Having never been hunting, I’m not sure whether I’m meant to like the ‘whips’ or not. In his Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon writes of them fondly enough, though:
Soon afterwards the second whip rode through the undergrowth encumbered with spades, and they took their coats off in the dappling sunshine for a real good dig. The crunch of delving spades and the smell of sandy soil now mingled with the redolence of the perspiring pack, the crushed bracken that the horses were munching, and the pungent unmistakable odour of foxes. However inhumane its purpose, it was a kindly country scene.[1]
It’s not too long a bound from the hunt to Parliament, and so we arrive at the whips we are more familiar with, who take their name from the hunting variety. Both types are represented as necessary, practical figures who facilitate the smooth working of often elitist institutions. Individuals might be better or worse at this job.
Alongside their work keeping MPs informed about the business of the House, securing attendance, arranging pairings and so forth, the whips are often seen as party enforcers. They can be particularly influential for governments, where their duties extend to mapping out time in the parliamentary calendar for the government’s business. But these official functions of Westminster’s whips are only part of the tale.
In 2023 Constitution Society research fellow Tabitha Troughton published a report on the system at Westminster. In it, she concluded that bullying, bribery, blackmail and spying, long associated with the whipping system, remained common practice among whips in our national legislature. Others, including former Conservative chief whip Simon Hart, may disagree, but our new Prime Minister is not among them.
Ahead of taking-up leadership, Andy Burnham wrote to Labour MPs that ‘the Whips’ Office should be our HR department, not something to be feared or where discipline is used to stifle debate.’ As with much of what we have seen so far, this builds on ideas the Prime Minister, and Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram, advanced in their 2024 book Head North. In it, Rotheram makes clear that they ‘believe that a major reform of the whip system – or even its total removal – will empower Members of Parliament.’[2]
It’s worth noting that their argument isn’t solely predicated on the excesses of the whipping system. Their frustrations are not just with allegations of inappropriate behaviour by whips towards Members of Parliament, but rather that whipping itself disempowers MPs as representatives of their constituencies. As Burnham sees it:
The House of Commons should be the place where the decisions are taken about every aspect of life in Britain. In reality, because of the way the Parliamentary whip system works, it spends the majority of its time rubber-stamping decisions taken elsewhere. For that reason, the whip system is a big part of the problem. Every general election, 650 people are elected with the votes of millions and big ideas about the things they want to change. Then, the minute they walk through the door to take their seats, the power given to them by the public is removed and effectively handed to a small number of their elected colleagues and many more unelected advisers who set the party lines and positions for which they are required to vote. As a result, the whip system disempowers MPs, diminishes their status and, over time, disconnects them from their constituents. It makes you say things you’re not sure about and vote for things you don’t believe in. At its worst, the whip system unfairly makes good people seem like frauds.[3]
Having now appointed the well-respected Anneliese Midgley as the chief whip, might we see greater efforts from the Government at changing the role, and reputation, of whips in Parliament?
A world without whips
Of course, it’s easier to criticise the whip system than it is to replace it. Alternatives to the present state of affairs do exist, though. In line with Burnham’s letter to Labour MPs, Dr Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society has recently suggested that changes to the system might at least include a more ‘pastoral’ approach towards MPs and a greater willingness for those MPs to constructively challenge government via select committees. A gentler, kinder politics from the whips’ office might go a long way to helping MPs trust the system and might draw that system further away from its dark reputation. If allowing MPs more freedom on select committees improves parliamentary relations alongside improving scrutiny, this seems like an easy win for all concerned.
If Labour MPs were freer to serve and speak out against government legislation on parliamentary committees, though, that privilege might be extended to some votes and amendments too. Without eradicating the whips’ office, making non-manifesto bills a free vote for MPs might go some way to reestablishing the bonds between MPs and constituencies which the Prime Minister is worried are fraying. A hint of something similar emerges during a long discussion of the Iraq War vote in Head North.
Andy Burnham voted in favour of military action in Iraq 2003, but as he describes it, the whips were influential and ‘entirely inappropriate when considering questions of this magnitude’.[4] If a convention, albeit a ‘very general’ one, has developed in the United Kingdom after 2003 that Parliament will be consulted over the use of force internationally, it offers an opportunity for reform.[5] In a scenario where a Burnham-led government was inclined to use force internationally, giving MPs a free vote on the intervention might prove an important codicil to the convention, alongside avoiding a repeat of the mistakes Burnham believes were made over Iraq.
More intensive still would be efforts at legislating on the proper conduct of whips. Here, the Government might attempt to take lessons from Germany, where under the German Basic Law, representatives are ‘not bound by orders or instructions, and [are] responsible only to their conscience’. Efforts to break this are themselves punishable in law. While Burnham and Rotheram don’t mention this specifically in Head North, elsewhere in the book they quote approvingly from the German Basic Law on federal funding. If they regard Germany as a model for a devolution settlement, perhaps it might be regarded as one for the whips too?
We might even abolish the whips entirely, as Rotheram hints at in the quote above, and offload the necessary logistics work elsewhere while abandoning the party-management functions. It’s often considered impractical in the Palace of Westminster, but in Canada, whose parliament is based on our own, the Green Party manage it in opposition. Likewise, in the UK across local government various parties and independents do not whip for votes. Clearly, these examples operate on a much smaller scale, and with lower political stakes, than the present Labour government in Parliament, but this is not to say that a Westminster without whips is impossible.
The noes
‘Calls to abolish the whips altogether have a direct charm equal to their improbability’, writes Tabitha Troughton. And even without going as far as their complete abolition, arguments are quickly raised against most suggested reforms to the whipping system at Westminster. These will have to be addressed if Burnham is to change that system, even working with a large majority.
The most common argument against reform now is that our mental image of the whips, drawn up in large part by House of Cards author Michael Dobbs, is out of date. His 1989 novel, adapted to an iconic television series in 1990, offered a dark, disturbing portrayal of malign political ambition and the possibilities for exploitation which existed in the whips’ office. Speaking to The House in 2020, though, Dobbs felt the caricature was further from reality than it might once have been: ‘Nowadays, politicians seem to stake their loyalty far more to their Twitter and Facebook followers than to the party. That’s a fact of life, love it or hate it, but the authority of the whips isn’t what it used to be.’
Burnham’s predecessor as Prime Minister had well-reported problems with party discipline. This led to the suspension of various MPs from the Labour Party across Keir Starmer’s tenure, but these were part of a wider trend of escalating rebellions since 1997. In any case, both the increasing number of rebellions, and the formal punishment of these rebellions by suspension, do hint that Dobbs might be right, and that the whips are less willing or able to use the dark arts of their trade against Members of Parliament today. That said, a complacency that things are better than they might once have been ignores contemporary accounts by Members of Parliament of appalling behaviour. To take just one example from the not so distant past, and there are many across political parties, in 2022 a number of Conservative MPs told The Telegraph that they had experienced sexism at the hands of the whips.
If the culture of the whips’ office still requires reform, though, the German example may not prove as effective as one might suppose. Despite the German Basic Law to the contrary, there is ample evidence that party coercion still goes on in Germany. As Christina Zimmerman has written, while it can be difficult to legally verify, first-hand accounts by parliamentary workers, representatives and media reporting make clear that the law is not enough to prevent coercion, which is to some extent, ‘an inherent pragmatic feature of representative democracies that ensures clear majorities for a functioning decision making process.’ Beyond this, where the line is drawn between coercion and persuasion is itself tricky to determine, even without the challenging and often secretive political context in which negotiations between whips and MPs take place.
The challenges inherent to changing the system, though, are not a particularly good justification for its existence. While Head North doesn’t put forward very specific reforms to the whip system, Burnham is convincing in his passion that an alternative is possible, realisable, despite the present orthodoxy:
[I]t is so hard-wired into the mentality of the place and the running of the system down there. The received wisdom is that removing the whip system would cause chaos and the country would be ungovernable without it. My view is the complete opposite. It would result in the immediate empowerment of MPs and the House of Commons and bring better decision making that would benefit us all. Nineteen times out of twenty, or even ninety-nine out of a hundred, most MPs would probably vote in the way their party asked. But it is on those isolated occasions, when the government has gone too far, that the public needs more independent MPs to be the ultimate guardians of the national interest.[6]
Cracking on
In Head North, Andy Burnham appears at times to argue in favour of entirely free votes on all legislation for MPs, and with that the effective destruction of the parliamentary whip. This would mark a radical departure from the norms of Westminster, and in the case of the whips, norms which have existed since perhaps the late-eighteenth century.
Whether the Government can deliver change in Parliament on this scale remains to be seen, but the first step towards it is surely grand ambition. The Prime Minister doesn’t lack for that, and even were the result to be reform rather than the ultimate destruction of the whip system, he might still have gone a long way to changing a Westminster culture he has vowed to end.
Dexter Govan.
Dr Dexter Govan is Director of Research for the Constitution Society. He holds a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh and is a historian of unionism in Britain and Ireland. He has worked as a Press Officer in the Scottish Parliament and retains an interest in contemporary Scottish politics and the territorial constitution.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.
[1] Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (London, 1961), pp 215-216.
[2] Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain (London, 2024), p. 184.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, p.188.
[5] Nigel D. White, Defence and the UK Constitution (London, 2025), p.64.
[6] Burnham and Rotheram, Head North, p. 185.