The question of whether the HFE bill should be subject to a whip, should be a free vote, or should involve a "conscience vote" (or abstention) has attracted quite a bit of interest on CentreRight - e.g. here, here, here and here. Since everyone else is doing so, I thought I'd set out my own stall.
I disagree with those calling for almost everything to be a free vote. Many matters central to policy will be conscience issues to someone. Take UK membership of the euro. One side might say it is a conscience issue for them to oppose - maintaining and advancing England's thousand year constitutional history is, they say, what politics is about. Another side might declare that for them, Britain's joining the euro is a conscience matter - for to them politics is about finding ways to resolve political differences without war, and the European Union and Single European State are the only hope that war might be ended in Europe for good.
So, are we to say that the Conservative Party is not, therefore, to have a Party line over whether Britain should join the euro? But if a political party is not to have a line on such matters, what do political parties exist for at all?
Well, then, perhaps we should have whips for matters of public policy but not of personal morality? But what of gambling on Good Friday - an economic issue to some; a matter of personal morality to others; or abortion - to some an issue of personal morality, to others a matter of the protection the law offers to human life. Are these public policy matters to which whips can be applied or personal matters to which whips can't be applied?
What if a Party wanted to adopt a moral line? For example, suppose that someone introduced a private members bill allowing female circumcision. My guess is that all the mainstream political parties would want to impose a whip insisting that their MPs voted against (certainly no mainstream party MP would be permitted to vote in favour). But suppose there were an MP that wanted to claim that, as a matter of conscience, she believed that female circumcision should be permitted. Should the party be prevented from having a party line on such a moral issue?
It seems to me that, in order for political parties to exist at all, there must be whips on policy matters that encompass economic, constitutional and social issues that some people might potentially regard as conscience issues. There may not need to be quite as many whips as now, or whips that have quite such force as today, but there must be whips, nonetheless. The whip is of the essence of a political party. Because of the whip, MPs will sometimes vote for measures they might, off their own bat, have voted against, and will sometimes vote when they wouldn't otherwise have bothered. And that's good, because it means that we function as teams, which allows us to achieve a great deal more than we would as disparate individuals.
Sometimes party managers will find that in their teams there are certain personnel that will want to violate the party line on certain issues. This is inevitable, but it isn't a reason for saying that there shouldn't be a party line, even in these cases. What consequences there are to be for violating the party line is a matter for the party managers.
So, I don't agree that in cases in which some MPs have personal or religious convictions there should never be a party line. Apart from anything else, to declare this is to overestimate what a whip really is. If you vote against what is not merely your personal conviction, but, rather, against a core matter of what you think politics is about or a question that your religion offers specific teaching concerning, you are likely to struggle looking at yourself in the mirror or even imperil your immortal soul. I'd have thought it should be pretty clear in such a case that there mere threat of the party whip would not seem much of a threat at all. Are we really to feel that a Catholic MPs is somehow to be intimidated by the threat of a "discussion without coffee" with Geoff Hoon into defying the unambiguous teaching of the Catholic church through the ages and committing a mortal sin, so that the imposition of the whip in such a matter represents the oppression of Catholics or a threat to religious freedom? I'm sure Geoff Hoon can be a scary man, but really...
