Do our MP's blindly follow the Whip? Image courtesy of iammikeb@Flickr

1. The people who elected them and whom they represent?
2. The MP makes up their own mind according to their personal opinions?
3. They get sent a fax from their party HQ telling them when to be in Parliament, and once they are there they get told which way to vote by a senior member of the party?

If you guessed (3) you’d be right for most of the time. The system is known as “whipping“.

Each of the major parties employ certain MPs to act as “Whips”, a position which functions much as its name suggests – to enforce so-called “party discipline” and make MPs vote the way the leaders of their party want them to.

The Chief Whips send out weekly circulars to “their” MPs notifying them of parliamentary business. The circulars use a code involving underlining. If a vote is underlined once, the Whip considers it routine, and attendance is “optional”. Items underlined twice are more important: attendance is required, unless that MP can organise someone from the opposing party to be absent as well, (a bit more like musical chairs than democracy). Any vote underlined three times means that failure to attend, and vote with the party, will result in disciplinary action. What disciplinary action usually means is expulsion from the party, at least temporarily. Because parties, not constituents, choose who gets to stand in elections, this effectively puts that MP on notice that he or she may well lose their job at the next General Election.

So, how often are votes dictated by “three line whips”? We don’t know, because the Whips’ weekly circulars are not made available to the public.

That’s right. They’re a secret. Just chew on that for a second.

Newspapers occasionally report that votes have been declared “three-line whips” by particular parties. Here are just a few reported examples:

• In 2002, the Conservative party imposed a three-line whip forcing their MPs to oppose the adoption of children by gay couples.
• In 2007, both Labour and the Conservatives imposed three-line whips in favour of a proposal to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons system, Trident.
• In 2008, the Liberal Democrats imposed a three-line whip which instructed their MPs to abstain on a vote to ratify the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.
• In 2009, Labour imposed a three line whip in favour of a vote to keep the full detail of MPs expenses secret from the public.

What has this got to do with Open Primaries? Well, right now party Whips can dominate MPs, because it is political parties who chose whether an MP gets selected or not. If voters got to choose who got selected, the Whips’ power would be substantially diminished.

So is your MP working for you, or for the Whip? It’s hard to tell categorically – and not just because the Whips’ weekly reports are kept secret. Even if we could see the Whips’ reports, there’s often no way to tell whether a particular MP would have voted the way they did even if the Whip hadn’t told them to – we can’t read MPs’ minds, after all.

Still, there is a very simple way to tell whether your MP is voting on particular issues in the way you would want them to, thanks to a very cool website put together by volunteers called Public Whip. If you’ve got five minutes, give this a try.

Go to Public Whip, find the box labelled “Find out how any MP or Lord votes” and enter your postcode in the space provided.

You’ll be sent to a new page (see image, below), where the name of your MP will appear. It’s worth checking at this point whether this was the person you voted for in the last election (their party name appears in the third column of the summary box near the top of the page). Obviously, if this MP is not the person you voted for, they’re less likely to share your political views. But if this is the MP you voted to get into power, then to see if they’re representing your views, read on…

Click on the tab marked “Policy comparisons” near the top of the page. Now you should be taken to a list of policies, including the Iraq invasion, abortion, the rights of homosexuals, fox-hunting, ID cards and laws to combat terrorism. Down the side of this list is a list of percentages. A low percentage means that your MP is generally voting against these policies. A high percentage means they are generally voting in favour of them.

Any surprises? If you’re shocked by what you see, leave a comment to this blog post. Do you share their opinions? Do you feel fairly represented? Let us know!

Heather Brooke won a High Court battle for the publication of MPs’ expense claims. She runs the blog www.yrtk.org

Democracy is made up of an informed electorate.

It sounds simple but let me deconstruct this. We need information to be informed and we need the ability to exercise our vote in a meaningful way to be a valid electorate. In the current set up we get neither and thus we cannot honestly call the UK a democracy.

Our public servants hoard information with a stubbornness last seen when Charlton Heston addressed the National Rifle Association saying the day he’d give up his gun was the day it was prised from his cold, dead hands. It was about that difficult prising from MPs their expense receipts.

Part of the reason I battled for the release of MPs’ expense claims was that I believed the public had every right to be informed about how their elected officials were spending public money in the course of their public duties. I wasn’t seeking state secrets, just expenses which can only be claimed “wholly, necessarily and exclusively in discharging their duties as Members”.  However, MPs and their civil servants thought such transparency was beyond the pale and they spent even more public money fighting for four years to stop me.

I remember sitting in an Information Tribunal hearing back in February 2008 listening to Andrew Walker the head of the Fees Office trying to explain to my lawyer how he thought constituents could in any way be making an informed voting decision about their MP when they lacked the most basic information about their MPs accountability.

“MPs should be allowed to carry on their duties free from interference,” he told us.   There you have it – you pesky constituents – in the world of Parliament you are an annoying interference getting in the way of the important business of being an MP. He honestly seemed to think that voting once every five years for someone pre-selected and without even the most basic information was enough.

It’s not. Not by a long shot. We need public bodies to understand they work for us and the information they collect in our name and at our expense belongs to us not them. Only then can we make any kind of informed decision.

Now that we’ve seen what lay behind MPs’ cries of ‘privacy’ and ‘security’ we are in a much better position when it comes time to casting our votes. That so many MPs have chosen to stand down reveals that what they’ve done will not stand up to public scrutiny.

But will we get the new kind of MPs we want to see: A new generation of technically savvy candidates committed to the people and not a political party? That’s unclear because unless the system of choosing political candidates is changed it’s just the same old favouritism and patronage that parachutes people from the strategy unit to a safe seat.

Currently candidates are selected not because they’ve built up a reputation as leaders in particular constituencies or proven themselves as sound leaders of merit, but because they’ve sucked up to the right politically powerful people. These people then give them the nod and the MP is put forward to be voted on by a tiny, totally unrepresentative party elite. As it was the party that put the MP in position, it is to the party to whom the MP is ultimately loyal. If we want MPs to work for us then it must be us who selects them. We need a role in the selection of candidates. That’s why I’m supporting the campaign to hold open primaries for all MPs.

I have one final suggestion for reform. Publish all party whips. These are the party’s instructions to all their MPs telling them how to vote. A one-line whip offers a suggestion on how to vote but a three-line whip is an outright threat and if the MP rebels his career will effectively be over.

Reform in a nutshell: freedom of information, open primaries and publishing the party whip. If we get that right then we might actually get MPs working for us and not political party bosses.