Its the Whips, stupid

First line of the Financial Times article this morning:

"Why are the British hung up about having a hung parliament? The question is much on the minds of Europeans watching the UK election. Continental states have long been used to holding elections in which no party wins an overall majority in the national legislature and a coalition must be formed. Yet in Britain, politicians and the media are in a flap that the UK will have a hung parliament, with no party enjoying an overall majority of the House of Commons."

That, to me, is a simple question to answer. It's the Whips.

Take the absurd example of the passage of the Digital Economy BIll, more than 20,000 people wrote their MPs objecting to it. £20,000 was raised to advertise against it. On the night just 40 MPs turned up to debate it, watched by 25,000 twitterers who exchanged more than 50,000 messages. Most were utterly appalled by the sight they saw on BBC In Parliament TV as at the close of a weak and pointless debate with a few brave souls fighting to remove the Internet Clauses inserted by the BPI in the Lords scandal the week before and bury Lord Mandy's proposals, again at the behest of Media Corporations, to shut down people's internet connecitons and ban breaking of DRM...

And in the end what happened? A 3 line Whip (which many MPs regard as unbreakable). And 187 MPs tramped in from the bar, who had taken no part in the debate, and voted the Bill through.

A travesty of democracy.

My own MP (Tony Baldry, Banbury) who I had canvased strongly about and against the Bill, and who had promised to make my views known, did not even turn up in the house.

So if we want a balanced parliament, a so called "hung" parliament, then to make it work the Whip system has to go and MPs have to stop voting as a tribe.