Waka waka waka

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Recall Petition

Today we have a special guest post from Philip Cowley, who has got a splendid new book out. He wrote a short piece for the FT recently, looking at how we might deal with defecting MPs, and I liked it so much I asked him if he’d write a longer version for the Swingometer. Which he has, and here it is.

A waka – or traditional Maori war canoe. In New Zealand politics, party switching by MPs is called “waka jumping”.

In 2022, when Christian Wakefield, MP for Bury South, left the Conservatives to join the Labour Party, Nigel Farage called it a “disgraceful episode”. He described it as “dishonourable” to change parties without resigning to fight a by-election. When he’d been UKIP leader, he said, they’d insisted that MPs defecting to them had to face their voters. “It is a complete insult to voters to have the arrogance to think that it’s them they voted for when the truth is most of us vote for or against the main party leaders”.

Clearly a lot can change in four years - because none of the recent defectors to Farage’s latest party Reform UK has said they will be contesting their seats, and he seems just fine with that. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

You might object – and you’d be right, I think – that it is a bit unfair to single out Mr Farage in this way, because they are all at it. My favourite fact about that 2022 defection is that the defecting MP – who is now a Labour whip – had previously been one of the sponsors of a bill to force MPs to face their electorate if they changed parties. And yet when it came to his defection, this no longer seemed such a priority.

Hypocrisy aside, 2022’s version of Nigel Farage was on to something. It does seem a bit off when MPs change parties like they change underpants and just assume voters will suck it up.

It is true that both constitutional theory and custom and practice are on the side of those sitting tight. Since 1979, just three MPs have resigned their seats at Westminster to fight a by-election after changing party. Two of those went to UKIP in 2014; the other was Bruce Douglas-Mann, who joined the SDP from Labour in 1981; his decision to fight a by-election was taken to the immense annoyance of the SDP leadership who thought it was self-indulgent. He lost.

Constitutionally, we elect individuals; the party label is incidental. Once at Westminster, MPs are mostly free to do what they want and vote how they please. In their loftier moments, MPs invoke Burke’s famous speech to the electors of Bristol: “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.

All true, but as a former elector of Bristol myself I have long wondered why a speech from 1774 (which anyway was a statement of intent not of established norms; it was made in response to someone arguing the opposite) has very much to do with what we expect from MPs today. And the constitutional theory is not really a valid description of how MPs are chosen by voters or how they then behave once elected.

For all that personal votes have become more important in recent years, it is still the party bulk vote that gives the MP their ticket to ride and gets them to the Commons. And while the rules at Westminster mostly treat them as atomistic individuals, they certainly don’t vote like that. I have spent my entire academic career studying backbench rebellions – I yield to no one in finding them fascinating – but while they have become more common in recent decades, cohesion is still the norm. Most votes see every MP of the same party vote together. Given all this, the party label is more than just incidental.

Plus, I am always unconvinced when people appeal to either the constitution or custom and practice as if that settles an argument. Both can be changed. We used to have by-elections when MPs were made ministers, because by doing so they had accepted an office of profit from the Crown; that practice was abolished a century ago. It lives on vestigially in the “Chiltern Hundreds” and “Manor of Northstead” to which MPs are appointed when they wish to leave the Commons.

A petition calling for by-elections to be called automatically when MPs defect to another party recently cleared the 100,000 mark and will be considered for debate in parliament. Yet while it’s easy enough to see the appeal, I am sceptical.

First, let’s think about exactly what changes when an MP shifts party. Because you can argue that, in many cases, defection isn’t quite as big a deal as it might sound. For one thing, the constituency part of the job takes up an ever-increasing amount of MPs’ time. Some do it well, others less well, but they all do it – and they are going to do it just as well (or badly) whatever party they are in. The public see this as the most significant part of an MP’s job – and it remains essentially unchanged when an MP changes party.

(Right at the margins, you might be able to argue that the kind of constituents MPs see as being most important might change in some cases, and maybe being in or out of government might make a small difference in whether you can deliver for your patch – but the truth is that most constituency work is pretty party neutral).

Even an MP’s voting won’t change all that much in many cases. As a Conservative Suella Braverman mostly voted against the Government. As a Reform MP she will do the same. On free votes, MPs vote their conscience anyway, so their voting will stay the same regardless of party label. There will be some votes which will differ, but maybe not that many.

One exception to this is where an MP crosses the floor. Defection and “crossing the floor” are often used as inter-changeable terms, but they are not. To actually cross the floor – from government to opposition or vice versa – matters much more fundamentally. In a speech fifty years ago, Enoch Powell argued that the key question to ask of any “independent” candidate was: if you find you have the deciding vote in an evenly balanced House of Commons, will you use it to turn the Government out or to keep them in? An MP who crosses the floor answers Powell’s question differently; one who shuffles around on the same side of the House doesn’t. And most changes of party label take place on the same side of the House. These defections are a bit like getting a new case for your mobile phone; it suddenly looks quite different but it functions pretty much the same.

We also need to think about what it means to defect. Explicitly changing from one party to another seems straight forward enough. But what about an MP who loses the whip and becomes independent? Are they forced to resign to fight a by-election?

If the answer’s yes, then we have just given the party whips one of the biggest disciplinary sticks they could wish for, far greater than any they enjoy now.

“If you don’t vote with us on the Murder of the First Born (No 2) Bill, then we will remove the whip, and you will have to fight a byelection”.

“Ah, well, yes, I wasn’t in favour initially, but I now suddenly see the wisdom of the government’s position”.

When you look at how legislatures with anti-defection rules function, they often also have very strong party discipline. Indian MPs, for example, are barred from changing parties and from voting against the party line. Something similar is also true in New Zealand, where rules against party hopping – what are sometimes termed anti waka-jumping rules (a brilliant phrase – from the Māori for war canoe) have led to a tightening of party discipline. Many of the arguments against defection can easily be applied to rebellion against the whip. Is that the direction we want to go in?

To avoid this problem, some of the attempts to deal with this issue have focussed on MPs who doing things voluntarily -such as an MP who chooses to resign the whip. But if we treat these two cases differently, then all any would-be defector needs do is stay within their party and behave increasingly outrageously, until they get turfed out. Imagine Robert Jenrick with a t-shirt saying “Kemi Is Rubbish” and a banner emblazoned “Vote Nigel”. (You may feel this doesn’t take much imagination; his actual behaviour wasn’t all that different.) He would just need to behave like that until his whips had had enough – as at the very end they did.

Once they’re whipless, can then they then join another party without a by-election? If the answer’s no, they can just stay independent but tell everyone to vote for, say, Reform, vote the Reform line, attend Reform events, and so on.

Indeed, what about someone who was suspended from the party for which she was elected, but then decided to set up another party? Zarah Sultana voted in favour of the Recall of MPs (Change of Party Affiliation) bill in 2020, but is another one where she didn’t feel that this principle applied to her when push came to shove. Rules for thee, not for me.

For all these reasons, I am wary of automatic by-elections. But there may be a compromise. One of the most effective constitutional reforms enacted by the Coalition between 2010 and 2015 was to allow voters to recall MPs in cases of wrongdoing. It has – somewhat to my surprise – been a success. Its scope could easily be extended. Rather than automatically causing a by-election, a change in party status could trigger a recall petition.

This has been the approach taken by the two legislative attempts to engage with this issue recently, in 2011 and 2020. If enough constituents are exercised by what the MP has done, they get a by-election, in which the incumbent can stand. But if they see it as no big deal, then the MP carries on. It would have the merit of allowing voters some control, without necessarily incurring all the costs of a by-election in every borderline case. I suspect voters in Romford, for example, might be relaxed about Andrew Rosindell as a Reform MP, given that if you were to create a Reform MP in a lab, you’d come up with something resembling Andrew Rosindell. But that would be up to his electorate.

It would also deal with the inbetweener cases. An MP who lost the whip because they had told the party leadership where to get off might find voters saw no need for a ballot. One who was turfed out of the party because they couldn’t keep their trousers on may find their constituents less forgiving.

Where I differ from the previous proposals is both over its scope (both bills focussed on MPs who voluntarily changed parties, when as explained above I don’t think that distinction works) and over the size of the bar. In cases of wrong-doing the bar for a petition to trigger a by-election is set at 10% of eligible registered voters in that constituency. I think this is too low for cases of party switching, especially if it covers all loses of whip; I would set it at 25% or 30%, although other figures are available.

This runs the risk of empowering the whips a little; the threat of a recall petition might be enough to persuade some MPs to stay in line. This is another reason why the bar needs to be set higher, so that not every temporary change of party label causes a by-election. (Relatedly, we might also want the ability to waive the procedure in temporary cases; it would be harsh if an MP who was suspended from the whip while allegations were investigated, only then to be cleared, faced recall). I suspect after a few whipless MPs had survived recall petitions the threat would diminish sharply. I don’t claim this is a perfect solution; but then the current situation is far from perfect as well.

Philip Cowley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. His latest book is “The Smallest Room in the House” and it is really very good.

Before this, Phil was co-author of three “Nuffield” election studies covering the British General Elections from 2010 to 2017, and co-edited three volumes of short essays with Rob, which featured Margaret Thatcher’s cat and Andy Burnham’s T-Shirt.

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