Politics of the United Kingdom Template‑class | |||||||
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I understand that there is no set seating arrangement but I think we should create a clean, table-based diagram like the one for Party standings in the Canadian House of Commons. Either that or recreate the image here in PNG format. --Zippanova 18:57, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Should they be included on the chart, seeing as how they dont take seats? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.106.136.177 ( talk) 04:28, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Not sure about that, but as for the spelling it's: Sinn Fein IRA — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.29.222.160 ( talk) 00:39, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
198 were elected in 2005.
Yet according to this article there are 195 in the Commons. I know that 1 crossed the floor. But where are the other 2? Biofoundationsoflanguage 10:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I have moved Alan Haselhurst back to the Conservative total, because:
Rather than reducing the Conservatives total now when there are still two Labour members to go, the least confusing thing to do is to leave him as a Conservative (which is what he actually is) but amend the footnote to mention that three deputy speakers have yet to be chosen. When they are chosen then we can represent it properly. ninety: one 14:57, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
The semi-circular diagram is misleading, for two reasons:
81.111.114.131 ( talk) 17:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
I see what User:Þadius is trying to do here, but I think it's flawed. The details of the last election and footnotes should indicate how the composition of a parliament has evolved, and the lines in mid table were confusing. -- Pretty Green ( talk) 08:55, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
The footnotes on this template have become excessive. We should reduce the footnotes to just referring to changes in overall numbers when compared to the previous General Election. In particular, it is disruptive in reading the 'House of Commons of the United Kingdom' page and I just can't see how it's relevant here. Where MPs have left Parliament and been replaced by an MP of the same party, this does not affect the composition of the House of Commons. This is how it operated during the previous Parliament ( [1]). I propose a version such as the following. I should also note that the reversion of my previous edit was done on completely spurious grounds - if the editor objected to the change then that's their prerogative, but there's nothing which demands that all large changes be run by the talk page first. -- Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 12:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
<reduce indent> Well my gripe is not at the information being here as such - rather, I fear that the table becomes difficult to read with multiple footnotes, and that it disrupts the page(s) that it is displayed on due to the length of notes. I like your suggestions - to convert it into a series of actions:
Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 20:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
References to footnotes for number columns ruin the possibility of using the table as a well formed datasource. So I moved them to a separate column. Kallocain ( talk) 19:51, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
In making the above edits, I removed the classification of the Deputy Speakers along with the Speaker. My logic for doing that was that the primary reliable source for this information - that is, the Parliament website - doesn't list these members separately. I'd be happy for this part of the change to be undone, but it seems to best fit with our policy of following what external sources say. Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 11:54, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
Super Nintendo Chalmers, you reverted my edit but it should be reinstated: as the government has lost one member and the opposition has gained one member, the government majority should be reduced by two, not one. Headhitter ( talk) 09:04, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Although I was pretty confident that a strong consensus was reached two years ago on this talk page about how best to deal with documenting the large amount of changes in the House of Commons' composition (see above), edits to this template today seem to indicate that it had previously not been entirely clear how the changes affected the politics of it all.
Rather than just revert the edits and go back to what was the previous consensus, I thought that it would be best to open up a discussion, as it might just help to see if there was anything that could be done better.
However, I'm afraid that I don't really think that this template is acceptable as it currently is. Individual MPs and constituencies are mentioned. This is exactly what we said we would not do, except for the Speaker and his deputies.
Perhaps, by mentioning only the Speaker and his deputies, this has not helped that matter, as it may have led to a feeling of 'injustice' of some kind for the other MPs to have an involvement in the calculation of the government majority. I'll come back to this point in a moment.
Before that, I just need to explain why I don't think that we can talk about certain MPs and constituencies in the notes of this template.
I'll use an example. Imagine the Conservative Party lost a seat to the Labour Party in a by-election. Going by what we'd have now, we'd have to note that in this template. Then imagine that the Labour Party lost two seats on the same day to the Conservative Party in by-elections. Either we'd have to note down all three by-elections, or we'd have to decide that the first by-election is 'cancelled out' by one of the later by-elections, so we wouldn't have to note either of them, but we'd be left with the impossible task of deciding which Conservative Party victory is notable.
Once you add more parties into the mix, as we have in real life with the Respect Party, then the situation becomes a whole lot more messy.
Unless we decide to go against having a short set of notes, and list all the changes in the notes of this template (and we previously decided not to do that), then we can't really have a system where we mention the individual MPs or constituencies because that would be relying on parties holding their seats in by-elections and there not being any defections if we wanted to keep the notes short.
In the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' I included a sentence beginning "The net outcome of all changes…" which details how the party counts have changed over the course of the Parliament. I think that this is a better idea than just pointing out the MPs which made a difference to the counts. There have been lots of by-elections and suspensions in this Parliament, and I definitely don't think that it is the job of Wikipedians to judge which are the most important. I put that sentence in that article, but I crucially left it for the readers to go further down the page if they wanted to decide which changes were the most important ones. Maybe we could help the readers with this, though, and I'll address this point, too.
Another problem of detailing the composition changes in the notes of this template is that they may be repeated in articles which the template appears in. This is the case with the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article after I recently included the template within that article in response to a comment on that article's talk page.
As a result of everything that I have said, I'm prepared to take the individual MPs and constituencies back out of the notes of this template unless someone else does it first, or there is an objection on this talk page.
However, I'm thinking about taking the allusions to the Speaker and his deputies out at the same time. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure whether their inclusion was helping matters.
The notes of this template could simply be left to say "see here for changes", with a link to the section in the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article. There could also be a note for parties that abstain (Sinn Féin), as well as one giving a 'formula' for calculating government majority. This last note could say how many Deputy Speakers should be deducted from each side of the calculation, but not name names.
Names should be named, however, towards the bottom of the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article. I mentioned before that we could help readers identify changes more easily. Maybe we could change the bottom of that article so that it appears in tabular form, with colour coding. It could look similar to the 'List of United Kingdom by-elections (1979–present)' article. If there was a desire to change that article, though, then it would be best to discuss it on its own talk page. Red v Blue 19:24, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
In this article, the number of Co-operative party members is currently 26. However, in Co-operative Party, the party is said to have 28 MPs in the House of Commons. Either some sort of explanation to this page should be added, or one of those totals should be corrected. UpperJeans ( talk) 01:41, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
The article states that, after the 2017 General Election, the Government were 4 short of a majority and that they are now 5 short. Now imagine a party-line vote immediately after the Speaker and 3 deputies were elected (those 4 being 2 ex-Conservatives and 2 ex-Labour). There would have been a total of 339 voting members. The Conservatives would have had 316 (not including Speaker John Bercow and First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means Eleanor Laing). There would have been 323 other voting members. 323 - 316 = 7. I suggest that the government should be described as being in a minority of 7. Another way of looking at it is that 316 voting Conservatives plus 10 DUP = 326, and all other voting MPs = 313, but that means a majority of 13, not 6. A third way of looking at it is that 10 DUP MPs switching from the Opposition to the Government lobby should change the figures by 10 x 2 = 20 - i.e. from minus 7 to 13. Thoughts? Alekksandr ( talk) 19:47, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
Is there a standing consensus about the position of new parties and groups? My instinct would be to sort by current members, and break ties by initial composition, and therefore to include the Independent Group between the DUP and the Lib Dems. Ralbegen ( talk) 14:00, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Along with John Bercow the current Speaker; Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Dame Eleanor Laing, & Dame Rosie Winterton, the three deputy speakers, do not vote unless when acting chair and casting a tiebreaker vote. This is important and must be shown on the list. Even the commons shows them as a different entity on the voting record and do not list them as Conservative or Labour, but they are coloured as black and their party is listed as "Deputy Speaker".
The image shown here is a better reflection of the current voting makeup of the House of Commons. The current maths do not add up unless you can explicitly show them as a different non-voting entity. Something that is not stated unless you go and read this article :
"By current convention, the speaker's deputies, who also do not vote, consist of one member from the Speaker's former party, and two from the other side of the house. Thus there is no net voting power lost for either the government or the opposition. [1]"
List of MPs elected in the 2017 United Kingdom general election has Bercow down as Vacant... he said he'd step down as MP and Speaker on the 31st, but as far as I can see he's only stepped down as Speaker and will retire at the election. So we list him with the Independents, right? FLYING CHRYSALIS 💬 00:11, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
Helper201 expanded on the footnote for the SNP, adding the sentence "The SNP is the third largest political party in the UK House of Commons by number of MPs." I removed: it's obvious that the SNP are the third largest party in the Commons. They're there, third in the table.
Helper201 re-added, saying: "It could be argued that is also obvious that Labour is the largest party not in government and is therefore the opposition, yet that is explicitly stated in a footnote. I think we should state this regarding the SNP because it can sometimes be forgotten/misinterpreted being it is a Scotland only party. I believe the third largest party in the HoC also gets special rights regarding aspects such as responses and speaking times, so it helps to explicitly clarify which is the third party."
I see your point, Helper201. However, I don't think your current text works. It's pointless saying the SNP are the third largest party when they are listed third and anyone can see that their 47/48 seats is more than the LibDems' 11 and less than Labour's 202. The footnote for Labour says they're the largest party not in government because that affords them a formal position as the Official Opposition. So, a footnote explaining what rights the third largest party gets and that the SNP gets them may have some merit. However, just saying they're "the third largest" is silly.
What are those rights then? This describes them. They're not big. I had to look hard to find them. The Commons' official website doesn't bother to mention them. Is it worth having a footnote to cover this? Not really, it seems to me. This is a template, not a full-blown article. Let's keep it simple. Bondegezou ( talk) 20:14, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
@ Ralbegen: There is a question of how to handle Hanvey, who was suspended as the SNP candidate during the campaign, but still listed on the ballot paper as SNP, but took his seat as an independent. I looked around and reliable sources all report him as an SNP win, contrary to your recent bold edit, so I think we should too. Bondegezou ( talk) 11:35, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm going to make the bold move to remove most of the footnotes on this template, as many of them strike me as unnecessary and not helpful. (For reference, here is the page as it stood before my edit, and the footnotes I'll be referencing in this comment.)
I don't understand what [a] and [b] are supposed to be elucidating; that the largest party forms the government and the second-largest becomes the opposition is standard practice, and if that ever wasn't the case, it would be something that ought to be mentioned in the article body rather than left to a template's footnote. [d], [e] and [f] (covering defections and suspensions) are giving excessive detail in what's meant to be a summary table: the links to by-elections and other membership changes are already there, and if some change is so noteworthy then — again — it ought to be mentioned in the body and not left to a template's footnote. [h] and [i] are just explanations of how a government majority is calculated, and I don't see why the calculation needs to be shown. Only [c], which clarifies that a party did not exist at the last election; and [g], which explains that the voting total is slightly less than the full amount, seem worth including, as those are not immediately obvious or clear, and the context actually helps. [b] is also worth keeping if just kept as a note about Labour Co-Op.
If anyone disagrees, feel free to revert me and we can discuss it here. — Kawnhr ( talk) 21:45, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
I've made a couple of changes here.
1. The government's current working majority is 57 not 58. This because there are currently three Conservative deputy speakers, not two. There needs to be a note here recognising that the current deputy speaker Eleonor Laing is on a leave of absence, with Roger Gale deputising on the Ways & Means committee.
2. Excluding Peter Bone, who has now been removed, there are currently seven Independent MPs who were elected as Conservatives (not six): Scott Benton, Crispin Blunt, Andrew Bridgen, Matt Hancock, Julian Knight, Rob Roberts and Bob Stewart. This means that the total de facto working majority for the Conservatives is 57 + 14 = 71. Joeskeaping ( talk) 10:20, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
The template currently has the following footnote: Assuming the 8 MPs elected as Conservatives at the 2019 general election and now sitting as independents vote with the government, the effective working majority is 69. Is there any particular reason to assume that independents originally elected for a party would vote with that party, given that one of the reasons they might have become independents is over disagreements with their former party? Otherwise, it just seems like noise. 82.5.221.238 ( talk) 02:45, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
According to the table in the template, as amended today, there are now 15 independent MPs. But Note d. says there are 16 — of which 7 are former Conservatives. Which is correct? Headhitter ( talk) 19:43, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Politics of the United Kingdom Template‑class | |||||||
|
I understand that there is no set seating arrangement but I think we should create a clean, table-based diagram like the one for Party standings in the Canadian House of Commons. Either that or recreate the image here in PNG format. --Zippanova 18:57, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Should they be included on the chart, seeing as how they dont take seats? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.106.136.177 ( talk) 04:28, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Not sure about that, but as for the spelling it's: Sinn Fein IRA — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.29.222.160 ( talk) 00:39, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
198 were elected in 2005.
Yet according to this article there are 195 in the Commons. I know that 1 crossed the floor. But where are the other 2? Biofoundationsoflanguage 10:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I have moved Alan Haselhurst back to the Conservative total, because:
Rather than reducing the Conservatives total now when there are still two Labour members to go, the least confusing thing to do is to leave him as a Conservative (which is what he actually is) but amend the footnote to mention that three deputy speakers have yet to be chosen. When they are chosen then we can represent it properly. ninety: one 14:57, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
The semi-circular diagram is misleading, for two reasons:
81.111.114.131 ( talk) 17:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
I see what User:Þadius is trying to do here, but I think it's flawed. The details of the last election and footnotes should indicate how the composition of a parliament has evolved, and the lines in mid table were confusing. -- Pretty Green ( talk) 08:55, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
The footnotes on this template have become excessive. We should reduce the footnotes to just referring to changes in overall numbers when compared to the previous General Election. In particular, it is disruptive in reading the 'House of Commons of the United Kingdom' page and I just can't see how it's relevant here. Where MPs have left Parliament and been replaced by an MP of the same party, this does not affect the composition of the House of Commons. This is how it operated during the previous Parliament ( [1]). I propose a version such as the following. I should also note that the reversion of my previous edit was done on completely spurious grounds - if the editor objected to the change then that's their prerogative, but there's nothing which demands that all large changes be run by the talk page first. -- Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 12:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
<reduce indent> Well my gripe is not at the information being here as such - rather, I fear that the table becomes difficult to read with multiple footnotes, and that it disrupts the page(s) that it is displayed on due to the length of notes. I like your suggestions - to convert it into a series of actions:
Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 20:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
References to footnotes for number columns ruin the possibility of using the table as a well formed datasource. So I moved them to a separate column. Kallocain ( talk) 19:51, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
In making the above edits, I removed the classification of the Deputy Speakers along with the Speaker. My logic for doing that was that the primary reliable source for this information - that is, the Parliament website - doesn't list these members separately. I'd be happy for this part of the change to be undone, but it seems to best fit with our policy of following what external sources say. Super Nintendo Chalmers ( talk) 11:54, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
Super Nintendo Chalmers, you reverted my edit but it should be reinstated: as the government has lost one member and the opposition has gained one member, the government majority should be reduced by two, not one. Headhitter ( talk) 09:04, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Although I was pretty confident that a strong consensus was reached two years ago on this talk page about how best to deal with documenting the large amount of changes in the House of Commons' composition (see above), edits to this template today seem to indicate that it had previously not been entirely clear how the changes affected the politics of it all.
Rather than just revert the edits and go back to what was the previous consensus, I thought that it would be best to open up a discussion, as it might just help to see if there was anything that could be done better.
However, I'm afraid that I don't really think that this template is acceptable as it currently is. Individual MPs and constituencies are mentioned. This is exactly what we said we would not do, except for the Speaker and his deputies.
Perhaps, by mentioning only the Speaker and his deputies, this has not helped that matter, as it may have led to a feeling of 'injustice' of some kind for the other MPs to have an involvement in the calculation of the government majority. I'll come back to this point in a moment.
Before that, I just need to explain why I don't think that we can talk about certain MPs and constituencies in the notes of this template.
I'll use an example. Imagine the Conservative Party lost a seat to the Labour Party in a by-election. Going by what we'd have now, we'd have to note that in this template. Then imagine that the Labour Party lost two seats on the same day to the Conservative Party in by-elections. Either we'd have to note down all three by-elections, or we'd have to decide that the first by-election is 'cancelled out' by one of the later by-elections, so we wouldn't have to note either of them, but we'd be left with the impossible task of deciding which Conservative Party victory is notable.
Once you add more parties into the mix, as we have in real life with the Respect Party, then the situation becomes a whole lot more messy.
Unless we decide to go against having a short set of notes, and list all the changes in the notes of this template (and we previously decided not to do that), then we can't really have a system where we mention the individual MPs or constituencies because that would be relying on parties holding their seats in by-elections and there not being any defections if we wanted to keep the notes short.
In the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' I included a sentence beginning "The net outcome of all changes…" which details how the party counts have changed over the course of the Parliament. I think that this is a better idea than just pointing out the MPs which made a difference to the counts. There have been lots of by-elections and suspensions in this Parliament, and I definitely don't think that it is the job of Wikipedians to judge which are the most important. I put that sentence in that article, but I crucially left it for the readers to go further down the page if they wanted to decide which changes were the most important ones. Maybe we could help the readers with this, though, and I'll address this point, too.
Another problem of detailing the composition changes in the notes of this template is that they may be repeated in articles which the template appears in. This is the case with the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article after I recently included the template within that article in response to a comment on that article's talk page.
As a result of everything that I have said, I'm prepared to take the individual MPs and constituencies back out of the notes of this template unless someone else does it first, or there is an objection on this talk page.
However, I'm thinking about taking the allusions to the Speaker and his deputies out at the same time. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure whether their inclusion was helping matters.
The notes of this template could simply be left to say "see here for changes", with a link to the section in the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article. There could also be a note for parties that abstain (Sinn Féin), as well as one giving a 'formula' for calculating government majority. This last note could say how many Deputy Speakers should be deducted from each side of the calculation, but not name names.
Names should be named, however, towards the bottom of the 'List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010' article. I mentioned before that we could help readers identify changes more easily. Maybe we could change the bottom of that article so that it appears in tabular form, with colour coding. It could look similar to the 'List of United Kingdom by-elections (1979–present)' article. If there was a desire to change that article, though, then it would be best to discuss it on its own talk page. Red v Blue 19:24, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
In this article, the number of Co-operative party members is currently 26. However, in Co-operative Party, the party is said to have 28 MPs in the House of Commons. Either some sort of explanation to this page should be added, or one of those totals should be corrected. UpperJeans ( talk) 01:41, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
The article states that, after the 2017 General Election, the Government were 4 short of a majority and that they are now 5 short. Now imagine a party-line vote immediately after the Speaker and 3 deputies were elected (those 4 being 2 ex-Conservatives and 2 ex-Labour). There would have been a total of 339 voting members. The Conservatives would have had 316 (not including Speaker John Bercow and First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means Eleanor Laing). There would have been 323 other voting members. 323 - 316 = 7. I suggest that the government should be described as being in a minority of 7. Another way of looking at it is that 316 voting Conservatives plus 10 DUP = 326, and all other voting MPs = 313, but that means a majority of 13, not 6. A third way of looking at it is that 10 DUP MPs switching from the Opposition to the Government lobby should change the figures by 10 x 2 = 20 - i.e. from minus 7 to 13. Thoughts? Alekksandr ( talk) 19:47, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
Is there a standing consensus about the position of new parties and groups? My instinct would be to sort by current members, and break ties by initial composition, and therefore to include the Independent Group between the DUP and the Lib Dems. Ralbegen ( talk) 14:00, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Along with John Bercow the current Speaker; Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Dame Eleanor Laing, & Dame Rosie Winterton, the three deputy speakers, do not vote unless when acting chair and casting a tiebreaker vote. This is important and must be shown on the list. Even the commons shows them as a different entity on the voting record and do not list them as Conservative or Labour, but they are coloured as black and their party is listed as "Deputy Speaker".
The image shown here is a better reflection of the current voting makeup of the House of Commons. The current maths do not add up unless you can explicitly show them as a different non-voting entity. Something that is not stated unless you go and read this article :
"By current convention, the speaker's deputies, who also do not vote, consist of one member from the Speaker's former party, and two from the other side of the house. Thus there is no net voting power lost for either the government or the opposition. [1]"
List of MPs elected in the 2017 United Kingdom general election has Bercow down as Vacant... he said he'd step down as MP and Speaker on the 31st, but as far as I can see he's only stepped down as Speaker and will retire at the election. So we list him with the Independents, right? FLYING CHRYSALIS 💬 00:11, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
Helper201 expanded on the footnote for the SNP, adding the sentence "The SNP is the third largest political party in the UK House of Commons by number of MPs." I removed: it's obvious that the SNP are the third largest party in the Commons. They're there, third in the table.
Helper201 re-added, saying: "It could be argued that is also obvious that Labour is the largest party not in government and is therefore the opposition, yet that is explicitly stated in a footnote. I think we should state this regarding the SNP because it can sometimes be forgotten/misinterpreted being it is a Scotland only party. I believe the third largest party in the HoC also gets special rights regarding aspects such as responses and speaking times, so it helps to explicitly clarify which is the third party."
I see your point, Helper201. However, I don't think your current text works. It's pointless saying the SNP are the third largest party when they are listed third and anyone can see that their 47/48 seats is more than the LibDems' 11 and less than Labour's 202. The footnote for Labour says they're the largest party not in government because that affords them a formal position as the Official Opposition. So, a footnote explaining what rights the third largest party gets and that the SNP gets them may have some merit. However, just saying they're "the third largest" is silly.
What are those rights then? This describes them. They're not big. I had to look hard to find them. The Commons' official website doesn't bother to mention them. Is it worth having a footnote to cover this? Not really, it seems to me. This is a template, not a full-blown article. Let's keep it simple. Bondegezou ( talk) 20:14, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
@ Ralbegen: There is a question of how to handle Hanvey, who was suspended as the SNP candidate during the campaign, but still listed on the ballot paper as SNP, but took his seat as an independent. I looked around and reliable sources all report him as an SNP win, contrary to your recent bold edit, so I think we should too. Bondegezou ( talk) 11:35, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm going to make the bold move to remove most of the footnotes on this template, as many of them strike me as unnecessary and not helpful. (For reference, here is the page as it stood before my edit, and the footnotes I'll be referencing in this comment.)
I don't understand what [a] and [b] are supposed to be elucidating; that the largest party forms the government and the second-largest becomes the opposition is standard practice, and if that ever wasn't the case, it would be something that ought to be mentioned in the article body rather than left to a template's footnote. [d], [e] and [f] (covering defections and suspensions) are giving excessive detail in what's meant to be a summary table: the links to by-elections and other membership changes are already there, and if some change is so noteworthy then — again — it ought to be mentioned in the body and not left to a template's footnote. [h] and [i] are just explanations of how a government majority is calculated, and I don't see why the calculation needs to be shown. Only [c], which clarifies that a party did not exist at the last election; and [g], which explains that the voting total is slightly less than the full amount, seem worth including, as those are not immediately obvious or clear, and the context actually helps. [b] is also worth keeping if just kept as a note about Labour Co-Op.
If anyone disagrees, feel free to revert me and we can discuss it here. — Kawnhr ( talk) 21:45, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
I've made a couple of changes here.
1. The government's current working majority is 57 not 58. This because there are currently three Conservative deputy speakers, not two. There needs to be a note here recognising that the current deputy speaker Eleonor Laing is on a leave of absence, with Roger Gale deputising on the Ways & Means committee.
2. Excluding Peter Bone, who has now been removed, there are currently seven Independent MPs who were elected as Conservatives (not six): Scott Benton, Crispin Blunt, Andrew Bridgen, Matt Hancock, Julian Knight, Rob Roberts and Bob Stewart. This means that the total de facto working majority for the Conservatives is 57 + 14 = 71. Joeskeaping ( talk) 10:20, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
The template currently has the following footnote: Assuming the 8 MPs elected as Conservatives at the 2019 general election and now sitting as independents vote with the government, the effective working majority is 69. Is there any particular reason to assume that independents originally elected for a party would vote with that party, given that one of the reasons they might have become independents is over disagreements with their former party? Otherwise, it just seems like noise. 82.5.221.238 ( talk) 02:45, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
According to the table in the template, as amended today, there are now 15 independent MPs. But Note d. says there are 16 — of which 7 are former Conservatives. Which is correct? Headhitter ( talk) 19:43, 27 May 2024 (UTC)