The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Signatures

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read10 min

Marking student work recently, I came across the claim that most Early Day Motions (EDMs) attract only one or two signatures. How can students get it so badly wrong? I blame the teacher.

Then I noticed that they had sourced the claim to the House of Commons website. They must be misquoting? But no. There it is in black and white: “In an average session, only six or seven EDMs reach over 200 signatures. Around 70 or 80 get over 100 signatures. The majority will attract only one or two signatures.”

Now the poor teacher really was confused. Had things changed recently? Because I know how to enjoy myself, I went to the online EDM database and checked. So far this session, around 10 per cent of EDMs have garnered just one or two signatures. Given its length, perhaps this isn’t an average session, but the EDM database goes back to 1989, and contains 59,000 EDMs; of those around 4,500 (eight per cent) had just one or two signatories. Whether it’s eight or 10 per cent, then, it’s not a majority. 

The source of the error, I think, is that older library briefings used to say that “quite a number will attract only one or a couple of signatures”, and at some point this has been mangled, with “quite a number” becoming “the majority”. See me after class.

What I wasn’t aware of until I looked into this – and this is a sign of things changing – was that that quote above is now also wrong at the top end. Of the 3,000 or so EDMs this session, how many have attracted over 200 signatures? Answer: none. There were also none in the whole of the last parliament.

It used to be true. Between 1989 and 2019, 452 EDMs attracted more than 200 signatories; that’s roughly 15 a year. But since 2019: nada. I am not entirely sure why.

The record-breaker, with 503 signatures, came in 2001-2. It urged the governments of India and Pakistan to seek to resolve their differences peacefully and to reduce the risks of nuclear conflict. Which is nice. 

The EDM database is another example of Kids These Days Having It So Good. When I first started out, you had to code this stuff by hand; now, you can get the data with a click or two of a button. The ground-breaking 1961 book by Finer et al that looked at EDMs as a measure of backbench opinion, an early attempt to treat parliamentary behaviour quantitatively, studied just one parliament – at a time when EDMs were far less numerous than today – and still took two years to produce. 

That book was the subject of a very sniffy review by Richard Crossman in the Guardian, dismissing it as “statistical gamesmanship” and “pretentious pedantry”. Anthony Howard in the New Statesman similarly put the boot in (“academic naivete can surely never have been taken further”). It was an early example of political practitioners meeting political science and not being overly impressed; it was sadly not to be the last.

Yet reading their reviews now, more than 60 years on, it’s difficult not to conclude they hadn’t slightly missed the point – and were just terrified of anything involving numbers.

 Of course, MPs sign (or don’t) EDMs for all sorts of reasons, many of them trivial, and on their own they don’t tell you very much about political opinions. But the patterns displayed en masse can still be revealing. More recent studies of EDMs, for example, have found links to gender, religion, marginality and so on. An individual EDM can sometimes be just noise; collectively however they are a signal. EDMs are often dismissed as parliamentary graffiti, but even graffiti can sometimes be revealing.

One of the authors of that study, the late great Hugh Berrington, mischievously began the follow up volume with a quotation from Crossman, taken from a debate in the Commons: “We have to be numerate as well as literate.”

A coda – Berrington is also the source of a much-loved quote on the psychology of top politicians: “If it is lonely at the top, it is because it is the lonely who seek to climb there.” Discuss. 

Further reading: S Finer et al, Backbench Opinion in the House of Commons 1955-1959 (1961); H Berrington, Backbench Opinion in the House of Commons 1945-55 (1973)