The title says it all. For some reason, it never occured to me that since the members of the British cabinet are MP, they’re supposed to sit there and vote on laws and stuff. Now, I can’t see this as being possible in practice. So, I suppose they don’t, but maybe they in fact do?
And if they don’t, what if the majority is so short that the ministers would make the difference?
Of course they do, why would it be impossible? They are exactly the same as any other MP, except they have the additional role of a government post.
Normally they do. However, there’s a convention (called “pairing”) that if a cabinet member is away on government business and cannot vote, a designated opposition member will also not vote, to ensure the government retains its majority.
Pairing is arranged for all members of parliament who are absent for a recognised reason e.g. official overseas travel, serious illness, not just for cabinet members. The loss of any member’s vote could affect a government’s majority.
They do, but they don’t necessarily vote a lot. At least not when the government can spare some votes. David Cameron has only voted twice since becoming PM, and George Osborne has only voted eight times in the same period.
Some of them, in most cabinets, will sit and vote in the Lords.
Technically, there is no requirement that a cabinet member be a member of Parliament at all, but on the rare modern occasions that a non-parliamentarian has been appointed to a cabinet post, a seat in parliament has been quickly arranged for them, either by making them a lord, or by getting an MP with a safe party seat to resign from the Commons (often by making them a lord) so that the new cabinet member can be elected from their constituency.
Yes, cabinet members have full voting rights, which they routinely exercise, in the relevant house of Parliament, although the pressure on them not to criticize, let alone vote against, the government in Parliament is considerably greater even than that upon ordinary MPs of the governing party.
And right after the edit window expires, I realize I wasn’t looking at the right column. Cameron has voted 190 times and Osborne has voted 293 times. Still a minority of votes, though.
The Congress of The World’s Greatest Democracy™ had a similar system, complete with complicated rules for recording paired votes, up until 2009.
However in 2009, with Senator Edward Kennedy gravely ill, the Republicans reneged on the vote-pairing tradition, gleeful that the Democrats would thereby need, in effect, 61 votes to pass anything in the Senate, instead of the usual 60. This is why the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was not enacted until Kennedy’s replacement was seated in the Senate.
** clairobscur**, why do you think it isn’t possible to work?
In all of the parliaments modelled on Westminster, the members of the Cabinet sit in the House, introduce bills, and participate fully in debates and votes.
In fact, that’s how all government bills get introduced: the minister responsible introduces the bill, and speaks to it at both second reading (consideration of the general principles of the bill), and in committee (examination in detail). Since it’s a government measure, a member of the government had to take responsibility for shepherding it through the house. That’s one of the basic principles of responsible government.
The pairing system is not a formal thing and depends on the honour of the MPs. Sometimes. when the government has a very narrow majority, the opposition will stop pairing and force the government to ‘whip’ all its members in to a vote.
“Whips” are the political parties enforcers and they will do just about anything to get a member to vote and vote the right way (no secret ballots in the House). There is a famous story about Leslie Spriggs, an MP in the 70s. There was a tied vote and he was brought to the House in an ambulance having suffered a severe heart attack. The two whips went out to look in the ambulance and there he was, laid there as though he was dead. Someone asked, “how do we know that he is alive?” The other leaned forward, turned the knob on the heart machine, the green light went around and he said, “there – you’ve lost.”
‘For the average backbencher, the whip is the street-corner thug they need to get past on their way home from school. Treat him with respect, and life will be fine. If you cross him, watch out’ - Jeremy Paxman (TV political commentator, himself no softie)
If the MPs are spending so much time in the House of Commons (as well as the usual time dealing with constituents, lobbyists…) how much time are they spending running their departments? Isn’t being an MP a full-time job?
Indeed. It’s quite common (pun intended) to hear them exclaim: “Voe is me!” in Parliament.
I assume the Department work takes up most of their time. A lot of constituency work is probably delegated to others within the MP’s office. The system seems to work ok-ish. Though its not unknown for MP’s to be criticized for spending not enough time on constituency business.
Most constituency stuff is handled by the staff at the local office anyway. The necessarily limited engagement of a Cabinet member MP at the local level is handsomely compensated by the additional weight their local constituency office gains. No local bureaucrat wants to adversely be on the radar of the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister over a badly blocked drain.
Most of the day-to-day running of departments id done by the permanent secretaries of each deparment:
Ther’s a documentary series by BBC called “The Great Offices of State” that does a great job of showing cabinet members in their daily work. In one scene, the permanent secretary, referring to the press gathering outside the office, tells the newly appointed Home Secretary Alan Johnson, “They don’t expect you to know anything.” The position is essentially a political one – the daily work is actually done by the permanent civil servants.
Agreed. The Minister’s function is to set the policy directives for the Minister’s department and to ensure those policy directives are carried out by the department. The Minister also gives instructions to the Department on issues where the civil service requires political direction from the Minister.
The Minister is then accountable to the House for the conduct of the Department. The Opposition can direct questions to the Minister in the House at the daily Question Period. The minister is also accountable to the House for the spending by the Department, during the presentation of the annual budget.
In Canada, the practice is that the Prime Minister (at the federal level) or the Premier (at the provincial level) will give a new Minister a letter setting out the PM’s instructions to the Minister on the political priorities which the PM expects the new Minister to carry out. Those instructions are generally based on the platform that the PM’s party put forth at the election, and on which they won office.
That’s already been answered now, by Northern Piper just above and by a number of others. Being an MP keeps anybody busy, but actually sitting in the House isn’t an onerous time consumer. In each government department, the Deputy Minister is really the functional department head, while the Cabinet Minister is his boss on policy matters during the duration of his elected term.
From my perspective as someone accustomed to the Westminster parliamentary system, it has always seemed a little odd to see systems where Cabinet members are unelected appointees. This struck me a few years ago when I heard Hilary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, say something to the effect that “this is not a political position”.
I believe that this sharply overstates the incidence of vote-pairing in the US Congress, which is informal and generally amounts to a system whereby an absent member can get his or her position on record on a bill where the vote is not close. Examples where abstentions based on paired votes actually affected the outcome of a paired vote are sufficiently rare, in my understanding, that a cite for one such seems in order.
Most of the Cabinet, including the PM, has to be present in the House for Question Period each day, since they have to respond to questions put to them by the Opposition, and it isn’t known in advance which Ministers the Opposition will choose to question.
There is flexibility, of course. The Opposition may say, " A question for the Prime Minister", but the PM may think it better that a particular minister respond. As well, other ministers or parliamentary secretaries can respond for an absent cabinet member. However, if too many of the Cabinet are absent on a regular basis from QP, the Opposition will start to make a fuss, and the press may pick it up.
There’s also the duties for a Cabinet minister to move a bill through the House, including appearing before House committees, and the duty to defend the estimates for the Minister’s department in the Finance committee each year.
Sounds like you’ve fought my ignorance. Thank you.
Googling, all I find is another instance where Orrin Hatch refused to pair with Kennedy, even though he had often extended that courtesy to his “close friend” in the past. In this case, Hatch refused to allow closure on the debate of TARP Stimulus. Although this had initially been proposed by George W. Bush, the GOP now “needed Obama to fail.” (In fact the Stimulus did pass, with the help of three GOP defectors.)