End of award report. Robotic or rebellious? RES

Transcription

1 End of award report Robotic or rebellious? RES Background There is a conventional wisdom about British politicians: that they are not as good as they used to be. And in particular, that the days of the independent-minded MPs who populated the House of Commons in the 1940s and 1950s are now long gone. Gutless and feeble, today s politicians are too willing to do what their political masters tell them; terrified to follow their own consciences for fear of what might happen to them, they can be led by the nose to vote for almost anything put before them. It would be simpler and more economical to keep a flock of tame sheep and from time to time to drive them through the division lobbies in the appropriate numbers. Like so much conventional wisdom, this is almost entirely wrong. Nearly every sentence in the above paragraph is incorrect. Indeed, it is not just that the sentences are incorrect. Nearly every sentence in the above paragraph is the precise opposite of the reality. Backbench cohesion in Britain was at its peak in the 1950s and early 1960s when the Commons was full of all those supposedly independent-minded MPs. There were two sessions in the 1950s in which not a single Conservative MP defied their party whip. Backbench cohesion began to weaken in the late-1960s and 1970s, at exactly the same point as those much derided career politicians began to enter Westminster in greater numbers. One group of politicians who grew particularly used to being dismissed as ineffectual sheep were the Labour MPs elected en masse in After Labour s first landslide, they got used to being described as timid, sycophantic, acquiescent and cowardly. They acquired a reputation for excessive cohesion, mindless loyalty and a distinct lack of backbone. As well as sheep, they were regularly compared to poodles, clones, robots or most bizarrely of all daleks. This project was established to see what happened next: during the 2001 parliament. As the original grant application stated: The overall aim of this research project is simple: to monitor, report and analyse the way British MPs vote in the 2001 parliament. As the majority party in the Commons, the primary focus of the research was to be on the behaviour of those sitting behind the current government: the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), but it would also look at the behaviour of Opposition MPs. Objectives The scope of the study was to be all votes in the 2001 parliament, including whipped and free votes. The research had five overarching objectives: [1] To gather and collate a record of all rebellious votes cast by members of the three major parties during the 2001 Parliament. [2] To gather and collate a record of votes cast by members of the three major parties on key free votes. 14

2 [3] To gather and collate secondary material to put such votes into their political context and to produce an account of each of the major votes of the Parliament. [4] Using both the quantitative and qualitative data, to answer six questions about the voting of British MPs: a) Would Labour MPs continue to behave as cohesively as they did in the last parliament, or as, judging from their behaviour at the start of the parliament, they appeared to be would they revert to historic type? b) How would the government deal with the PLP? During the 1997 Parliament, Labour ministers were (to a far greater degree than was realised) adept at negotiating with their backbenchers in order to lessen the extent of public rebellion. Would such tactics work with a more assertive PLP? c) Would the Conservative Parliamentary Party under Iain Duncan Smith prove to be more cohesive than it was under either William Hague or John Major? To what extent would the policy changes being introduced by Duncan Smith prove controversial on the Tory backbenches? Would the Tory frontbench be more or less hostile to the principle of Government legislation than under William Hague? d) Would the Liberal Democrats continue to be a cohesive group in parliament, or would Charles Kennedy s leadership prove divisive? What would the shift in the Liberal Democrats ethos from constructive opposition to effective opposition mean in practice? e) How would the parties vote when the whips are taken off? To what extent were the divisions between the parties artificial (the result of whipping) or genuine (the result of agreement and consensus)? And what issues if any had the capacity to divide the parties? f) How would an Independent MP (Dr Richard Taylor, the victor at Wyre Forest) operate in the House dominated by the concept of party? And how would his voting as an Independent who defeated a Labour MP differ from that of Martin Bell an Independent who defeated a Conservative? [5] Combining the quantitative data with other extant data, to investigate the determinants of parliamentary voting. Particular attention was to be paid to the behaviour of the women MPs much maligned during the 1997 parliament for their loyalty to the Government. To a greater or lesser extent, we met all five objectives of the project. We gathered and collated a record of all rebellious votes and key free votes of all the main parties, and made that data available [objectives 1 and 2]. Our briefing papers detailed the rebellious votes in great length, and we also published several briefing papers on various free votes to occur during the parliament such as hunting, House of Commons modernisation, smoking and so on. We also gathered and collated extensive secondary material to put such votes into their political context and produced a published account of each of the major votes of the Parliament, with these accounts published through both our briefing papers but also through the monograph, The Rebels [objective 3]. Using the combination of quantitative and qualitative data we answered nearly all of questions about the voting 15

3 of British MPs [objective 4]. (We discuss the answers to those questions in Results, below). The only area where we didn t meet our initial aim was 4f where, although we did monitor Taylor s voting, we have not yet published any results. But we did instead carry out and publish other analysis of, for example, George Galloway, and other defectors from the main parties. The one objective where we did less analysis than we might initially have liked was objective 5. We used multiple regression for a paper on the determinants of the Iraq rebellions (at the Political Studies Association Conference in 2004, for example) and another on the electoral consequences of rebellion (at the American Political Science Association conference and the EPOP conference in 2005), but these papers have yet to be published, and much of the other analysis was methodologically less sophisticated than originally intended. The same could be said of some of the analysis of women MPs: we researched and published several short articles on the behaviour of the women MPs, but these were not of a level of sophistication to match some of our previous work. Yet in other ways the project went way beyond its initial goals. For one thing, its impact (see below) was much greater than expected because of the efforts made by the researchers to disseminate their findings. This takes time and the laws of physics mean that time spent disseminating to an audience of millions cannot be spent polishing a journal article for an audience of six. With hindsight, we have no doubts that we made the right choices in trading breadth of coverage for depth of analysis in some places. This problem was, however, exacerbated by the sheer amount of dissent occurring at Westminster. Although we expected the PLP to be increasingly rebellious, we were still taken aback by just how rebellious and each large rebellion meant more work analysing and reporting. We produced (see below) almost 80 briefing papers during the grant period and whilst ideally we would have perhaps preferred to have produced fewer briefing papers and more articles, we were not entirely masters of our own destiny. One other way in which we have managed to maximise the outputs of the grant was by covering a whole extra session. The coverage of the project was supposed to end in May 2005, but we extended our analysis up to November 2006 a full 18 months of additional coverage to include the first session of the 2005 Parliament. This meant our data included four defeats and some record-breaking revolts, as well as some more fascinating free votes. One other area where we did not fully meet the specifications of the grant was in our project website. We had initially envisaged a website where voters would come to look up the voting of their MP. The establishment and development of sites like made this exercise largely redundant. There seemed little point in spending large amounts of the ESRC s money doing something that was already being done very well by others. So, instead, we set up a (cheaper) site to disseminate project findings hence the project s underspend on website development. As will become clear, however, this did not in any way limit the dissemination of our work, which was one of the great successes of the project. Methods The project involved a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The former drew on division lists and other hard data. Each year, the average session of the House of Commons sees around 300 divisions (votes). Each is recorded, with division lists being 16

4 published in Hansard. These lists, which can consist of over 650 names each, form the primary source for studies of MPs voting behaviour. It is now possible to do much of this data collection electronically, although for the most part we continued to collect the data manually. (Any future project will however need to be more automated, saving money on the data collection and utilising it more valuably in other research areas). But however collected, the data do require checking. Votes are sometimes misrecorded, with (for example) MPs with similar names being confused. This task requires correspondence with the MPs concerned. As in the past, MPs proved very willing to respond to such enquiries, and we had very few refuse to assist us. Our data is therefore more accurate than the (otherwise excellent) web-based systems (such as publicwhip.org.uk or theyworkforyou.com) which utilise the raw data without any checks. Once cleaned, the data were entered into SPSS, and we have begun the process of depositing the data with the UK Data Archive. Our contacts with parliamentarians also allowed us to differentiate properly between whipped votes those where the parties issue instructions and free votes those where MPs are left to their own devices. This too differentiates our work from any analysis based simply on the raw data. Our main interest is in matters of dissent on those occasions when MPs defy their party leadership (although we also did, as already noted, some analysis of free votes). For one thing, there is a qualitative difference between voting against your party when the whip is on, and doing so when it is not. Not differentiating whipped from unwhipped votes can lead to very curious conclusions about an MP s behaviour. Supplementing the quantitative data requires correspondence and interviews with MPs to check on the motivations for rebelling (or not), analysis of media reports and (where appropriate) use of additional parliamentary sources (such as Early Day Motions). We carried out over 100 interviews with MPs and other sources. Despite the ever-increasing demands on them, nearly all of the politicians we approached were incredibly generous with their time. They included rebels, loyalists, whips, special advisers, ministers, exministers, would-be ministers, and ex-would-be ministers. Most of the interviews were conducted at Westminster, with a handful carried out on the phone. A further 120 MPs responded to various queries by post, and there was also countless correspondence. Interviewees were guaranteed anonymity (a condition broken only with their agreement). We were particularly grateful for the assistance of the Government Whips Office. Traditionally very secretive, they were persuaded to participate in the project and their participation was extremely helpful. It was not just that the granted a series of (very useful) interviews, but also that they routinely helped clear up minor queries. These contacts provided much of the basic source material for the monograph resulting from the project The Rebels (see below) but also important contextual information for the more quantitative analysis, which we used far more for our series of briefing papers (also see below). Indeed, all of the project team are convinced that it is simply impossible to do meaningful analysis of Westminster without having this sort of contextual information. Results 17

5 Given that the project generated a 100,000 word monograph and a range of briefing papers and articles, it is difficult to summarise the findings in such a short amount of space, But, inter alia, the research revealed: that Labour MPs rebelled more frequently in the 2005 parliament than government MPs in any other post-war parliament: Labour backbenchers rebelled in 20.8 per cent of votes, a higher rate of rebellion than in any other parliament since that these rebellions included some record-breaking revolts including the largest Labour rebellion on health policy, the largest Labour rebellion on education policy, the (joint) largest rebellion at Second Reading since 1945, and (most significantly of all) over Iraq the largest rebellion by MPs of any governing party Labour, Conservative or Liberal on any type of policy for over 150 years. that the MPs responsible were largely the same MPs as had been causing the government difficulty before the 2001 election although the Iraq rebellions led to an increase in the number of MPs prepared to defy the whip. that rebellious behaviour increased yet further in the first session of the 2005 parliament, with Labour MPs rebelling more frequently than government MPs in any first session during the post-war era and inflicting four separate defeats (another record for any government with a majority of more than 60). that there was almost no electoral benefit for rebel MPs from their behaviour with the electorate largely treating MPs as a group rather than differentiating between rebels and loyalists. that Conservative MPs relatively cohesive over whipped votes (with a rebellion in 9.6 per cent of divisions), and with the majority of these rebellions taking place under Iain Duncan Smith s leadership, but with some more serious (and interesting) divisions over moral issues, especially those relating to sexuality. that Liberal Democrat MPs were (as they had been in the preceding parliament) astonishingly cohesive on whipped votes (with a rebellion in just 4 per cent of divisions) but with some very serious splits occurring on free votes, most notably over fox-hunting and smacking, both issues that split the parliamentary party down the middle. Activities and Outputs As outlined in the initial application, the project aimed for a varied set of outputs, aimed at different audiences, both inside and outside academia. In traditional terms, the key publication was a 100,000 word monograph The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority which was published by Politico s in late-2005 and which was then shortlisted for Channel 4 s Political Book of the Year. Reviews so far include: fascinating (The Times), fascinating and entertaining (Radio 4), lively and wellresearched (Tribune), an important, and necessary, corrective to much of the nonsense talked and written about Parliament (Journal of Legislative Studies), and entertaining and revealing (The Times, again). Political Studies said: There aren t many politics books which can truthfully be described as enjoyable: this is definitely one of them, and should at the very least be recommended to undergraduates, if only to convince them that politics isn t half as boring as we ve so far managed to convince them. 18

6 The book and its arguments received widespread coverage on broadcast and print media. Radio coverage included features on Radio 4 (The Westminster Hour, The World This Weekend, Yesterday in Parliament), Radio 5 (the Julian Worricker Show), the World Service (People and Politics), as well as a multitude of local radio slots. Television coverage included BBC 1 (BBC Breakfast and an authored piece for the Politics Show), BBC 2 (Newsnight), and Bloomberg, ITV, Sky News, along with coverage in The Times, Sunday Express, Independent, New Statesman, Tribune, Guardian (including an authored op-ed piece), and other outlets. There are around 100 known citations of the book in various media outlets, and the book has also been quoted in public by at least three members of the Cabinet as well as during debates in the House of Commons. Many other projects would be satisfied with the production of such a monograph and such coverage, even without any other publications. Yet just as important to this project were the many other publications produced both in advance of The Rebels and after it. These encompassed academic journal articles with three pieces in Parliamentary Affairs and Political Quarterly as well as two teaching publications (both in Politics Review) and three chapters, including in Seldon and Kavanagh s high profile The Blair Effect (CUP, 2005). There were also a string of authored pieces by the project team in magazines and newspapers read by practitioners. These included Progress, Parliamentary Brief, The House Magazine (twice), Public Servant, New Statesman (three times), Journal of Liberal History (twice), and the Conservative History Journal. Other pieces were written for newspapers including the Guardian (both in print and online), Scotland on Sunday, the Yorkshire Post, and (less usefully) the Times Higher Education Supplement. We also gave papers at a range of conferences and workshops. These included the Political Studies Association (multiple papers), the American Political Science Association, the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA), the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) conference (multiple papers), and the Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians. Seminar papers or talks were also given at the Universities of Hull, Sussex, Manchester, LSE, and Oxford (twice), in addition to papers or talks delivered at seminars aimed at practitioners including at the House of Commons, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, the Hansard Society, and the Association of Conservative Peers. Perhaps the outlet that achieved the widest dissemination, though, was the project s website: This site went live in February 2004 on the day that the Government faced a record-breaking rebellion over the Higher Education Bill and soon became well-established. In late-2006, revolts.co.uk was identified as amongst the best 20 non-aligned political blogs in Britain. Traffic to the site grew year-on-year, as it became more widely used. It now averages over 10,000 visits per month (that is, around 50,000 hits per month). The site also allows individuals to sign up for regular e-newsletters; we now have over 500 people signed up. More important than the quantity, however, is the quality: the site is now utilised by all major news organisations as well as widely within Westminster and Whitehall. Those signed up for the e-newsletter include as well as a large number of interested members of the public those from academia, schools, journalism, thinktanks and pressure groups and those working within Westminster. In addition to publishing regular short news items updates on individual votes, responses to stories in the media and such like revolts.co.uk published almost 80 19

7 briefing papers. Each of these briefing papers was also sent to political journalists and columnists with whom the project team had contacts (a group that has grown vastly during the project), as well as those involved in the events we were discussing. These briefing papers varied in size some were merely a page or two long, others were somewhat bigger. Our end-of-parliament report on the behaviour of the PLP, for example, ran to 138 A4 pages, and listed all 259 rebellions to have taken place during the parliament, including full lists of everyone who rebelled on each, along with summary tables of each of the significant rebellions and a full listing of all MPs to have rebelled during the parliament, together with the details of the number of times they had rebelled. We aimed to provide scene-setting analysis before a key vote explaining what historical comparisons there were, for example as well as then providing analysis after the vote, explaining which MPs had rebelled, which had not and so on. A good example of this came during the recent Education and Inspections Bill, during the passage of which we published 10 separate briefing papers (all co-authored by Cowley and Stuart), ranging from the initial grumblings and the production of the Alternative White Paper to the Bill s final day in Report (and Third Reading). We tried to be both reactive (regularly responding to journalists enquiries) and proactive (ensuring that we pushed information out to those who might need it, to try to inform the debate). The ESRC was credited with its support on each of these briefing notes, along with being credited on the revolts website itself. Revolts.co.uk proved to be a major form of dissemination and is possibly the one single academic activity of which this project s PI is most proud. It led, in 2005, to him winning the Political Studies Association s Communicator of the Year award. Impact The ESRC may have funded projects which have made a larger impact although not very many, we suspect but in terms of bang for buck this project has probably made more of an impact than almost all other ESRC politics grants in recent years. The published academic work from the project most notably The Rebels is already beginning to be cited regularly in academic literature. More significant, however, has been the considerable impact the work had on the outside world. An example of the impact that the project has had came with a briefing paper in November 2006 technically after the project was finished but still utilising the work (and still acknowledging the ESRC s support). The briefing paper our end-of-session report on the PLP, was circulated in hard copy to around 150 journalists and politicians, and electronically via the website. It was the subject of a feature on Radio 4 s Today programme, led to articles in the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, and Mail, as well as on Bloomberg News (which was then used extensively in the US) and assorted other outputs as diverse as politics.co.uk, the LabourHome website, and the Islamic Republic News Agency. Again, many projects would think that this was good real world coverage for their entire project. But this came on top of literally hundreds of uses of the work, in print and other media, featuring in every major newspaper in the UK (and beyond) and on every major television news channel/news programme in the UK (and beyond). We initially 20

8 tried to keep track of usage of the work in the media, but this soon proved impossible to do given its quantity). Below are examples of praise for the work from those who use the site: Revolts is the first place I - and many journalists I respect - turn to for authoritative analysis, historical comparisons, and accurate predictions of parliamentary revolts and rebellions. This is academic political research doing exactly what it should do helping to inform the political debate - and in real time not years after it matters Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor The Revolts website is an invaluable aid to reporting the Commons. Revolts gives historical context, up-to-date predictions, quick vote analysis, all with the same reliability and elan. Nobody does it better! Where would we be without it? - Gary Gibbon, Channel 4 News The revolts website is indispensable for political journalists. There is no alternative to the website for informing the public debate about Parliament and correcting the all too frequent myths and errors Peter Riddell, The Times Revolts has become the invaluable one stop shop for analysis of parliamentary backbench turmoil. Phil Cowley's site has become the first port of call for the politeratti whenever turbulance strikes - Mark D Arcy, Today in Parliament, Radio 4 Philip Cowley's work on backbench rebellions has become an indispensible reference point for anyone attempting an informed account of the Blair government's parliamentary difficulties. The journalist who writes about these matters without consulting his research is not serious and is not worth reading - Martin Kettle, Guardian The Revolts website has been a life-saver for journalists who need up to date and - crucially per cent accurate information on MPs' voting records. With Labour rebellions threatening to strike at the heart of Tony Blair's "reform agenda", this is a crucial website for any political journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer, Sunday Express Revolts has proved to be an invaluable resource for journalists and broadcasters. It not only provides accurate statistical information, but most importantly historical context. This kind of informed analysis does not exist anywhere else. Its availability to the media in turn ensures that the information is conveyed to the public, giving it a wider currency than usual for academic research - Shaun Ley, BBC Radio 4 Philip Cowley's timely, accurate assessments of the state of ferment inside the Labour Party have been invaluable to practising journalists working in the lobby. He is one of the few academics that seems to understand there is a worthwhile interface with political journalism - Patrick Wintour, Guardian Further examples of the praise for the work from outside the academic community (and which draw on almost every major political journalist) can be found at 21

9 It is for this reason that the nominated outputs from the project include the briefing papers produced from revolts.co.uk as well as The Rebels. In July 2006, just as the project was formally drawing to a close, Michael White of the Guardian was appearing on the Radio 4 s Today programme, when (quite unprompted by any of the research team) he said: This government early on got a reputation for having very craven backbenchers. It was never true at the beginning but it s got more so, quite assertive. Figures here from a Guardian leader [which had in turn came from More than one in four votes there are rebels, 112 Labour backbenchers broke with the government at least once. And there is this genius of a sort of anorak, called Dr Phil Cowley, I want to pay tribute to this man on the radio, Nottingham University. You re sitting there typing about a revolt late at night and up pops an , which says this is the 33 rd worst Labour rebellion on a wet Wednesday since And it s made us all much more aware that they do vote against the government a lot, even though there s a core of loyalists, and a core of disloyalists, of course, the Campaign Group, 25 often vote against the government a lot. The rest is a mixed bag. They follow the government on issues. They don t like 90 day detention for terrorism, so they beat them down to 28. Quite active, quite impressive on a lot of issues. We couldn t have put it better ourselves. It wasn t just that the work on rebellions had filtered through so well to the wider (political) world, but it also summed up well the proactive way we pushed the findings out to those who needed to know them - you re sitting there typing about a revolt late at night and up pops an . Future research priorities The assumption made within the Government Whips Office shortly after the 2001 election was that the size of the Government s majority meant that they should be able to make it through the four years of the parliament without being defeated on a whipped vote. They anticipated difficulties with one or two proposals, but none of these problems appeared insurmountable. They knew that things were going to be tougher than they had been in the first Blair term, but they were still confident that they would reach the end of the parliament without suffering a defeat. They therefore attempted an ambitious longer-term strategy: to look ahead to Labour s third term. The goal of the second term should be to nurture good relationships with backbenchers and to prevent the habit of rebellion from becoming too widespread, so that if Labour managed to win a third term with what they assumed would be a reduced majority the whips would have credit in the bank with Labour backbenchers, which they could then use to get legislation through, even with that smaller majority. It didn t work. Instead of constraining it, the events of the 2001 Parliament made backbench rebellion a relatively commonplace activity one engaged in by the majority of Labour MPs, and one which few backbenchers had not taken part in at some point. The bit that the Whips Office got right, of course, was that Labour did then win a third term and with a much reduced majority. Historically, Labour s majority is not very small but for a government which has occasionally struggled to get its legislation through with a majority of over 160, it now seems worryingly small. 22

10 Thanks to the use of the grant to cover the first session of the 2005 parliament (as explained above) we know that those fears were realised with the government going down to four defeats within the first year. Although we have some unanswered questions based on the 2001 data left to resolve, our most pressing research priority, therefore, is to continue the work on into the 2005 Parliament examining whether such rebellious behaviour continues through the rest of the parliament. We are already expecting significant rebellions on the replacement of Trident, House of Lords reform, civil nuclear power, and party political funding, as well as a range of smaller issues. We would be especially keen to monitor any changes in the behaviour of the PLP when a new leader is elected historical precedent suggests a short-term honeymoon, followed by renewed hostilities and also any changes in the behaviour of the Conservatives. (We are currently preparing a short paper on the behaviour of the Conservatives under David Cameron s leadership, which shows plenty of discontent with his policy direction on the backbenches). We would also be extremely keen to keep up with the revolts.co.uk work, which we believe is a model example of how academics can communicate their work to a wider audience. 23