How did PAD determine the best candidate for animals?

The British political system, with centralised Government control over Parliament and rigid party discipline, means that even backbench MPs from the governing party have little meaningful influence over Government policy. The priority for animal advocates must be to affect the Government.

This means that overall party policy and track record is a major factor in deciding who to vote for - normally this is more important than the attitudes of individual MPs and candidates.

However, in deciding who the best candidate for animals is in each constituency there are a number of complicating factors:

First of all, it has to be said that the Green Party has by far and away the strongest animal policy - in fact they are the only party to embrace the notion of animal rights. The problem is that in the first-past-the-post system for General Elections, the Greens were unable to win any seats despite picking up 300,000 votes, or 3.4% where they stood - a figure likely to have been significantly depressed by the current election system because it promotes the idea that a vote for the Greens won't count. In many cases, tactical voting for an incremental improvement on the current situation was the only realistic strategy for affecting the result in individual seats. This is especially the case in seats where, in the 2001 election, Labour beat the Conservatives, and the Lib Dems were a long way behind. Because Conservative policy was to repeal the hunting ban, it was best in some seats to vote Labour to retain the ban. So, the relative positions of the parties in each seat was an important factor to take into consideration in deciding who best to vote for.

Secondly, it is necessary to consider each seat in the context of the overall composition of the House of Commons, and how 'marginal' a seat currently is. In other words, there were some seats that, if Labour lost to the Conservatives, might have let in a Conservative Government who would probably be even worse for animals than Labour. But there were other seats that, if Labour lost, would mean that the Labour Government would have had a reduced majority (as actually happened) or be the largest party in a hung parliament. This has meant that Blair and the New Labour Government have been weakened and are reliant on more animal-friendly backbench Labour MPs and the Lib Dems, who are now in a slightly stronger position to influence Government policy in a more positive direction for animals.

Thirdly, in many cases the individual candidate may have had different views on animal protection policies compared to his or her party. For example, there are a few pro-hunting Labour and Lib Dem MPs, even though overall policy in both parties is for a ban. Some animal issues tend to be seen as 'matters of conscience', in which case individual MPs have greater leeway in terms of voting.

It is for these reasons that we analysed the results from the 2001 General Election, surveyed individual candidates, and examined the records and policies of each party in order to work out who the best candidate was in each seat. Our Head of Political Affairs, Dan Lyons, has a degree in Politics from the University of Sheffield, and is conducting postgraduate research into British animal protection policy.

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