The Public Whip is a parliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprem ...

. It was developed by Francis Irving and

Julian Todd Julian Todd is a British computer programmer and activist for freedom of information who works in Liverpool. He was inventor and co-founder of Public Whip with Francis Irving, and also the affiliated TheyWorkForYou website, a project that pars ...

following the

18 March 2003 Parliamentary Approval for the invasion of Iraq British Parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq was given by the elected members of the House of Commons to Tony Blair's government on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in a series of two votes, on 18 March 2003. Constitutional back ...

as a tool to record which MPs had defied their party's

whip A whip is a tool or weapon designed to strike humans or other animals to exert control through pain compliance or fear of pain. They can also be used without inflicting pain, for audiovisual cues, such as in equestrianism. They are generally ...

long after the information had become effectively inaccessible for reference. On 1 August 2011 Irving and Todd handed control of the site to a new team. The project is loosely affiliated to

mySociety mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that the ...

TheyWorkForYou TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembl ...

with which it shares a large part of the same parliamentary parsing code-base. In 2014 the

OpenAustralia Foundation The OpenAustralia Foundation (OAF) is a non-profit organisation aimed at improving government transparency. Its projects include Right to Know, a website allowing users to submit freedom of information requests, and They Vote for You, a parliamenta ...

launched a fork of the project for Australia's federal parliament calle
They Vote For You
.

Awards and funding

In 2004 the Public Whip won the ''

New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members ...

'' New Media Award for "civic renewal". The site has never received a grant from any funding body and remains entirely paid for by its creators, including server costs and bandwidth.

Technology

Originally the software was written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

, and then later rewritten in Python. The main process downloads the daily transcripts from the online

Hansard ''Hansard'' is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries. It is named after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), a London printer and publisher, who was the first official prin ...

, matches and assigns IDs to the names of MPs, and saves them into XML files. These are later uploaded into a

mySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

table and viewed through PHP webpages. At the end of 2003 the project was extended to read the archive of Parliamentary Written Answers. Following a request from

, the Parliamentary Parser was expanded to include House of Commons and Westminster Hall debates, and finally the House of Lords, which are all more or less in the same format. It is now maintained by them to provide the data to their

website.

Publicity

The website has occasionally been cited in newspaper articles, and is sometimes referred to in election material. It has also been used to provide voting analysis to citizens during elections.

Activism

An election quiz which advised voters of which party or incumbent candidate most closely matched their political opinions (according to the Parliamentary vote) was on the site for the 2005 General election and received over 10,000 hits. In anticipation of preparing a version of it again for the next general election, Julian has distributed leaflets and tried out variations of the site at the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election and the

2008 Glenrothes by-election The 2008 Glenrothes by-election was a by-election held in Scotland on 6 November 2008 to elect a new Member of Parliament (MP) for the House of Commons constituency of Glenrothes in Fife, Scotland. The seat fell vacant when the previous MP, ...

Creators

Francis Irving currently does programming work for

, most recently ''

WhatDoTheyKnow WhatDoTheyKnow is a site by mySociety designed to help people in the United Kingdom make Freedom of Information requests. It publishes both the requests and the authorities’ responses online, with the aim of making information available to a ...

'', a site that provides an on-line interface to the

Freedom of Information Act 2000 The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (c. 36) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that creates a public "right of access" to information held by public authorities. It is the implementation of freedom of information legislation in ...

has extended the concept of parsing transcripts for speeches and votes to the

General Assembly A general assembly or general meeting is a meeting of all the members of an organization or shareholders of a company. Specific examples of general assembly include: Churches * General Assembly (presbyterian church), the highest court of pres ...

and

Security Council The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, an ...

of the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoni ...

with a website called undemocracy.com established in 2007. The work was motivated by the discovery of the transcripts on-line during research into the application of

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 United Nations Security Council resolution 1267 was adopted unanimously on 15 October 1999. After recalling resolutions 1189 (1998), 1193 (1998) and 1214 (1998) on the situation in Afghanistan, the Council designated Osama bin Laden and associa ...

in his home town of Liverpool.

References

{{reflist

External links

Public Whip webpage

Parlparse

TheyWorkForYou.com

Julian Todd's blog posts relating to PublicWhip and undemocracy.com

undemocracy.com website
Politics of the United Kingdom British political websites Political whips Software using the GNU AGPL license Open government in the United Kingdom Internet properties established in 2003