhich included constituency-facing
workand the most recently elected batch of MPs spend more
than half of their time and energy looking away from Westminster.
Their central or primary roleor at least the main draw
on their time and energiesis not at Westminster.
Whilst it is possible that this figure will
decline over time, as MPs become established, the Hansard Society
in fact found evidence that the importance of the constituency
grew over the first year that most MPs spent at Westminster. It
is possible simultaneously to value the constituency link (and
it is valued by both MPs and constituents) and still think that
this has grown out of all proportion. There must now be a real
concern that MPs are so focussed on the parochial they have no
time for the national, let alone the international, picture. It
is axiomatic that MPs would automatically be strengthened in their
role at Westminster if they were able to spend longer there, if
they were able, for example, to prepare properly for committee
meetings, to do more independent policy research, or to read and
scrutinise legislation thoroughly.
This is, of course, not something over which
the Modernisation Committee has any powerbut there must
be a strong suspicion that acquiring a pledge from the Liberal
Democrats that they will never again campaign on the basis of
potholes and drainpipes would probably do more to strengthen the
role of the backbencher at Westminster than any other single proposal
you will be able to produce.
THE RISE
OF BACKBENCH
INDEPENDENCE
Conventional wisdom amongst many commentators
is that one reason that the role of the backbencher needs strengthening
is because of an increasing lack of independence of its MPs.
For example, writing in the Observer in
December last year, Henry Porter argued that he wanted to see
MPs who were willing to "defy the party whipping system that
is crushing the life out of Parliament and the spirit of MPs".[2]
Andrew Gimson in the Daily Telegraph recently argued that
it has "never even occurred to most of these so-called legislators
that they were under a duty sometimes to express an independent
opinion and register an independent vote".[3]
And the well-publicised Power Inquiry went so far as to claim
that: "the Executive in Britain is now more powerful in relation
to Parliament than it has been probably since the time of Walpole
... The whips have enforced party discipline more forcefully and
fully than they did in the past".[4]
Yet there is simply no evidence that party cohesion
today is higher than it was in the past. Rather the opposite:
there is plenty of evidence that MPs today are in fact more independent-minded
and willing to defy their whips now than they used to be.
In absolute terms, high levels of party cohesion
have been a fundamental part of parliamentary behaviour in the
UK for over 100 years. Party votesthose in which 90% or
more of the members of one party vote one way, facing 90% or more
of the members of the other principal partywere the norm
by the end of the 19th century. [5]In
this, the British House of Commons is similar to most other parliaments
in Western Europe; indeed many have much higher levels of party
discipline than those seen at Westminster. [6]
In relative terms, party discipline in the past
was far higher than it is today, not lower. There were, for example,
two sessions in the 1950s during which not a single government
MP defied their whip. Today's whips would be green with envy at
the thought of such behaviour. Similarly, between 1945 and 1970,
there was not a single government defeat in the House of Commons
as a result of backbench dissent. [7]Party
discipline within Parliament began to weaken in the late-1960s
and 1970s. [8]MPs
have since become more of a problem to the executive than they
were then.
The Parliament between 2001 and 2005 was (depending
on how you measure it) either one of the most rebellious parliaments
of the post-war era or the most rebellious. [9]In
those four years, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) set a series
of records which the whips would much rather they had left well
alone, including a higher rate of rebellion than in any other
post-war Parliament, and more rebellions than in all but the (longer)
1974-79 Parliament; the revolts over Foundation Hospitals were
the largest rebellion by Labour MPs over a Labour Government's
health policy; top-up fees produced the largest rebellion by Labour
MPs over a Labour Government's education policy; top-up fees also
produced the (joint) largest rebellion at Second Reading since
1945, and over Iraq, we witnessed the two largest rebellions against
the whip by MPs of any party for over 150 years.
Such behaviour has continued since the 2005
election. Within the first year of its third term, the current
Government were defeated four times in the House of Commons as
a result of backbench dissent. No other post-war government with
a majority of over 60 in the House of Commons suffered that many
defeats in so short a time. [10]Labour
backbench dissent in the 2005-06 session ran at the rate of a
rebellion in 28% of divisions, making it the most rebellious first
session of any post-war parliament, topping even the Maastricht
session of 1992-93 (a rebellion in 23% of divisions) which had
so crippled the government of John Major.
As well as the four defeats, the government
won another vote with a majority of just onebeing saved
by a handful of inattentive Opposition MPsand managed to
pass the Education and Inspections Bill, a key plank of its legislative
programme, only as a result of Opposition support. The Commons
has also forced concessions from the government on a range of
other legislation, including on the issue of smoking, where the
government abandoned one of its manifesto commitments in the face
of backbench and Cabinet splits. I can think of no other post-war
government forced to allow a free vote within a year of winning
an election on something which had previously been an explicit
manifesto commitment.
It really is difficult, with any intellectual
credibility, to reconcile such behaviour with claims about the
decline of backbench independence. Rather, all the evidence is
that backbenchers are themselves "strengthening" their
role.
THE WHIP
Usually concomitant with any discussion on the
role of the backbencher is a discussion on the power of the whips.
One of the Power Inquiry's 30 recommendations, for example, was
that the power of the whips should be limited (although they were
extremely vague about how this could be achieved). [11]A
recent article in the Guardian by Quentin Letts advocated
abolishing the whips altogetheror at the very least their
salariesand anyone who has ever spoken to audiences on
the subject of parliament almost always faces a question on the
sickening evils of the whipping system. [12]
Whips have long been the pantomime villains
of Westminster politics, yet much of the antipathy towards them
is merely a combination of ignorance about their role (what they
really do as opposed to the considerable mythology) combined with
a sense of antagonism towards the very idea of political parties,
an antagonism that is not some creation of the last twenty or
so years but rather has much longer antecedents. Writing at the
beginning of the 20th century Sidney Low noted that the easiest
way to get a round of applause at a public meeting was to claim
that something was non-partisan. "No sentiment", he
said, "is likely to elicit more applause at a public meeting,
than the sentiment that `this, Mr Chairman, is not a party question,
and I do not propose to treat it from a party standpoint'".[13]
Not much has changed over the last century.
Rather than a corruption of democracy, whips
are an essential and unavoidable part of party politics. Enoch
Powell's description of the whips as a prerequisite for civilization
"like a sewer" is often quoted approvingly by opponents
of the whipping system, without realising that Powell's point
was exactly the opposite. Even if we werein some fairytale
political landto abolish whips, informal arrangements to
convey the views of the party leadership to the backbenches (and
vice versa) would merely spring up to replace them. The key reason
that it would be impossible to "abolish" the whips (and
one reason it is also very hard to weaken their influence) is
because they have, as many writers on the subject have noted,
relatively few formal powers anyway. They certainly have fewer
powers than in many other parliaments. British whips cannot, for
example, cast votes on behalf of the entire party grouping as
happens elsewhere (New Zealand, for example). [14]And
British MPs are free to defect from one party group to another
should they wish, without being expelled from the Commons (as
would happen, for example, in the Indian Lok Sabha). Many of the
powers that the whips do have are rarely used, not least because
they merely prove to be ineffectual or counter-productive. The
events of 1994-95 demonstrated the self-defeating nature of withdrawing
the whip from rebellious MPsand it is notable that, despite
all the rebellions since 1997, not a single Labour MP has had
the whip withdrawn as a result of their voting.
It is in fact quite possible to argue that the
whips today are less powerful than they were in the past. For
one thing, they have to deal with a more activist backbench than
in the pastthe rise of the career politician bringing with
it MPs more concerned with making an impact on policy than MPs
of 40 or 50 years agoand at the same time some of the patronage
formally available to them has diminished, as a result of both
privatisation and (more significantly) the Nolan reforms of the
1990s, which opened up quango appointments to greater public scrutiny.
Whipping is certainly less physically aggressive now than in the
past, a change that was first noted more than 20 years ago. [15]Today's
whips are pussycats compared to, say, David Margesson, the Conservative
Chief Whip between 1931 and 1940, who was frequently brutal towards
his MPs. [16]
Given the membership of the Committee on Modernisation,
it might be useful to recount an example of particularly aggressive
whipping. It comes from the former Conservative Chief Whip, Lord
Renton, in his excellent book Chief Whip and it concerns
an encounter between the then Labour Chief Whip, Michael Cocks
and a young backbench Labour MP. The MP was said to be thinking
of rebelling, and so Cocks explained the party's position to him.
The MPwho happened to represent the constituency of Blackburnreplied
that he didn't find it a particularly convincing argument. At
this point, Michael Cocks seized Jack by the genitals, held on
to them tight while Jack turned white in the face and finally
released him with the comment, "Are you convinced now?"
[17]Renton
admits that the story is probably apocryphal; he provides it as
an example of a style of whipping that simply would not work today.
It is, of course, important not to be naive
about this. The whips do have more at their disposal than simply
the power to persuade. But because their formal powers are relatively
limited, it is harder than many critics realise to clip their
wings yet further. If the Committee has a desire to cause a right
stink it could revisit the issue of nominations for select committees;
and if it is looking for real trouble, then there is always the
control of office space. Both would impinge on the whips' patronage,
although in both cases the impact would be relatively minor (and
the political costs involved in achieving the changes probably
too high). An easier route might be the issue of induction programmes
for new MPs, which the Committee has already indicated it intends
to investigate. Any expansion of House-provided induction will
lessen the early reliance that some MPs develop on their party
whips. [18]Again,
however, I suspect any impact in terms of their future behaviour
will be relatively minor.
FREE VOTES
Another favourite of critics of the whipping
system is the possibility of allowing more free votes, which to
critics conjures up the idea of normally chained MPs set free
from the malevolent whip in some temporary act of liberation,
like "so many heirs of Spartacus" in Peter Jones's lovely
phrase. [19]When
the Government allowed a free vote on the issue of smoking in
February 2006, the Guardian made "free votes"
the subject of its "In praise of ..." leader, arguing
that they "allow MPs to show individual responsibility and
to rise above their role as lobby fodderand that can only
be good for parliamentary democracy".[20]
There is certainly scope for free votes to be
more frequent. Recent years have seen the whip (at least on the
Government side) applied to several issues where there was at
least a prime facie case justifying a free vote on grounds of
conscience, including (but not limited to) the Civil Partnership
Bill, the Gender Recognition Bill, the Children Bill, the Human
Reproductive Cloning Bill, the Human Tissue Bill, the Gambling
Bill and the Mental Capacity Bill. There is no systematic evidence
that I am aware of that there are fewer free votes today than
in the past, and the definition of what is and is not to be the
subject of a free vote is both notoriously fuzzy and constantly
evolving: capital punishment, for example, was the subject of
a whipped vote in both 1948 and 1956 and issues relating to homosexuality
and Sunday trading have been both whipped and free over the last
couple of decades. What is and is not a free vote tends to owe
more to calculations of party advantage than to any hard and fast
constitutional rules.
Moreover, whilst allowing a free vote is frequently
sensible politicsnot least because it avoids media coverage
of splits and divisionfree votes bring with them questions
of accountability. Take, for example, the smoking vote referred
to above. The free votes resulted in the overturning of part of
the election manifesto on which Labour had foughtand wonan
election less than a year before. That manifesto was explicit:
pubs and bars not serving food "will be free to choose whether
to allow smoking or to be smoke-free".[21]
When Labour broke its manifesto commitment on university fees
during the preceding Parliament, there was an outcry; in this
case, it got applauded.
Even when they are not on issues that were covered
in the manifesto, free votes can be a problem in a system of party
government, in which voters overwhelmingly vote for parties and
not MPs, and where the personal vote of any MP is relatively small
(and what personal vote there is owes almost nothing to policy
positions, but to constituency work and visibility). Free votes
allow controversial issues to become detached from the electoral
process; however controversial they are, free vote issues vanish
from the political radar at election time. Manifestos rarely contain
more than a passing mention of them (if that); they are largely
absent from the national campaign and from media coverage of the
election. [22]This
would be problematic enough if they wereas they are usually
describedsomehow "cross-party" or "non-party".
But in reality the party battle-lines are almost as entrenched
on free votes as they are when the whip is appliedmost
free votes see the majority of one party in one lobby facing the
majority of the other main party in the other lobbyand
the outcome of most free votes owes almost everything to the party
composition of the Commons. [23]As
in both the 1960s and more recently, free votes effectively allow
the party in government to enact controversial legislation whilst
simultaneously denying all responsibility for that legislation.
Free votes may well be good for Parliament"When
the whips are off, wrote Peter Richards, "Parliament has
a new vitality"but it is less obvious that they are
always good for democracy." [24]
CONCLUSION
None of this is to argue that things couldn't,
or shouldn't, be different. Perhaps in an absolute sense we should
have weaker party cohesion. Perhaps MPs should deviate more from
the party whip more. The public certainly say they value independence
from their MPs, although they simultaneously dislike the consequences
of independencesplit and divided partiesand there
is no evidence that they differentiate between MPs based on whether
or not they are independent when it comes to the ballot box.
But any such debates need to be placed in their
historical contextin that we currently have better resourced,
and more independent-minded, MPs than at any point in the post-war
period. Concomitantly, the whips are less dominant and powerful
than they used to be. Attempts to somehow attack the role played
by the whips is likely to be a pointless and self-defeating exercise;
even the free voteso beloved of many outsidersbrings
with it some potential downsides. What would do more than anything
else to strengthen MPs at Westminster would be to relieve them
of some of their (ever-growing) constituency dutiesand
yet voters also say that they want MPs to prioritise the constituency.
Even those MPs who agree that Westminster is their primary role
often find themselves forced to spend an unreasonable amount of
time on constituency casework or else risk losing their seat to
those who promise to do so.
One ray of hope is that the Committee's work
this Parliament has already made considerable advances. It is
a standard rule of parliamentary reform that there is an inverse
relationship between the importance of any reform and the amount
of media coverage it attracts. The decision to allow MPs to make
a point of order during a division without wearing a hat attracted
considerable media coverage; the introduction of automatic programming
of legislationwhich has had real consequences for the scrutiny
of billscame into being without almost any external discussion.
Ditto for the more recent reforms to the legislative process and
to Members' allowances. The changes to the procedure for the consideration
of Government bills, a reform which could do more to improve the
quality of parliamentary scrutiny of bills than any other reform
in the last 20 (or more) years, went almost without comment inside
or outside of the House.
Yet if implemented properlyand it is
easy enough to see how they could yet be scupperedthat
reform has the potential to strengthen the role of the backbencher
at Westminster considerably. The most important thing the Committee
could do over the next three years is to ensure that the new procedure
is utilised to its full, and that it becomes properly embedded
in the parliamentary soil, in the way that departmental select
committees did after 1979.
Philip Cowley25[25]
January 2007
1 G Rosenblatt, A Year in the Life: From Member
of Public to Member of Parliament, Hansard Society, 2006,
pp 31-32. Back
2
Henry Porter, "My radical manifesto to revitalise Britain",
Observer, Sunday 17 December 2006. Back
3
Andrew Gimson, "Long may the Lords give MPs lessons in democracy",
Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2006. Back
4
Power to the People, London, The Power Inquiry, 2006, pp
128, 133. You will, however, search the list of experts who gave
evidence to the Inquiry in vain for anyone who actually knew anything
about Parliament at the time of Walpole. Back
5
See A L Lowell, The Government of England (Volume 2), Macmillan,
1926. Back
6
See, for example, the selection of essays edited by John E Owens,
"Cohesion and Discipline in Legislatures" in the Journal
of Legislative Studies, 2003. Nor is it just in Western Europe.
In Australia, the Government recently experienced the largest
backbench revolt in the House of Representatives since John Howard
became Prime Minister: it consisted of three MPs voting against
the party whip, and one abstention. Back
7
The handful of defeats that did occur were caused by poor organisation
on the part of the whips and/or as a result of tactical manoeuvres
by the Opposition. Back
8
See P Norton, Dissension in the British House of Commons, Macmillan,
1975. Back
9
P Cowley, The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority, Politico's,
2005. Back
10
Indeed, no post-war government with a majority of over 60 suffered
four defeats in an entire parliament. Back
11
Aside from some (perfectly sensible) recommendation about strengthening
select committees, the Report contained almost no concrete suggestions
as to how to weaken the power of the whips. Back
12
Quentin Letts, "The obscene cost of a good whipping, Guardian,
10 December 2006. Take, for example, this comment from the
dozen or so of people who commented online on Letts' article:
"Put plainly, whips are the enemy of democracy, of free speech,
of independent thought, and of accountability to the electorate.
Were there any justice in the world, their nefarious activities
(which ultimately amount to blackmail, bribery and intimidation)
would be seen for what they are-illegal acts which undermine our
whole politcal [sic] structure". Back
13
S Low, The Governance of England, Unwin, 1904 [1927 ed],
p 119. Back
14
New Zealand's MPs are able to request what is known as a personal
vote-in which they vote individually-but the default position
is that party whips will cast votes on behalf of their party en
masse. The New Zealand Standing Orders also allow MPs to cast
their votes by proxy-with proxies allowed for up to a quarter
of the parliamentary party. Again, think how much easier that
would make things for British party whips. Back
15
See D Searing's Westminster's Worlds, Cambridge, Harvard,
1994, p 255. Back
16
The former Conservative Chief Whip, Lord Renton, describes Margesson
as the "total whip"; even on holiday, the first question
to his daughter in the morning would be "what is the programme
for today?" (T Renton, Chief Whip, Politico's, Ch
11). Back
17
Renton, Chief Whip, pp 20-21. Back
18
Rosenblatt, A Year in the Life, p 26. Back
19
Peter Jones, "Members of Parliament and Issues of Conscience",
in P Jones (ed), Party, Parliament and Personality, Routledge,
1995, p 141. Back
20
Guardian, 12 January 2006. Back
21
Britain forward not back, The Labour Party, 2005, p 66. Back
22
P Cowley, "Morality policy without politics: the case of
Britain", in C Z Mooney (ed) The Public Clash of Private
Values, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 2001. Back
23
P Cowley, "Dealing with moral issues", in J Fisher et
al (eds), Central Debates in British Politics, Pearson,
2003, pp 360-362. Back
24
Peter G Richards, Parliament and Conscience, George Allen
and Unwin, 1970, p 215. A similar example would be the idea of
secret voting for MPs. At a stroke, this would empower the individual
MP and make Parliament considerably stronger vis a vis the executive-but
only at an unacceptable cost in terms of representation and accountability. Back
25
Professor of Parliamentary Government at the University of Nottingham. Back
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