How Liberal / Authoritarian are Luton’s MPs?

At party conference last weekend Liberal Democrat Voice launched their new website, ‘How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP? ‘ which has the simple aim of providing an easy way for the public to find out online how liberal or authoritarian are the views of their MP according to his or her voting record in parliament.

Their explanation goes like this:

“Liberal Democrat Voice has identified 10 key votes from the 2005-10 Parliament in order to rank all MPs according to how liberal or authoritarian their record is. All MPs are marked out of 100: the higher their score the more authoritarian they are. The lower their score the more liberal is their voting record.”

So how do Luton’s two MPs do?

• Kelvin Hopkins scores a reasonable 23/100 having gone the liberal way in all but two of the key votes. Not perfect, but could have been a lot worse.
• Margaret Moran scores an authoritarian 62/100. Which I suspect would have been a lot worse if she had bothered to turn up to half the votes that she missed. Why am I not surprised?

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.