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The Public Whip

Counting votes on your behalf
Every week, a dozen or so times, your MP votes in the UK parliament. This is their crucial, visible exercise of power. The Public Whip data-mines their voting record to help you hold them to account.

 

What is the Public Whip?

The Public Whip is a project to watch Members of the United Kingdom Parliament, so that the public (people like us) can better understand and influence their voting patterns.

First, can you explain "division" and other political jargon?

The House of Commons divides many times each week into those who vote "aye" ("yes", for the motion) and those who vote "no" (against the motion). Each political party has whips who try to make their MPs (Members of Parliament) vote for the party line. Sometimes an MP rebels by voting against the party whip. A teller is an MP involved in the counting of the vote. For more information on all these terms, see the Parliament factsheet on divisions .

How does the Public Whip work?

All the House of Commons debate transcripts ( Hansard ) back to 1988 are published electronically on the World Wide Web. We've written a program to read it for you and separate out all the records of voting. This information has been added into an online database which you can access.

What time period does it cover?

Voting data extends back across three parliaments to the May 1997 General Election, although there are a few divisions missing in the 1997 parliament. New divisions usually appear in Public Whip the next morning, but sometimes take a day or two longer. We give no warranty for the data; there may be factual inaccuracies. Let us know if you find any.

Some numeric statistics: The database contains 2718 MP records from 27 parties. There are 2566 divisions which have been counted. A mean of 420.91 MPs voted in each division. In total 1080052 votes were cast, of which 14762 were against the majority vote for their party. That's an overall 46.46% attendance rate and 1.37% rebellion rate.

What do the "rebellion" and "attendance" figures mean exactly?

The apparent meaning of the data can be misleading, so do not to jump to conclusions about your MP until you have understood it.

"Attendance" is for voting or telling in divisions. An MP may have a low attendance because they have abstained, have ministerial or other duties, or they are the speaker. Perhaps they consider each division carefully, and only vote when they know about the subject. A full list of reasons for low attendance can be found in the Divisions section on page 11 of a House of Commons library research paper . Note also that the Public Whip does not currently record if a member spoke in the debate but did not vote.

"Rebellion" on this website means a vote against the majority vote by members of the MP's party. Unfortunately this will indicate that many members have rebelled in a free vote. Until precise data on when and how strongly each party has whipped is made available, there is no true way of identifying a "rebellion". We know of no heuristics which can reliably detect free votes. See also the next question .

Why do you incorrectly say people are rebels in free votes?

The short answer to this question is succinctly given by the Speaker . Here is the long answer.

There is no official, public data about the party whip. At the moment we guess based on the majority vote by MPs for each party. In order to correctly identify rebels, we need to know each party's whip in each division. There are two ways this could be officially recorded.

  1. Hansard clerks could record the whip. They could either be officially told the whip by each party's whips' office, or they could deduce it from the presence of offical whips. The whip would then be written in Hansard next to the division listing.

  2. Each whips' office could publish their official whip on their website after each vote. If you are a member of a political party, and want to fix the Public Whip site, lobby them to do this, then let us know.

Parties can't have it both ways—complain that we don't take account of what the whip is, and at the same time not tell us. There is no contradiction in admitting the whip exists and recording it officially—after all some whips are paid a salary by the taxpayer so there is a precedent for admitting they exist.

How do you estimate abstentions?

It isn't possible for an MP to abstain in the UK parliament. They can however not vote at all. We try to detect massive low turnouts on the division page by estimating abstentions for each party.

They are calculated from the expected turnout, which is statistical based on the average proportionate turnout for that party in all divisions. A negative abstention indicates that more members of that party than expected voted; this is always relative, so it could be that another party has failed to turn out en masse .

Sometimes MPs also indicate abstention by voting both aye and no .

Legal question, what can I use this information for?

Anything. This website is copyrighted by us, and the software is free open source. You are free to use them how you like within the terms of the public license. The data is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Amongst other things, this means that if you use it, you should double check the information. It may be wrong. If you are going to rely on it, at the very least do some random cross-checking to make sure it is valid. Whichever way, use it at your own risk. Of course we'd rather you helped us fix the software and correct any contact. See the answer to I've found an error for details.

If you reproduce this information, or derive any interesting results from it, we ask you to refer your readers to www.publicwhip.org.uk. This way they can use and contribute themselves.

Can I play with the software?

Sure. All the software we've written is free (libre and gratuit), protected by the GNU General Public License . It's not complicated, anyone can have a go running them. But there's only a point in doing this if you are going to change it as otherwise you will see the same results. For more details go to the special coding section of this website.

Why are you giving everything away for free?

We're not; we're letting you take copies. Whatever you do, we still have our computers, all the programs, and our domain name. The more people who are playing with this sort of thing, the more cool ideas can come out of it.

We could wrap it up as a service and sell it to political lobbying organizations for cash. This would, however, be pointless since it would take away the notion of the public having access to it. All that would happen is that the people who are already organized influentially would retain all the power but would have slightly better software (which they probably have already).

What organisation is behind the Public Whip?

None. It was started by just two guys Francis and Julian who had an idea and made it happen. Giles designed the original look of the website. We're hosted by the ever helpful and encouraging Mythic Beasts . These days lots of other people help out with bits of code, writing and design.

What's your connection with TheyWorkForYou.com?

Both of us, Francis and Julian, are members of that project, but PublicWhip is not. These projects use the same underlying code to interpret the online Hansard pages, but they make different displays of it. That code and data is in the separate Parliament Parser project. We are not part of a business and there is no reason for any project to have control over any other project, so they don't. You could take our code and derive a new project from it should you wish. In fact, if you have an idea and the time, we will encourage you and give you all the support we can.

Are you happy to give interviews about Public Whip?

Yes. Both Francis and Julian have given interviews over the phone in the past and had their pictures taken for newspapers. We would be happy to do more of this. Francis has even featured on the radio in "Yesterday in Parliament". Julian lives in Liverpool, and Francis resides in Cambridge. Both travel to London whenever there is something interesting happening there. Neither of us has had any working experience inside Parliament, and so our opinions are very much formed from the outside.

Do you make any money out of Public Whip?

No. The only money we've seen is from someone who contributed 70 pounds towards our internet bill. We have no moral objection to earning money from our work, it's just that we are not willing to compromise with the need for this sort of work to be public and freely available at no cost.

How do you earn enough to make a living?

We don't have expensive lifestyles. Francis does IT contract work for various clients including mySociety , and Julian is a self-employed programmer of machine tool software . Francis and Julian first met and worked together in 1997 as employees of NC Graphics , a machine tool software company in Cambridge, before they became enlightened enough to abandon such working practices and enjoy life without ever having to answer to a boss.

Many people have hobbies, like pigeon breeding or vintage car racing, that are far more costly and time consuming than running a webpage. Just because the skills we have used can earn real money in the marketplace doesn't mean it has to be difficult and boring.

I've just got a job at a company that's been contracted by Parliament for millions of pounds to improve their website and information handling systems. I don't understand why you have written your software for free in your spare time when I'm paid to do the same thing.

Neither do we. From what we can tell, the government's system for procuring software gives, shall we say, somewhat suboptimal results. It's one of our ambitions to be a notable embarrassment to the business professionals who are capable of blowing whole pots of public money on software projects that don't work. To date, we have never been approached by anyone for technical advice on how to solve some of the problems we have encountered during the development of our software. We can't understand this, because if we had their job we would be the first people we would contact before writing a single line of code.

Sometimes programmers who work in corporations exist in a state of fear and feel that if they speak to anyone on the outside of the organization they will get sacked, then sued for releasing commercial secrets, and wind up homeless never able to get another job again. If you are too afraid, you do not need to speak to us. We have posted up everything we know on Parliament Parse . If there's anything we're missing which you'd like to see there, drop us a line or post onto the forum anonymously.

Have you had any problems from MPs or other officials with what you are doing?

Mostly they ignore us. If anyone in power has had an objection to what we are doing, they have kept it to themselves. As a rule, politicians must contrive to frame their desires into something that relates to the public interest. We can't rule out that some creative genius will invent a reason which explains why we are doing more harm than good, but it's unlikely.

Most of the problems have had to do with the inaccuracies in the the attendence and rebellion rates . Once we point out that the data can only be improved if politicians are willing to publish their secret party whip information, the criticism generally falls silent.

Are there any RSS syndication feeds?

First an explanation. RSS is a way to let you easily read news from lots of different sources. You need a special program called a newsreader to do this. On the BBC website, there's a full description of how to do it. We provide the following RSS feeds:

interestingdivisions.xml — Find out every time there are more than 10 "rebellions" in a division.
alldivisions.xml — Keep on top of every division in Parliament, after it happens.

Where is the data in spreadsheet file format or in XML?

Take a look at our Raw Data page.

What is the fuss about software patents?

A new European directive on software patents threatens the existence of websites like The Public Whip. We'd like your help to stop it. For more information see here .

What did you do for the 2005 election?

During the 2005 General Election campaign we ran a how they voted quiz . You can still take it and link to the results.

Can I help with the project?

Sure! Email team@publicwhip.org.uk to say you would like to help. We always need help writing newsletters, improving site usability, and with publicity and media. As well as programmers, of course! Read our project page and see the Public Whip section of VolunteerTasks on the mySociety wiki for some specific things we need doing.

How can I keep up with what you are doing?

Subscribe to our newsletter! It's at most once a month, and has interesting news and articles relating to the project. You can chat with other users on our forum.

There's something wrong with your webpage / I've found an error / Your wording is dreadfully unclear / Can I make a suggestion?

Please post your comments in the forum under Bugs and Problems or Suggestions and Ideas instead of emailing us. This will give us an obvious place to post our replies which you can look up should you be interested.

Putting it there is likely to be more effective at getting things done because if the whole world is able to see just how flaky our system is becoming, we're more likely to be embarrassed enough to take action.

Email us at team@publicwhip.org.uk only if it's something you think should be kept private.

Offcial Website: http://www.publicwhip.org.uk

 

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