I haven’t written here for a while. There's a few reasons for that but the main one is a new personal project I started a few months ago called mpdata.uk. This began as a simple bit of background research for a post on Reform UK but ended up morphing into a full on website build once I discovered that the information I was after was not easily accessible, but that the APIs and other resources existed to make it so.

There were articles at the time about Nigel Farage only voting on something like 30% of the motions put before parliament, but nothing much to contextualise that - how often did other MPs vote? What other contributions do they make to the business of parliament? Where does Nigel Farage fit in a 'league table' of MPs? I couldn't find it, so I decided to build it - taking publicly available data from the parliament.uk api and combining and displaying it to get the content I was after.

As I was building this platform I realised something - I was going against everything I had written on this blog. I was focusing on the metrics, the measures which become goals themselves. Counting the number of votes cast by an MP doesn't tell you if they're doing a good job, they might be carefully analysing and researching every bill they vote on, or they could be blindly voting along party lines or based on how they feel that day. TheyWorkForYou make this exact point themselves - absence isn't necessarily indifference, it can even be a form of protest. Vote-counts are a blunt tool. But a blunt tool is still better than no tool if you know how to use it. We’re back at Goodhart's Law again - when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Swap GDP for vote counts and it’s the exact same critique I've been making in past posts on everything from forestry to economics

In the case for the defence, I would like to make two small counter arguments.

1. This is still genuinely useful data, and it's all the quantitative data we can get so I would say it’s better to engage with it than to ignore it, as long as we are aware of its limitations. Don’t assume that politician A is doing a better job than politician B simply because they have voted more often. Use this data as a starting point for further investigation or as context alongside other information.

2. Fuck them. They're measuring us in exactly the same way, passing targets down from the top based on generic, easily quantifiable measures. Whether you're a teacher with a target for the number of passing grades, a doctor with a minimum number of appointments per day, or just a regular person expected to contribute x amount as an ‘economic actor’, we are regularly seen as nothing but numbers. So let's turn the tables. See how they like being treated that way. If they want to complain that being judged on a few simplistic metrics is unfair then maybe that can start a much bigger conversation.

Anyway, cutting a long story short - what started as a very simple laravel application to retrieve voting attendance data from the parliament api has already grown to encompass debate contributions, MPs registered interests and party political donations via the electoral commission, and I have plenty more ideas still to add. The latest update has been a ‘financial connections’ section which attempts to collate and clean up all the donors data from the electoral commission, along with the registered interests data from parliament.uk to provide a single verified record for every donor/benefactor that is putting money into our politics. Resolving issues with typos, alternative names, and multiple records for the same individual or organisation across 2 platforms.

In spite of what I guess is a fairly obvious lack of impartiality on this blog, mpdata.uk is completely unopinionated and entirely data driven. There is no editorialising, no moralising over whether certain financial arrangements are ‘ok’ or not, it is purely about presenting the data in a clean, useful and above all accurate fashion in order to help people make their own minds up about those we allow to represent us.

The site is currently getting a few thousand views a month (which is approximately a few thousand more than this blog), and since Nigel Farage has just triggered a by-election to try to avoid the investigations into his dodgy finances - despite already being comfortably the second highest earner in parliament from outside interests - I'll likely be continuing to work on it for a while yet!