According to yesterday's DT, the party will be whipping their MPs to vote against the upcoming motion in the House of Commons to relax the law banning the hunting of foxes with dogs, thus bringing law down south in line with that up north, that is to say, north of the border.
To my mind, matters of this sort should be the subject of free votes, with MPs free to vote as they wish, unconstrained by the views of either their party as a whole or, worse, just those of its leaders. Going further, I would like to see a lot more free votes and lot more adult behaviour generally. MPs voting against generally sensible measures just because they belong to the party of opposition, does nothing, at least not for me, for the reputation of Parliament, particularly now that we seem to be moving away from an orderly two party system with regular changes of government.
Will the Scottish MPs play children and vote against the measure in pursuit of some real or imagined party advantage?
Maybe kicking the MPs out of their antiquated building would kick start the growing up process. See reference 1.
PS: I wonder if I can lay my hands on a short discussion of the merits or otherwise of the party system, according to which parties decide their policies on everything of importance up-front and then get their representatives, their MPs, to vote en-bloc for the party line. Presumably the sort of thing students studying for degrees in politics go in for. Do they go further than the examples of ancient Greece and Rome these days? Which one should not knock too much, as one is often surprised at how often political disputes now have well documented and useful precedents then.
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