I began my academic career specialising in voting behaviour in the House of Commons, in particular intra-party dissent by Members. This entailed manually checking every division list. For my doctoral research, I estimate I read over 3,000 division lists, with the number of names running into seven figures, in order to identify any Members voting against…
When the first vote took place on 16 January on an amendment to the Assisted Dying Bill, the result was announced as 107 for the amendment and 180 against. However, this was later corrected when it was found that one peer had voted in both lobbies. In the Lords, if a peer votes in both…
When a vote is called, peers can vote Content or Not Content. The voting figures do not always correspond with how many peers are present. On occasion, some members abstain from voting. The reason the Government lost a vote last week on the Academies Bill was because of a combination of some Liberal Democrat peers…
Appearing before the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill yesterday, Labour MP Graham Allen repeated a proposal he has variously advocated: that is, knocking through the chamber of the Commons into the division lobbies, thus creating space for each MP to have a desk and to be able to vote electronically. In my earlier…
