Is the party Whip undemocratic?
Good question and at first sight the answer should be “yes – undemocratic and every vote should be free” or at least MPs should be free to vote their constituents majority view on a given issue. However the Whips role is to ensure MPs follow Government policy.The constitutional theory is that all government policy has a pre-existing mandate from the electorate who voted on a manifesto and on a set of stated approaches to various issues even if they fall short of concrete manifestio commitments.If that is true then individual MPs do not have the democratic right to vote against x,y, or z if there is a pre-existing mandate for it. The democratic problem is that to many aspects of any Governments policy has no specific mandate i.e it wasn’t in the manifesto. Up till now the deal in UK Parliamentary democracy has been that the Government of the day does not need a specific mandate for every single thing it does.We rely on them and trust them to do what is right within a general set of expe
