Old Site News

Have a look at the more recent newsletter archives as well.

Votes back to 1997 - 4 October 2003 by Francis

You can now browse and examine most of the 1997-2001 parliament. There are still a few divisions missing because of errors in Hansard. Also the motion text extraction algorithm is particularly bad on this older data, so don't expect too much of it. There's lots of fun new stuff to look at. For example, old warhorses and figures from recent history now appear in the twilight of their parliamentary career. Take a look at Paddy Ashdown, John Major or Tony Benn.

Go have a dig for information. Perhaps you would like to know just how many divisions have been spent trying to ban fox hunting over the last six years (make sure you take off divisions that only mention it in passing in their motion text). Or if you prefer, go hunting yourself for all the divisions on terrorism which occurred before September 11th. Let us know if you find anything interesting.

Amongst this new data is a first case of mass abstention. In a curious vote about EC fishing regulations, 77 members from the Conservative party voted both aye and no. Does anyone know the story of what they were trying to signal? Why is this the only occasion in 6 years when so many have used double voting to mean something?

New logo and look - 2 October 2003 by Francis

Giles has been working away, and given us a new logo and look. Thank you Giles! This involves a few changes, and I might have broken something. If anything doesn't work, then send us an email.

MP votes twice in one division - 25 September 2003 by Francis

When I first analysed the database of votes which the Public Whip software generated, I was a bit shocked. There are dozens of occasions when an MP voted both aye and no in the same division. How could this be? Fortunately, it is perfectly allowed. Have a look at the new page about double voting for a list of occasions when it has happened. And for an explanation.

Before today, MPs who voted twice were listed twice everywhere. This meant that one of their votes counted them as a rebel! They no longer are, so the number of rebellions is slightly reduced for some MPs and divisions. On the other hand, the counts printed in Hansard "The House divided: Ayes 199, Noes 393" include double votes, so they differ even more from Public Whip's counts which list double voters separately.

Turncoats and byelections - 18 September 2003 by Francis

Politics, being human, is endlessly rich in the variety of things that it throws up. This may be good fun, but it's bad when you try and encode things in a rigid computer database. The quirk in this case is Paul Marsden, member for Shrewsbury & Atcham, who changed party from Labour to the Liberal Democrats about the time of the Afghanistan war.

For a while now Public Whip has coped with this by treating him as two MPs, one who left the house on 10th December 2001, and another of a different party who joined the house the next day. The same format is also used to store MPs who've died, resigned, won a new seat created during the Parliament, been expelled, or who have been certified as insane. Really! Check out the complete list of causes of byelections since 1832.

A few people have queried Paul Marsden's position as top rebel in the list on the front page. Has the site accidentally counted his votes as a Liberal Democrat as rebellions against the Labour whip? The answer is no. His entry there is calculated using only divisions while he took the Labour whip. There is another entry for him as a Liberal Democrat further down the rebels table. Today I've changed the site to clarify this a bit by saying "whilst Lab". Hopefully that will lead people to realise it takes into account that he has changed party. It seems unsurprising that somebody who changed party had a high rebellion rate in their old party just before the change.

Today's a good day to be thinking about this as it's the Brent East byelection. As I write the result hasn't been announced yet. I look forward to entering the new MP into the database in time for their first division...

Detecting abstentions - 16 September 2003 by Francis

Quite often members deliberately refrain from voting in a division, even if they are in the house so could have done so. Conversely, on an important vote, the whip of one party will deliberately try and get a higher turnout. A while ago Becka suggested a way of detecting these effects.

You add up the turnouts for each party across all divisions and end up with a percentage expected vote share per party. Then you calculate, given the total turnout for this particular division, what the percentage would lead you to expect. If the number of voters in the party is much different from your expectation, then something interesting is happening.

This calculation has been in Public Whip for a while, manifest as a mysterious column of numbers on the party table in the division listing. I've hopefully made it a bit clearer, using the terminology of abstentions, and displaying high abstention parties even if nobody in them voted. Have a look at the recent Iraq and the UN vote, where the Lib Dems proposed a motion. You can see from the large abstention number for the Conservatives that the party whip must have been to abstain. Indeed none of them voted at all.

Which Gareth Thomas? - 12 September 2003 by Francis

One of the things I'm doing at the moment is improving the quality of data for the current parliament. There are sometimes omissions or inconsistencies within Hansard itself. Those errors for recent months are corrected when the session is put into a "bound volume". Although this concept originally applied to the paper versions of Hansard, it is passed on to the electronic version. There are also sometimes errors in the bound volume text as well.

One example is division 56 from during a debate on occupational pensions at the start of this year. There are two MPs both called Gareth Thomas, one the member for Clwyd West and the other for Harrow West. In this division Hansard doesn't say which one it was that voted. I asked the House of Commons Information Office, who seem to regularly get strange queries like this. After some time researching the answer, someone in this not-quite-byzantine bureaucracy kindly emailed me on Wednesday to say that the voting member was the one for Harrow West. You can now see the division on this site.

This all sounds a bit trivial and tedious, if necessary as every MP's reputation could be at stake. But there are worse things to come. The scariest is that quite often the count of votes does not equal the count listed in Hansard "The House divided: Ayes 100, Noes 200.", when there are actually perhaps 101 ayes listed. This happens often enough that I haven't quite dare mention it to HCIO yet.

Summer's ended - 9 September 2003 by Francis

Parliament has reconvened now summer is over. However, under this new system, after only two weeks it will adjourn for the party conferences. Yesterday there were three divisions votes on the Water Bill. I'm doing these updates semi-manually at the moment, so new divisions will only be available a few days after they happen.