Freesteel Blog » New immediate vote list feature available for TheyWorkForYou.com when they finally have the time off from pointless video editing to incorporate it

New immediate vote list feature available for TheyWorkForYou.com when they finally have the time off from pointless video editing to incorporate it

Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 6:43 pm Written by:

Not that I actually have the time for this, myself, but anyway. That’s my whole Friday blown when I should have been doing some machine tool debugging.

The picture is that TheyWorkForYou.com has the speeches, and PublicWhip has the votes.

I think the speeches are generally all hot air, and it’s only the votes which matter — that is why there are 40 MPs known as party whips making sure their flock votes the right way, but they don’t care what anyone says.

But anyway, the speeches are what politically unsophisticated people supposedly understand, while large charts of votes are kind of scary for everyone — supposedly. Common wisdom is that ordinary citizens don’t really get it with votes.

Except when they do: 10:10 call defeated in Commons (The Guardian):

MPs voted by a margin of 71, 297 votes to 226, to reject a call by the Liberal Democrats to commit to the cut. Yesterday, in the run-up to the afternoon vote, the Lib Dems’ challenge to the government built up a head of steam with 63 MPs from all parties supporting their motion.

According to 10:10’s organisers, nearly 10,000 people had written to their MPs about the debate in the preceding 48 hours, and made more than 600 phone calls. In all, 96% of MPs were contacted by members of the public before the debate. A government amendment welcoming the 10:10 campaign was carried without a vote.

It turns out that if you actually read the newspapers, Parliamentary votes are quite regularly reported. It’s the goal score, so to speak. Maybe it’s time someone helped people out by showing which net their MP got kicked into the back of. You know, it’s kind of an obvious thing to show the next day.

Currently, the TheyWorkForYou.com interface for an MP has a voting record from the PublicWhip:

How Lynne Jones voted on key issues since 2001:

  • Has never voted on a transparent Parliament. (votes),
  • Voted moderately for introducing a smoking ban. (votes),

  • Voted moderately against introducing ID cards. (votes),

This uses a kind of complicated calculation averaging over sets of votes selected according to a particular opinion.

There’s a concern over whether the sets that have been made are fair and balanced, or are skewed towards certain issues and stuff.

I think people who allege this are just looking for trouble because the real problem is that they have to be selected from the votes that actually take place in Parliament — which are not a fair and balanced set of political concerns in the first place. A high degree of control is exercised over what may or may not get voted on.

For example, in 10 years we have had a single double vote on nuclear arms policy in the UK, and that was only on whether to build another Trident system or delay it. Hardly a broad spectrum of opinions.

There has never been a vote on renationalizing the railways.

Nor has there been a vote on whether change the Prime Minister, or to impose a constitutional time limit to protect the world from the progressive insanity that creeps up over the years on all long-serving heads of state.

So, I think that we can only be balanced in relation to the sources, not in relation to some abstract objective balance of the kind you get in lazy reporting, where they give the two sides of the story on the global warming issue, for example.

The policy average votes work when people want short summaries and don’t want to engage with something more specific.

I think we ought to be reporting specific votes as well.

Accordingly, I have given up talking about it, and have built the PublicWhip interface to allow the insertion of a small panel of such voting information into the TheyWorkForYou.com MP’s pages using a jQuery call that will look something like this:

$.ajax({url: “http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/twfymp.php?id=1234”, cache: false,
success: function(html){ $(“#pwvotingpanel”).append(html); } });

I’ve very quickly hacked up (on the live webpage coz staging sites are too time consuming) the system.

Here’s the output for http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/twfymp.php?mpn=Lynne_Jones&mpc=Birmingham%2C_Selly_Oak&house=commons&dmp=1069:

Lynne Jones MP, Birmingham, Selly Oak

  • (2009-10-21) voted to call on the Government to sign up to the 10:10 campaign(details…)
  • (2009-10-21) voted to ask the Government to accept Ombudsman recommendations on compensating Equitable Life policy holders (details…)
  • (2009-10-13) voted against the abolition of executive committees in all medium sized local authorities, and succeeded (details…)
  • (2009-07-15) voted aye on Opposition Day — [16th Allotted Day] — US-UK Extradition Treaty(details…)
  • (2009-06-24) voted to demand that Parliament debate and set the terms of the Iraq inquiry (details…)
  • (2009-03-03) voted against renewing the terrorism control order powers for another year (details…)
  • (2009-04-30) did not vote on “MPs’ expenses — outer-London MPs can no longer claim second home”(details…)
  • (2008-04-30) voted to require the Government to establish a renewable energy feed-in tariff (details…)
  • (2009-01-28) voted to urge the Government to rethink its plans for Heathrow third runway (details…)
  • (2008-10-28) voted to give the Government powers to set greenhouse gas performance standards on power stations (details…)
  • (1999-11-01) did not vote on “Print Acts of Parliament on Paper instead of Vellum — rejected”(details…)
  • (2008-03-19) voted against calling on the Government to suspend the compulsory closure of sub-post offices (details…)
  • (2006-02-13) did not vote on “Identity Cards Bill — Report of Costs and Benefits — rejected”(details…)
  • (2005-11-29) voted in favour of considering a Parliamentary Bill to reduce the voting age to 16 (details…)

Hey, you know, we could change those dates to say “yesterday”, “last week”, or “five years ago”

And here’s the output for http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/twfymp.php?mpn=Tom_Watson&mpc=West_Bromwich_East&house=commons&dmp=1069 who gets his way more often, accounting for the green colours. (We could also add in some extra icons for whether the vote was a party rebellion.):

Tom Watson MP, West Bromwich East

  • (2009-10-21) voted against calling on the Government to sign up to the goals of the 10:10 campaign (details…)
  • (2009-10-21) voted to assert that the Government’s actions regarding compensation of Equitable Life policy holders was adequate (details…)
  • (2009-10-13) voted against the abolition of executive committees in all medium sized local authorities, and succeeded (details…)
  • (2009-07-15) did not vote on “Opposition Day — [16th Allotted Day] — US-UK Extradition Treaty”(details…)
  • (2009-06-24) voted for letting the Government set the terms of reference for the Iraq inquiry (details…)
  • (2009-03-03) did not vote on “Control Orders — Annual renewal 2009″(details…)
  • (2009-04-30) voted to abolish the second home allowance for outer-London MPs (details…)
  • (2008-04-30) voted against forcing the Government to establish a renewable energy feed-in tariff (details…)
  • (2009-01-28) voted to welcome the Government’s plans regarding the third runway at Heathrow (details…)
  • (2008-10-28) voted against giving the Government power to set greenhouse gas performance standards on power stations (details…)
  • (2008-03-19) voted against calling on the Government to suspend the compulsory closure of sub-post offices (details…)
  • (2006-02-13) voted against requiring the Government to publish a detailed cost-benefit analysis of ID card scheme before it goes into force (details…)
  • (2005-11-29) did not vote on “Representation of the People (Reduction of Voting Age)”(details…)

Silence.

My goodness, those summaries look pretty short and potentially inflammatory. How are you going to be sure to get this right and not offend powerful people? This is awful. We’re going to have to set up an executive committee of trustees to check over the wordings so we don’t we harm our good reputation that has taken us years to build.

Excuse me?

I mean, How did you make this work, and can we get these text strings up and edited within hours of the votes going on-line, when people are still reading about yesterday’s Parliamentary voting score in the news and want to know which way their MP went?

That’s better!

The trick is to use Policy #1069 – Notable Divisions to make the selection. I’ve put in about 14 votes I happen to know of, because I am one of the few people who read and interpret these Parliamentary divisions — as opposed to going round to all the hot dinners with powerful people and soaking up all the glory.

In the final version, we might give people a short subselection at random, but put the most recent one (or the one tagged with Aye as opposed to Abstain) always on the top. It’s important to plan to keep a hit counter so we can graph which voting issues people are most interested in each day. That’s valuable data.

So that’s the selection interface, showing yet another application of Francis’s original and surprisingly popular (so we turned it off!) DreamMP feature. It’s pretty quick.

To get the words right, you need to edit the motion text.

So far no one apart from myself has succeeded in doing this in any reliable manner, leaving me to continually wonder what all those unpaid Parliamentary interns are doing with all their time during the day.

No one’s praised me on the improved layout of motion text, which shows up like:

This House
urges the Government to rethink its plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport and to give full consideration to alternative solutions;
regrets the Government’s heavy reliance on data supplied by BAA in assessing the case for expansion and notes the likely forthcoming break-up of BAA’s ownership of three of 5 London’s airports following the investigation by the Competition Commission;
believes that the consultation paper Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport[2] was deeply flawed, as it paid insufficient regard to the costs of air and noise pollution in the surrounding areas and the commitment to curb carbon dioxide emissions to tackle climate change;
regrets the fact that provisions to improve high-speed rail lines from 10 Heathrow to major cities have not been fully explored, along with the potential of other UK airports to handle more long-haul flights; and
urges the Government to initiate a consultation on a new national planning policy statement on the theme of airports and high-speed rail.

rather than:

I beg to move:

“That this House urges the Government to rethink its plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport and to give full consideration to alternative solutions; regrets the Government’s heavy reliance on data supplied by BAA in assessing the case for expansion and notes the likely forthcoming break-up of BAA’s ownership of three of 5 London’s airports following the investigation by the Competition Commission; believes that the consultation paper Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport was deeply flawed, as it paid insufficient regard to the costs of air and noise pollution in the surrounding areas and the commitment to curb carbon dioxide emissions to tackle climate change; regrets the fact that provisions to improve high-speed rail lines from 10 Heathrow to major cities have not been fully explored, along with the potential of other UK airports to handle more long-haul flights; and urges the Government to initiate a consultation on a new national planning policy statement on the theme of airports and high-speed rail.”

If someone does this parsing automatically, it’ll work on those slab-like EDMs as well. Anyone? Ah, stick with those automatic Wikipedia hyperlinks, why don’t you.

Anyway, if you edit the motion text for one of these selected votes you will find some magic invisible text, that reads like so:

@ MP voted no to continue the practice of printing two copies of every Act of Parliament on vellum for deposit in the national archive
@ MP voted aye to end the practice of printing Acts of Parliament on vellum

This is what is parsed into the sentences that you read. I tried automatically coding the negations, but it really got crazy.

Due to complete overloading of seagrass, the settings don’t come online on PublicWhip till about midday. Someone needs to invest a bit of time sorting this out, and I’ve got to pay my £1200 server bill by November 20. Donations? Ah, please yourself. You won’t get rid of me that easily.

I’m off for a 3-day weekend cave digging and surveying in Ireby Fell Cavern. Hopefully a well-resourced and nimble organization will be able to make use of this by the time I come back on Tuesday so we can serve the needs of people who read about votes in the paper during these last frenetic months in Parliament.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>