Comments on: Looking at How MPs Vote

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:52:38 +0000

Julian, in many of votes with Conservative abstentions the Lib Dems do have high turnouts.

By: Julian Todd

Julian Todd — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:03:17 +0000

A reason he won’t give is that of the convervatives not wanting to appear to support the libdems in any way, or to give the appearance that they think the libdems are ever competent about anything, or ever come up with good ideas worth supporting.

This will often be the real motivation. It’s then very easy to rationalize it in the way he has done it in the nit-picking way he has done here.

“under our system a bill is considered many times…” All the more reason to vote for it in this case for the broad position, and add the nuances later!

You can only argue against it by exhibiting another example of an amendment which they did vote for that has a similar degree of flawedness. But then they’ll say that’s a different subject.

Perhaps we ought to start coding up more formally which MP/party proposed the amendment in order to demonstrate the statistical pattern.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:53:03 +0000

Oliver Heald, the MP who said there is no reason the amendment should not succeed but failed to vote for it, has replied to me to say:

Dear Mr Taylor,

Thanks for this. The speech I made was supportive of GCHQ workers having the rights which civil servants will have under Part 1 of the Bill, but you will have noticed that I and others asked the Minister questions. One of his reples [sic] was to say that the intelligence services are dealt with under different legislation, but that the effect was to protect workers in these services (including GCHQ) in the same way as proposed. Conservatives decided to give further consideration to the Minister’s comments and the best way forward. We therefore abstained.

Under our system a Bill is considered many times in different stages so that legislators can have the chance to think over issues as we go through. I had expected the Lib Dems to withdraw the amendment for further consideration.

Best wishes,

Oliver Heald MP
Member of Parliament for North East Hertfordshire

The Minister, Angela Smith, did not say that the separate acts which deal with, and give protections to, intelligence service staff provide the same protections as would be provided by the amendment.

All the Minister did was give assurances; Mr Heald had said that he was seeking stronger - statutory protection; he himself said during the debate: “It is not good enough for her to say, ‘I am making an assurance’,” ^* Despite saying that it appears that he assurance was sufficient to deter Mr Heald and the rest of his party from voting on the question.