They Blog For You

DURING the general election campaign I received one or two emails from constituents asking why I had voted against measures to prevent climate change.

I was puzzled. I wasn’t aware I had done so. In fact I knew for a fact I had voted for the government’s Climate Change Bill in the last parliament. So I replied, politely explaining that they were mistaken and expressing the hope that they would still consider supporting me.

Then I came across the source of my constituents’ concerns: They Work For You. The aims of the site are laudable; it tries to make sense of what happens at Westminster and tries to paint a picture of individual MPs’ political outlook.

The trouble is, it doesn’t try very hard.

Take the subject with which my constituents were concerned. If you check out my voting record as represented by the site’s record of parliamentarians’ voting patterns, The Public Whip, you’ll see that I did indeed vote against an Opposition motion moved by the LibDems on the subject. Now, the motion itself, if you read it, was reasonable enough. But it was implicitly critical of the government, and the government’s own motion (which I supported) was pretty robust on the issue of climate change. Here’s the government amendment in full:

This House welcomes publication of the draft Climate Change Bill, which will make the UK the first country in the world to establish a long term legal framework for managing the transition to a low carbon economy, setting ambitious binding targets to cut carbon emissions by 26% to 32% from the 1990 level by 2020 and at least 60% by 2050, which can be revised in light of significant developments in international policy and climate science, and establishing an independent Committee on Climate Change to advise on setting statutory five year carbon budgets and to report to Parliament annually on progress; further welcomes the Government’s comprehensive approach to reducing emissions from all sectors of the economy and the proposals in the energy review to cut carbon emissions by up to a further 25 million tonnes of carbon per year by 2020; recognises that home energy use for heating, lighting and appliances accounts for more than a quarter of domestic UK carbon emissions; applauds the Government’s proposals to improve building standards so that from 2016 all new housing developments must be zero carbon; recognises the Government’s commitment to improving the energy efficiency of existing homes and tackling fuel poverty through Warm Front and the Energy Efficiency Commitment; welcomes the Budget 2007 report statement that by the end of the next decade all householders will have been offered help to introduce energy efficiency measures; and looks forward to further development of policies in this area.

But did The Public Whip report that I had voted for that pretty robust Government position? Did it award “points” to me and other Labour MPs who had voted for what was, arguably, a very strong commitment to the fight against climate change?

No, no, no… They don’t want to bother their readers with such details – such honesty only gets in the way of their own agenda.

Also missing from my list of crimes against the planet is an explanation that this wasn’t even a vote against legislation – it was a vote on an opposition motion. My support for the Climate Change Bill – the most radical measure ever proposed by a government – was considered barely more significant than a vote against a motion that would have had no legislative effect whatsoever.

Similarly, I get “null points” because I voted against an amendment to the government’s Energy Bill in 2008. No reference is made to the perfectly sound arguments made by the minister at the time for rejecting the amendment. Because in this world of two dimensional student politics, only the headline matters. And woe betide anyone who votes against a headline.

As I perused this site further, I came across the site’s totally objective and balanced reporting of the government’s deliberations on the Housing Bill in 2004 and the disagreement on one particular clause between the Commons and the Lords. Greenpeace had taken out an advertisement criticising those MPs who had signed an Early Day Motion on the subject of the amendment but who had then voted against it (and with the government) on the floor of the House.

The minister taking the Bill through the House, Keith Hill, later told the Commons:

We listened carefully to the arguments made in this House and elsewhere and we accepted the strength of those arguments. What we emphatically did not take into account was the disgraceful full-page advertisement naming names that appeared in The Guardian newspaper after the vote here. It was paid for by Greenpeace and an organisation called ACT, of which I personally had never heard before and of which I wish to hear no more. The advertisement pandered to the vulgar tabloid theory convenient to at least some elements hostile to the Government that Members of Parliament will always in some knee-jerk fashion cave in to pressures from the Prime Minister. Frankly—I speak as a former deputy Chief Whip—anybody with the most primitive knowledge of recent events in this Parliament will recognise that that is a lie.

The advertisement went on to state that the consequences of the vote would be the deaths of 30,000 people. That statement is outrageous. It is in plain ignorance of the facts of the case. Not even the most passionate advocate of the energy and fuel poverty amendments that we were debating would make such a dishonest claim, and nobody did so. The advertisement also betrayed a total ignorance of the way in which Parliament works.

I shall remind the House and, more to the point, those outside, how Parliament does work. I acknowledge the position of those Members of Parliament who felt that they could not support the position of the Government during the debate, some of whom have a long history of advocacy of the energy efficiency target, but I have to say to the House in all candour—I hope that this message gets through to those outside elements—that the voices to which I listened were the private representations of the colleagues who rightly supported the Government in the Divisions.

This is how the self-appointed guardians of democracy over at They Work For You reported Keith’s comments:

The minister then ranted that it was wrong for MPs to vote against their government, and citizens and organizations who attempted to hold them to account for votes “betrayed a total ignorance of the way in which Parliament works” because the only “voices to which [he] listened were the private representations of the colleagues who rightly supported the Government in the Divisions.”

That is a deliberate lie, an attempt to mislead the reader into buying into the peculiar political agenda taken by They Work For You. Keith did not “rant” – a peculiar choice of word for an allegedly objective writer to use. And neither did he rail against “citizens and organisations who atempted to hold the government to account”. He did, thank goodness, rail against organisations like Greenpeace who think they can pressurise MPs into voting the way they want them to by buying media coverage. When the Murdoch press do the same thing, that’s anti-democratic. But when Greenpeace do it, well, that’s just dandy, apparently.

They Work For You could still be a valuable resource, but only if it stops trying to plug a particular party line (and we all know which party the line belongs to). The various votes at Westminster are, granted, confusing to the outside world – and often to those inside the Palace also. They need interpretation and explanation. But They Work For You does not provide the objective, balanced interpretation which would be valuable.

Constituents will in future, therefore, be advised to pay no attention to anything They Work For You says about my voting record. If they want my views they can ask me direct – not get them through a self-appointed politically biased filter.