Caroline Lucas reveals 10 things no one tells you before you first enter Parliament

[Chippiewill]

Entering Parliament for the first time is a daunting experience. MPs for parties already represented at Westminster have their parliamentary colleagues to turn to for advice and support. As the first MP for my Party, the Greens, it was a question of learning through experience...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caroline-lucas-reveals-10-things-no-one-tells-you-before-you-first-enter-parliament-10149138.html

I suggest reading the full article, it's quite difficult to just copy down part of it.

Found it a really interesting read. It's absolutely shocking how poor the parliamentary procedure on voting is - I would probably call it an intentional attempt to subvert democracy and to take power away from our representatives and to give it to the parties.

[-:Undertaker:-]

Interesting, although I did learn many of them from my teacher last term Lord Norton of Louth. :P


6. The division bell rush is madness When a vote is called – which can happen at any time – a 'division bell' begins to clang throughout the Palace (and in various bars and restaurants in the surrounding streets) to warn MPs that they have eight minutes to reach the voting lobbies. You have to drop everything and run for it. MPs then crowd into the lobbies and file through one of two doors – the 'Ayes' who support the motion, and the 'Noes' who don't – where they are counted and their names recorded. The whole pantomime takes at least 15 minutes for each vote, which means there's only enough time for MPs to vote on a tiny proportion of the amendments put forward for each bill. It's excruciatingly inefficient.

The reason for this is... well it is the Westminister system so there isn't a reason as everything is convention and unwritten, but the plus of this is that although it may seem votes are open to manipulation by the party executives and the whips... it is also more democratic compared to Euroland systems of parliament where you go in, sit down and press a button for each vote. In the division lobbies, MPs are able to make or break a vote as well as show the strength of the backbenchers last minute which keeps the whips on their toes until the vote is actually passed.

She may call it an act of panto, but it brings together backbenchers of all parties and keeps both MPs and whips on their guard.

Caroline Lucas may find a lot of this outdated, but the system works amazingly well and is preferable to any other parliamentary system known: because it was never planned, written down and everything goes by convention hence why it is still here hundreds of years onwards.


9. Whips are all-powerful Another shock was to see how the powers of parliamentary scrutiny are so poorly exercised. Membership of the ad hoc 'bill committees' set up to go through draft legislation line by line is one of the best opportunities to have direct influence over future laws. That's why the whips generally try to keep people with too much expertise or independence of mind off these committees. Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative MP for Totnes and a former GP, tells of her enthusiasm to sit on the Health and Social Care bill committee. Instead, the whips told her to sit on a committee examining double taxation in the Cayman Islands. When she protested that she knew nothing of the subject, the whips replied that was all to the good: all they wanted her to do was to vote the right way at the right time.

Whilst I am no fan of the whips or stories like this, it is true to say that this is evolving in that the whips are losing more power as each year go by. There's a statistic somewhere that says there's been more rebellions against the whips in the last parliament than there was between 1950 to something like 1990.

The Westminister system is absolutely perfect and works as a proper sovereign parliament, the problem is as I always say with the two-main party leaderships being so detatched which is why it always irritates me when people say we need to change the system: no, the system is beyond good it is the main two political parties of the last century themselves which require reform/abolition.

[Inseriousity.]

That recent documentary 'Inside the Commons' revealed a lot of this. When I heard about this division bell and MPs who aren't even at the debate rush down, vote depending on what their whips say and they probably don't even know what they're voting for/against, I was sadly not surprised.