MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Labour MPs more rebellious under Brown than with Blair

British Labour MPs rebelled on more occasions during Gordon Brown's first full parliamentary session as Prime Minister than during the whole of Tony Blair's first four-year term in office, a new report has shown.

The analysis of Labour voting records found that some 103 of the 341 Commons divisions during the year - 30% of the total - saw at least one of the party's MPs defy the whip. This was the highest figure since 1971-72, when Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath fought a significant section of his own party to take the UK into Europe. Many of those voting against the party line over the past year were also serial rebels under Mr Blair, suggesting that Labour hopes that the change of leader would boost party unity have failed to materialise. Academics Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart, of Nottingham University, found most of the rebellions of the past year were small, with an average of just eight Labour MPs taking part in each. The biggest rebellion was on November 4 this year, when 45 Labour MPs backed a clause in the Employment Bill placing a duty on employers to co-operate with unions conducting a strike ballot. But the Government won this and every other whipped vote during the session. The Bill to ratify the EU's Lisbon Treaty accounted for more than a quarter of the rebellious votes, but this was largely because there were more than 30 divisions. On only three occasions did the number of Labour rebels top 20. Mr Cowley and Mr Stuart ascribe Mr Brown's success in avoiding defeat in the Commons not to Labour unity but to his ability to buy off rebels on issues like the abolition of the 10p income tax rate and 42-day detention for terror suspects. "The Government won every whipped vote before the House," said the report, entitled Browned Off? "However, this was at least partly because it became adept at doing deals with its backbench critics, negotiating its way out of trouble. "A pattern soon became established in which the threat of a rebellion would be followed by some concessions which, in turn, would be followed by the rebellion deflating, at least down to manageable numbers."