It's interesting: despite his twelve-year history of conspicuous loyalty to New Labour's Whips, my opponent, Andrew Smith, occasionally seems to suffer a rush of blood to the head, and find himself indulging in a bit of strategic rebellion. It happened to him last week - he turned out to oppose the government's decision to build a third runway at Heathrow - and he's lost no time in publicising the fact.
Well, it's nice that Andrew's started showing a little interest in the environment. However, a few well-chosen differences with the whips (on matters where the government is assured of winning anyway) don't suddenly make you an independently-minded MP: in over 2,500 votes he's cast in the Commons since 1997, Andrew Smith has voted against the government line precisely nine times, according to the excellent publicwhip.org.uk website.
Publicwhip also divulges that Andrew voted 'very strongly' for introducing foundation hospitals; 'very strongly' against an investigation into the Iraq War (I'll bet he did); and 'strongly' for introducing ID cards (and 'moderately' for laws to stop climate change, which is odd considering his newly-discovered concern for the environment). That's besides his vote last year to close down hundreds of post offices nationwide having claimed the week before to be trying to save them in Oxford. So nice try - but it'll take a lot more indpendently-minded votes before Andrew loses his status as Gordon Brown's man in Oxford.
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