Ballots & Bullets

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 …

Ten years ago today, a record-breaking rebellion took place in the House of Commons. It was the largest backbench revolt, by members of any political party, on any subject since Sir Robert Peel’s administration repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, at a time when the franchise was enjoyed by just 5% of the population, and before anything which resembled today’s …

The media caravan has already moved on, but for the record here are five more observations about the boundaries vote, in increasing order of importance.

1. Not that it really matters but we think the Commons authorities have miscounted.  The result was announced as 334 noes (to which need to be added the two tellers), but we count 335 …

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 …

When the government urges us to make sure research has an impact on the real world, I’m not sure this is what they mean.  Just after PMQs yesterday, I tweeted this:

Around 4.30pm, said Philip Davies tweeted back:

I better stop tweeting things like that, or no one in the whips office will ever speak to me again…

Philip …

‘Prediction is very difficult’, said Niels Bohr, ‘especially if it’s about the future’ – and it’s always potentially embarrassing when you revisit things you wrote and in which you had confidently predicted what was to come.

Take, for example, this 2009 article, looking at the likely state of the Conservative Parliamentary Party after the election.

It argued the party …

Last night saw 81 Conservative MPs rebel against the Government, making it not only the largest ever Tory rebellion on Europe in Government, but very nearly twice as large as the previous biggest Tory rebellion suffered by David Cameron in Government.

The 81 Conservatives were joined in the aye lobby by 19 Labour rebels, eight DUP members, one independent unionist, …