Friday
Feb042011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Metcalfe votes for cover-up
Feb 4, 2011 Climate: Parliament Autonomous Mind notes a comment left at Climate Audit and apparently here too (I seem to have missed it), concerning somebody who asked Stephen Metcalfe MP why he voted against Graham Stringer's amendment to the SciTech Committee report on the Climategate inquiries. Metcalfe's response to detailed questions was to blank and evade.
This is remarkably similar to the approach taken by Phil Willis when I wrote and asked him about his reasoning for his decisions on the original SciTech report into Climategate.
Their refusal to explain their reasoning suggests strongly that they know the truth but, for whatever reason, choose to vote to keep it quiet.
I wonder what is motivating them?
Reader Comments (13)
I wonder what is motivating them?
Follow the money, lad! Follow the money.
Also, did you notice that their lips were moving?
So much pension money tied up in green schemes, the govt and local auth and unions, it would spell disaster. So bad in fact, that they are as a deliberate policy, raising the price of electricity so that wind power will become competative. Its ok for the mp's who can afford it, but the low paid, pensioners and the jobless will suffer. Now thats a real scandal
Whips?
Do you want me to explain "whips" for you golf, or are you surprised that members were whipped at all for this vote? If the latter, I certainly am.
Do you want me to explain "whips" for you . . .
There isn't any formal whipping of Select Committee members (in the sense of two- and three-line whips and pairing and all that) but the notion that Westminster whips wouldn't seek to influence critical SC votes would be held only by folk with rather more faith in the intellectual independence of legislators than I have.
Did someone imply a conspiracy?
I mean besides me ;^)
I wonder what is motivating them?
Big brother is watching them.
Laziness. They couldn't be bothered to find out the facts, assumed that what they were told was true, and they don't want to justify their decision to anyone because that will mean their ignorance will be exposed (or else they'll have to do a lot of work mugging up on what they should have studied in the first place).
Just how far up the greasy pole could any MP who went against Call me Dave's preferred religion expect to travel?
Look at the failed careers of Eurosceptic politicians. Going against the flow is a career death sentence.
Were not a couple of MP's pulled in front of 'Call me Dave' just recently and told that their careers were more or less done for for voting against a particular measure just recently? Now there is a need for party discipline, but my view is that since the MP's (of all parties) are no more or less picked centrally, and not by their constituency associations, there is precious little point in most of them. Once elected you may as well take their votes as given, and send them home 'till the next election. All it takes with the Select committees is a little quiet chat, and a 'look here old boy...' and the job's a good 'un.
The party system is a good one in theory, but the power to hire or fire needs to be back at the constituency if there is to be any real meaning in the term 'democracy'.
Have any of you been a member of an ongoing committee, that has a good esprit de corps?
In that situation, people are very reluctant to disagree with the chaiman.
I have learnt that to my cost when charing meetings and proposing necessary but rather painful or unpleasant outcomes or side effects.
Later I found that I had no real support and was hung out to dry.
And I am not a dominant person or one to be feared.
It is very difficult to get people to speak up or to critcise the chairman in public.
I have found that as well, as a member of a meeting.
Other members who do not understand why you are opposing the chairman- well they just jump on you - stop wasting time, we need to get down to the pub for a drink!
Then - when it comes to politics, then both ideology and money interests kick in.
You should all read "GroupThink" by Janis to see how a brillant bunch of do gooders under Kennedy got the Bay of Pigs so disasterously wrong.
It's not surprising that it is hard to get scientists or politicans to think and act for themselves.
It can be very painful - psychologically, socially, career-wise and financially too.
That's why we must cherrish the Bishop, Steve McI. and the other brave souls who repeatedly poke their heads up over the sandbags to be shot at.
Yes, follow the money. Carbon trading is a solid gold multi trillion dollar bandwagon in which the only redistribution of wealth is from poor to rich.
M's P. should be proud, pleased and duty bound to the public to give reasons for their voting. Unless, that is, they had personal motives but no general reasons