Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart: This Parliament remains on course to be the most rebellious since 1945.

Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart are based in the School of Politics and International Relations at Nottingham University. 

We’ve been producing end-of session reports on the behaviour of government MPs at Westminster for almost a decade. Last year’s was a record-breaker: Coalition MPs rebelling more often than MPs in any other session since 1945.  This morning we’ve launched the report on the 2012-13 session.  It tells a more nuanced story, but with plenty to concern the party whips:

• There were rebellions by Coalition MPs in 61 divisions in the last session of the Parliament, covering a wide range of issues and bills, from Europe (on more than one occasion…) to House of Lords reform, from child benefit to housing benefit, and from the succession to the Crown to planning regulation.

• As a percentage of divisions, that’s a rebellion in 27% of divisions, down from the 44% in the last session.  But it’s still relatively high for the post-war period.  It tops the comparable figure for all but nine post-war sessions.  Most of these nine are from periods of Labour government (two under Callaghan, five under Blair and Brown); the preceding session of 2010-12 aside, only one Conservative Prime Minister has experienced a session with a higher level of dissent (that is, Edward Heath), and he only experienced it for one session (between 1971-72).

• If we break down the overall figure of 27% into its two component parts, Conservative MPs have broken ranks in 19% of divisions (down from 28% in the 2010-12 session), Lib Dem MPs have done so in 15% (down from 24% in the 2010-12 session).  (These two figures sum to more than 27%, because of some votes in which both parties have seen dissent).  So the decline in rebelliousness has been equal (down nine points for the Conservatives and nine for the Lib Dems) for both parts of the Coalition.  

• The figure of 19% for the Conservatives alone is still higher than for all but seven sessions of Conservative government during the post-war era.  It is, for example, higher than John Major faced for all but the 1992-93 session; higher than Margaret Thatcher faced during her premiership save for the 1981-2 and 1984-5 sessions; and it is higher than the levels of rebellion faced at any point by Churchill, Eden, Macmillan or Home (save for the 1962-3 session, when it also ran at 19%).  Edward Heath faced a higher rate of rebellion in three of his four sessions in government, but overall the rate for the 1970 Parliament was 19%. In other words, even the figure for the Conservatives alone is relatively high compared to most periods of previous Conservative government. 

• And despite the reduction in the rate of rebellion from the preceding session, the Parliament still remains on course to be the most rebellious since 1945.  The rate for the Parliament as a whole (that is, 2010-13) now stands at a rebellion in 39% of divisions, easily topping the 28% seen in the 2005 Parliament.  Even if the rate of rebellion drops again by half – down to a rate of around 13% - in the remaining two sessions, we would expect the overall total for the Parliament to be 29%, still (just) enough to make it the most rebellious in the post-war era.  The good news for the whips, therefore (and right now they probably need some), is that we can report a gradual reduction in the level of backbench dissent on the Coalition side.  But the rate of rebellion in this session only appears low when compared to the unprecedentedly high levels seen in the preceding session.

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• Why’s it down? Several reasons, but a key one was the withdrawal – under fire – of House of Lords reform.  This had the effect of removing considerable combustible material from the Government’s legislative programme.  Had (somehow) that Bill gone ahead, past Second Reading, we would be reporting a considerably higher number of rebellions.

• A total of 185 Coalition MPs have voted against their whip so far during the Parliament. Most (148) of these are Conservatives, but this is not surprising, given that there have been more Conservative rebellions and there are anyway more Conservative MPs.  The most rebellious nine Coalition rebels are Conservatives, headed by Philip Hollobone, who was also the most rebellious in the last session.  He has now voted against his whip 129 times since the election in 2010.

• Of these 185 MPs, 144 rebelled during the 2012-13 session, and there was a very strong relationship between behaviour in the two sessions of the Parliament.  The correlation between the number of rebellions in the 2010-12 and 2012-13 sessions was 0.79. 

• Of the 148 Conservative rebels, 90 (or six in ten) are from the 2010 intake.  Of those members of the 2010 intake who have been on the backbenches throughout the Parliament some 85% have now rebelled.  New MPs are normally relatively pliant in their early years in the Commons.  Not this lot.  And on the Lib Dem side of the Coalition once you exclude those Lib Dem MPs who are or were at some point members of the payroll vote, either as ministers or parliamentary private secretaries, and thus expected to remain loyal to the government, and there is now not a single Lib Dem MP who has been on the backbenches throughout the Parliament and who has remained loyal to the party whip.

• The government still win most votes easily – the median majority in whipped votes this sesson was 71.  But close run things are becoming slightly more common (in its first 24 months in power the government’s majority only fell below 50 on 22 occasions; in the last twelve months it has fallen below 50 on 17 occasions).  And, crucially, David Cameron has now joined the list of Prime Ministers defeated in the House of Commons as a result of their own MPs rebelling, a line which dates back unbroken to Edward Heath.

A final fact: David Cameron has had three government Chief Whips in the Common. Two – Patrick McLoughlin and Sir George Young – have been defeated.  Andrew Mitchell is his only undefeated Chief Whip.  We doubt that makes Mr Mitchell feel much better. 

Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart: Serious three-way splits for a parliamentary party in the voting lobbies are rare, but not unprecedented

Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart are at the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham.  They run www.revolts.co.uk, which analyses the voting behaviour of British MPs.

It was December. The motivation factor among the leadership was to find a political fix that would unite a seriously divided party, and discussion in the parliamentary party centred around the idea that they might all abstain on the big vote. As the Chief Whip commented:

‘We would therefore not be approving it, but would not be seeking actively to frustrate its passage. This was not in itself a particularly honourable or logical position, but it was the only means of preserving party unity under the leadership’.

Perhaps, senior figures in the party reasoned, if only no-one went into the lobby in support of the measure, then those who were going to vote against would draw back from doing so. Feverish discussions continued for the next few days, right up until the final vote.

This is not, however, anything to do with tomorrow’s vote on tuition fees, but the dilemma faced by Willie Whitelaw as Conservative Chief Whip during the furore over whether or not back Harold Wilson’s Rhodesian oil sanctions in December 1965. Ian Smith had just declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain, and Wilson’s decision to impose oil sanctions on the illegal regime put pressure on the new Tory leader, Edward Heath.

A large group of his party wanted to oppose sanctions, while a slightly smaller, but equally vocal section wanted to support Wilson in the voting lobbies.  Whitelaw’s solution was to abstain, but the policy ended in disaster: while the bulk of the party abstained, 31 Conservatives supported the sanctions order, 50 opposed it. In a typical Whitelawism, he blamed ‘rogue elephants’ (rather than elements) in the party for defying the instruction. Before he died, Whitelaw claimed that his ‘biggest failure as a Chief Whip was that I had a party in three pieces’.

This huge Conservative split was the largest to have occurred – either in absolute terms, or as a percentage of the parliamentary party – since 1945, when a similar three-way split occurred over the US loan. Some 47 Conservatives had voted against the Second Reading of the Bretton Woods Agreement Bill on 13 December 1945, with nine Conservatives voting in favour.

Even in Opposition a three-way split like the one over oil sanctions caused ill-feeling within the party. One pro-sanctions Tory MP returned home for the Christmas recess in a miserable mood. In a letter to his son, he wrote:

‘The whole Shadow Cabinet sat gutless on the front bench without voting either way … it was a black day for the Conservative Party, and a blacker one still for Ted Heath, with the party split in three. It was a result of lack of firm leadership from the start … of trying to appease everyone and to have it both ways … I am disgusted with the whole affair’.

And it caused merriment on the other side of the House.  A gleeful Harold Wilson – always a politician to enjoy a tactical victory – sent a congratulatory note to his own Chief Whip, Ted Short:

‘To a great Chief Whip on the occasion of the three-way split’.

Philip Cowley: What will the Conservative Parliamentary Party be like after the next general election?

Philip Cowley is Professor of Parliamentary Government at the University of Nottingham, and runs the website www.revolts.co.uk, which monitors backbench behaviour. This Platform piece is a version of a paper that he presented at The Centre for British Politics' recent conference on Cameron's Conservatives.  It is the third of a number of papers we are publishing from the conference.

Should the Conservatives manage to win the next general election – or even if they become the largest single party in a hung parliament – then the most striking thing about the new parliamentary party in the Commons will be how different it will be.  Even without any more retirements those that we already know about, there will be around 180 incumbent Conservative MPs fighting the next election.  To reach the 260 MPs required for minority status as the largest party, the party therefore needs at least 80 brand new MPs.  Under such circumstances, some 31% of the Parliamentary Party will be new.  Achieve the bare minimum for a majority, and some 48% of the parliamentary party will be newly elected.  Similarly, there will be relatively few MPs with experience of sitting on the governent benches.  As the largest single party in a hung parliament, just 31% will have been MPs prior to 1997; achieve a bare majority and those with experience on the government benches would amount to just 25%.

These figures are all a) rough estimates, and b) minima.  More retirements in the run-up to the election will diminish yet further the pool of experienced MPs from which the Conservatives can draw.  And in the event of the Conservatives achieving more than the bare minimum required for an overall majority, then the percentage with experience will be smaller still.  It is entirely plausible that a majority Conservative government will see over half its MPs freshly minted.

It’s already well known that many of these new MPs will be visibly different from the incumbents, with more women MPs and MPs from ethnic minorities.  The majority of the parliamentary party, though, will remain white and male, and this will be especially true at the higher levels of the government.  In one respect, however, the parliamentary party will remain very similar to previous groups of Conservative parliamentarians.  For all the talk of trying to create a parliamentary party in the image of those represented, the absence of working class MPs on the Conservative side of the House will continue.  In 2005, the Conservatives gained 25% of the DE vote and 33% of the C2 vote.  Almost no efforts have been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – receives representation on the Conservative benches.