{"id":568,"date":"2004-01-31T16:47:53","date_gmt":"2004-01-31T16:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2004\/01\/top_up_fees\/"},"modified":"2004-01-31T16:47:53","modified_gmt":"2004-01-31T16:47:53","slug":"top_up_fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/01\/top_up_fees\/","title":{"rendered":"Top Up Fees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I didn&#8217;t know for certain which way my MP, Joan Ryan, had voted over these fees. Well <a href=\"http:\/\/www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk\/pa\/cm200304\/cmhansrd\/cm040127\/debtext\/40127-37.htm#40127-37_div38\">now I do<\/a>. She was a teller for this vote. And why does she have this job? Because she&#8217;s a whip. So there&#8217;s no danger of my local MP ever going against Tony then is there. That&#8217;s representative politics for you.<br \/>\nNow I must admit that I had to away and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Division_(vote)\">look up<\/a> what that meant, since for all I know, tellers are randomly appointed MPs. In fact when a division (or vote) is called for, each side has to put up a couple of tellers to count each side&#8217;s votes. These come from among the ranks of those supporting that side of the bill. Their votes aren&#8217;t counted, but since both the &#8220;ayes&#8221; and &#8220;noes&#8221; have two tellers, this balances out.<br \/>\nThere are clerks as well who record who&#8217;s voted for which side, but it does seem all quite antiquated. But I&#8217;ll stop there, before I disappear off on a tangent talking about Millionaire style voting buttons and on-screen graphics to liven things up. In any case I suspect that it&#8217;s a very sociable way of doing things having two lobbies. Members can immediately see who&#8217;s voting for what &#8211; foes and allies.<br \/>\nSomewhere about I have a book that I bought a year or so ago that details many of the intricacies of the British parliamentary system, as I know that I should know more about how this democracy supposedly works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I didn&#8217;t know for certain which way my MP, Joan Ryan, had voted over these fees. Well now I do. She was a teller for this vote. And why does she have this job? Because she&#8217;s a whip. So there&#8217;s no danger of my local MP ever going against Tony then is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}