Also, instead of abstaining, I would have felt better if the others voted NO. When you abstain, you are basically ceding the issue to someone else. IMHO, its a form of cowardice.
That can certainly be so, but in this case its only technically abstention. Essentially this vote was taken on a privately introduced bill held at some god forsaken hour when most people weren’t even present. Normally the only people who attend such things are those who feel really, really strongly about the issue, one way or another, or who have a specialist interest in the field (whatever it might be). In this case that would have been about 20-30 members. The Labour MP’s were only there to swamp the vote because the party bosses had advised them to do so (one line whip).