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Political Parties and Elections Bill — Parliamentary candidates can keep their home addresses secret — 2 Mar 2009 at 21:00
The majority of MPs voted, without any debate,[1] to add a new clause to the Political Parties and Elections Bill[2] that makes the following changes to the rules for running Parliamentary elections:[3]
Julian Lewis, the MP who sponsored this new clause, had earlier sponsored a change to the Freedom of Information Act to exempt the disclosure of MP's addresses, their travel plans, how much they spend on security, and the identities of people who deliver goods to them[4] for fear that "a self-taught follower of al-Qaeda... goes on the internet, conveniently finds 646 addresses and sends 646 packages containing something explosive, horrible or, at the very least, abusive to 646 unprotected mail boxes"[5] having already come to terms with the fact that "if someone who is targeting a particular MP and means to track him or her down in order to do him or her harm puts in enough effort, it will be possible to do so."[5] In the aftermath of this vote there was such disquiet among some MPs about the apparent irregularities on how it had been handled to the extent that two further divisions were called on minor and consequential amendments.[6][7] Following this debate about the lack of a debate and appeals to the Chair to do something about it,[8] Julian Lewis put on record the fact that "although both the Government and the Opposition treated this free vote as a free vote, the Liberal Democrats whipped all their Members to vote one way."
Further reading
Debate in Parliament | Source | Edit (learn more) | Discussion (last edited 2 Apr 2010 by julian) Party SummaryVotes by party, red entries are votes against the majority for that party. What is Tell? '+1 tell' means that in addition one member of that party was a teller for that division lobby. What are Boths? An MP can vote both aye and no in the same division. The boths page explains this. What is Turnout? This is measured against the total membership of the party at the time of the vote.
Rebel Voters - sorted by partyMPs for which their vote in this division differed from the majority vote of their party. You can see all votes in this division, or every eligible MP who could have voted in this division Sort by: Name | Constituency | Party | Vote | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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