Putting the Whip to Partisanship
September 2, 2010 | No Comments
If you don’t know, there’s quite the discussion going on in response to Nick’s recent post, Why not dismantle party discipline? Readers Stageleft and Max Fawcett are doing much of the discussing, but ChrisinKW and R. Mowat have played their parts also… in fact, the whole gang took it over to twitter for a bit (by the way, we’re @thecommonsblog, and you can find the rest of the crew by checking out the people we’re following).
Anyway, Stageleft decided to take up arms at his eponymous haunt; here’s a taste:
The discussion that developed is whether or not party leaders should have the power to compel, on threat of punishment, caucus MPs to vote on a given issue the way they are so ordered by the party leader; regardless of what their constituency may think of the matter.
My position on this is known and can be summed up with the following question, “are MPs sent to the House of Commons to represent their constituents, or are they sent there to represent the will of their party leader?“
So, pop over to Stageleft, or comment on Nick’s post, or just take up the fight here.
Personally, I’ve just been enjoying the back and forth too much to stick my nose in… I’m sure that won’t last long.
(By the way, there was no attempt to rhyme with the title of this post. Sometimes these things just happen.)
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