Friday 20 July 2018

We really need to change MP's voting in commons.

This  week Theresa May, survived a number  of very close  votes on Brexit legislation after whipping her MPs to support hard-right Brextremist amendments to the customs bill that have clearly been designed to make her Brexit White Paper unworkable.
 

Although  the vast majority of Tories and their DUP  compatriots actually voted in favour of the Brextremist led by Jacob Rees Mogg amendments which ,ore or less scuppered the previous .agreement that had made in Chequers that has led to the resignation of Boris Johnson and David Davies.

Although Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party voted against Theresa May and the Brextremists, the Tories were saved by the usual crowd of   Hard Brexit  supporters
Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer, Frank Field, Kate Hoey and that great Anti-Tory Dennis  Skinner

But that's not all

It was revealed that the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable, and the former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up to vote in the debate


 A Lib Dem source said: 

“Vince had an important meeting off the parliamentary estate that had been approved by the whips and nobody thought these amendments would ever be so close
Apparently the excuse was that they were under the impression that Corbyn would instruct Labour to abstain as they have done in the past

Whatever the excuse both parties lost an opportunity  to defeat the Tories.

But that's not all  

"The Conservatives have been forced to admit that their chief whip asked MPs to breach Commons voting conventions in knife-edge Brexit votes on Tuesday, as opposition parties demanded he quit and queried the accuracy of the prime minister’s account of events.
Party sources conceded on Thursday night that Julian Smith had asked several of his own party’s MPs to break pairing arrangements but some had refused to do so, and the only one who did obey the instruction was paired to a Liberal Democrat MP who was on maternity leave.
They admitted that Smith had wanted some MPs to break “short term” pairing arrangements, where a Tory is asked to skip a vote because an opposition member is unable to attend for good reason, but had made an error in asking party chairman Brandon Lewis to vote because he was paired with Jo Swinson – who only recently gave birth"
It has led to the call for the whole pairing  situation to be replaced by proxy voting  a form of voting whereby a member of a decision-making body may delegate his or her voting power to a representative, to enable a vote in absence,

Clearly we need a system where parties could apply to the speakers office where MPs like  Jo Swinson could nominate a fellow MP to vote on her behalf.

It could also end  the disgusting issue similar to when a Labour MP  discharged herself from hospital and attended parliament in her pyjamas in order to take part in a Brexit vote

Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West, said parliamentary voting procedures were archaic and undignified after the whips refused her request to be paired with a Tory MP to cancel out each other’s vote – a practice that allows MPs to be absent from parliament with good reason.
She has been in hospital since last Friday with severe nerve pain, an ongoing complication from a hit-and-run collision several years ago.

When it became clear the vote on an amendment to the Brexit bill was going to be close, Labour whips asked her to leave hospital and make a four-hour journey to London to take part.
They told her she would be allowed to stay in the car rather than haul herself into the chamber, and whips would come to the car park to count her vote. But the Tories insisted she attend not just the vote but the three-hour debate preceeding it.
Shah was brought into the House of Commons in a wheelchair, carrying a sick bucket and dosed up on morphine. She said it was a humiliating experience.

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“I was in my pyjamas. It felt personally very undignified and very invasive. It was embarrassing. I thought I’d just be able to stay in the back of the car, where I’d made a bed for myself, and be counted there, but the Tories wouldn’t have it. By making me go in to vote like that, they stripped me of my dignity.

When Tories can stay in the bar watching  the  England game only to leave to vote down a series of SNP amendments there is clearly something wrong.

but i doubt things will change such procedures  are there to bring new MPs into the whole ethos of parliament, where  many a previous rebel ends up embracing the whole archaic system   in preparation for them donning ermine and moving to the Lords next door.

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