Ballots & Bullets

The House of Commons is generally considered to be ineffective when it comes to amending government legislation. The statistics back this up: no government legislation was rejected outright in the last Parliament. Even in the much less public confines of the committee rooms, 99.9% of government amendments are accepted and successful opposition amendments are rare, averaging less than 1%. But …

We’ve been producing end-of-session reports detailing the rebellions of government backbenchers for several years now, and last year’s was a whopper: the largest number of rebellions faced by any Prime Minister in any post war session, the largest rate of rebellion to boot.  Without pre-empting this year’s report (and not least because the session is not yet complete), the one …

Image by Steve Punter

This post originally appeared on politics.co.uk.

As someone who’s spent a long time – and probably far too long – studying the willingness of MPs to vote against their party line, I’m often asked the question: is it effective? MPs who rebel, especially those who rebel a lot, claim it is: that only by voting …

TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!

AND WHEREAS most people on Monday were interested in press regulation, we were interested in Conservative rebellions on press regulation.

AND WHEREAS the vote would have been very tight anyway, the chances of a Conservative victory in the division lobbies had become impossible once a half-decent number of Conservative MPs declared …

Parliament resumes today, after the Christmas recess – and we have a rare piece of good news for the government whips. Having just updated our data on rebellions up until Christmas, we have been struck by the decline in the level of backbench revolt on the government side of the House.

The current session has been dominated by two major …

We’ve been producing end-of-session reports detailing the rebellions of government backbenchers for several years now – but we’ve never had to produce one quite so large before.  The Bumper Book of Coalition Rebellions is available free of charge in pdf format (at the end of this post). It details every rebellion and every rebel. How much more fun could you …