Standards in Public Life

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

We come to SNP spokesperson, Brendan O’Hara.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Here we are again, Mr Speaker. Once again, the Minister for defending the indefensible is sent out to defend his boss, but even he must realise the frequency with which we reconvene in this place to question the veracity of the Prime Minister’s version of events; it is like being on a merry-go-round that gets faster and faster. Today, it is the turn of Lord McDonald, the former senior civil servant at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, to call out the Prime Minister’s claim that he was unaware of any specific allegations against the right hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) when he appointed him Deputy Chief Whip. In his letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Lord McDonald is unequivocal in saying that three years ago, in 2019, the Prime Minister

“was briefed in person about the initiation and outcome of the investigation.”

Lord McDonald’s letter absolutely demolishes the Prime Minister’s claims that he did not know and, once again, raises serious concerns and questions about whether he has broken the ministerial code. How much longer will we have to endure this seemingly endless merry-go-round? Will the Secretary of State now commit to holding a full and transparent investigation into this matter, and perhaps finally allow us and the people of the United Kingdom to get off this appalling merry-go-round?

[Michael Ellis]

I realise that the hon. Gentleman from Scotland wishes to make political hay out of this situation, but it really does not wash. It is not indefensible to defend natural justice. Natural justice means acting on evidence, not on gossip, rumour and innuendo. It is a fact that in this place, and in SW1 generally, there are rumours, gossip and innuendo about a multitude of issues and people. The reason journalists do not report it is that they cannot stand it up with evidence. The reason why others do not act is, in many cases, because they have not got evidence. It is not indefensible to defend the principles of natural justice and not expect people to act—to defenestrate individuals—without proof. That is the difference.

Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests Resignation

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

We now come to SNP spokesperson Brendan O’Hara.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Another day, another scandal, another humiliation for the Prime Minister as another sleaze adviser quits. Let us not forget that when Lord Geidt took this job on 16 months ago he was the personal appointment of the Prime Minister, and we were assured that his credentials were absolutely impeccable. Lord Geidt said that if he were to resign it would be a last resort, and that he would use that resignation to send a critical signal into the public domain. We need to know what critical signal he was sending out last night. As yet, we do not have details of his resignation letter. We could speculate—could it be lawbreaking? PPE contracts? Breach of international law? I am pleased that the Minister is publishing the correspondence in full, but will he define “shortly”, as opposed to immediately, and will he confirm that all the correspondence will be published in full when it is published?

[Michael Ellis]

Lord Geidt’s credentials are impeccable and remain impeccable. He is an example to people like me and to all people in public life for the service he has given to Queen and country over the course of decades. The hon. Gentleman seeks to criticise people who hold those public roles and make political points if they do not support his position, and I suggest that is not the right approach.

[Brendan O'Hara]

No, I don’t! That is shameful nonsense!

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I call Sheryll Murray.

Oral Answers to Questions

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Scottish National party spokesman, Brendan O’Hara.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

In October 2019, the Brexit Opportunities Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and assured businesses that the “broad, sunlit uplands” of Brexit lay ahead. Yesterday, I spoke to Elizabeth, whose company, Gracefruit, has exported chemicals for cosmetics to the EU for almost two decades. She weathered the financial crash, but such was the impact of Brexit that she has told me she no longer has the

“mental or emotional energy to make a success of a once-thriving business.”

So would he like to tell Elizabeth, and all the others struggling with red tape, soaring costs and a loss of market, when they can expect those “broad, sunlit uplands” to arrive?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The sun is shining, metaphorically, regardless of the meteorological conditions outside. What I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that we are in charge of how this economy works, but what we cannot do is make the EU dance to our tune. If it wishes to disadvantage its own consumers—if it wishes to put up prices for its consumers—that is a matter for the EU, but we are producing a dynamic, open, free market UK economy.

[Brendan O'Hara]

The idea that the Minister for Brexit Opportunities believes that the sun is shining for small and medium-sized companies in this country is absolutely unbelievable because, in the first year following Brexit, Elizabeth’s business fell by 65%. Because of red tape and new regulations, her product line had to be reduced from 350 products to one, and the company has had to lay off 50% of its workforce. So it is Brexit that has been an unmitigated disaster for Gracefruit and so many other long-standing successful businesses. Is it not time that this Government stopped playing games with people’s lives and livelihoods and admitted that their Brexit experiment is a lose-lose for everybody, bar a few double-breasted suit-wearing hedge fund managers and City spivs?

Standards in Public Life

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I pass my sincere thanks to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) for bringing to the House this very important motion on the need to implement, quickly and in full, the recommendations made by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which found four areas of particular concern that required significant reform.

Given the time constraints, I will limit my remarks to what I consider to be the most pressing issue: the ministerial code, which, under this Government, has hardly been worth the paper it was written on, and the role of the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests. I can assure the House that if it divides this afternoon, the SNP will support the motion; if anything, the issue has been given even greater urgency as a result of the hurried, self-preserving changes that the Prime Minister made to the ministerial code in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Sue Gray report.

Of course, the Government have tried to spin the changes that they introduced as being in line with what was recommended in the report, but we all know that the changes made to the ministerial code last week were made to protect the Prime Minister’s personal position, and to change the rules governing behaviour ahead of the upcoming inquiry by the Privileges Committee. He appears to have viewed the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life as a smörgåsbord of suggested reforms, from which he could choose those that suited him and leave out those he did not much fancy.

Surely if this was a genuine attempt at a fresh start, if the Prime Minister wanted us to believe that he had truly been “humbled” by the Sue Gray report, and if he wanted the public to believe that he had changed, he would have accepted the committee’s recommendations in full, particularly this recommendation:

“The Independent Adviser should be able to initiate investigations, determine findings of breaches, and a summary of their findings should be published in a timely manner.”

Rather, the Prime Minister has decreed that his independent ethics adviser will not be given any such powers, and will instead have to seek the Prime Minister’s permission before launching an investigation into possible ministerial misconduct.

In picking and choosing those bits of the report that suit him, the Prime Minister has, understandably and rightly, been accused of rigging the system and moving the goalposts, simply to get himself off the inconvenient hook on which he has been caught. Those on the Government Benches need to understand that the optics of this are absolutely dreadful—but then again, when has that ever been a concern to this Prime Minister of an increasingly authoritarian Government, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be allergic to scrutiny, on issues ranging from Prorogation to the awarding of PPE contracts?

On 25 May, in response to the publication of Sue Gray’s withering and damning report on the Prime Minister’s conduct and the toxic culture he allowed to fester in Downing Street, he stood at the Dispatch Box and told this House:

“I apologised when the revelations emerged, and I continue to apologise. I repeat that I am humbled by what has happened”—[Official Report, 25 May 2022; Vol. 715, c. 299.]

His humility and contrition, if they were ever there at all, lasted all of 48 hours, because the ink was hardly dry on Hansard’s report of the Prime Minister’s grovelling mea culpa before he was brazenly changing the ministerial code, not to strengthen parliamentary standards, to increase transparency and accountability or to rebuild the shattered public trust in this Parliament—not a bit of it—but in a way that would afford him greater protection from this Parliament and from scrutiny, and entrench even greater powers in his hands. With the Prime Minister having been publicly humiliated in the Sue Gray report and forced to pay a fixed penalty notice for breaking his own laws, and with an investigation by the Privileges Committee hanging over him, one would have thought, or hoped, that a period of self-reflection and humility would have been in order, but sadly not. Once again, his instinct for self-preservation came to the fore, and he watered down the ministerial code to save his own skin.

Had anyone else done that, we would have been shocked, aghast and disbelieving at such a lack of good faith—but were any of us really that shocked? Apart from the 211 unfortunate, gullible souls on the Conservative Benches, were any of us that surprised at what he did? Probably not, because we, and increasingly the public, know the character of this man, and they can see that there is no one and nothing that he will not bring down in his desperation to cling on to power. From the day he assumed office, we have seen the Prime Minister dismantle, degrade, debase and demean standards in public life.

This crisis has been long in the making, because the bigger problem is that there are no real rules. There is only the expectation that those in power will adhere to a code of behaviour based on personal integrity and common decency, and the whole system is all hung on a vague concept of individual honour. Of course, that all falls apart when a powerful individual decides that they will not behave with decency and honour, and matters are made considerably worse when it turns out that the person at the very top lacks integrity, is devoid of a sense of shame, and completely lacks a moral compass. What then happens, as we are discovering, is that the system of ensuring standards of behaviour in public life falls apart, and there is very little anyone can do about it. The sad truth is that if someone at the very top of Government is so thick-skinned that they do not see being fined by the police or publicly eviscerated in a report about their personal behaviour as a resignation issue, and decides to tough it out until the news cycle inevitably moves on, then it appears that there is almost nothing we can do about it.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. Does he agree that if the Prime Minister —any Prime Minister—can always simply bail out a ministerial colleague, even if they have been shown to have clearly broken the ministerial code, that undermines not only the code and the role of the independent adviser, but the role of all of us? We are all besmirched by the same sense that we cannot get our own house in order, and that is damaging to democracy and to the parliamentary and political system.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I absolutely agree. The system has to change, and that change has to start with us in this House. When the problem is staring us in the face, and when we know that what we see is wrong, then unless we act, we become complicit—we become part of the problem. I believe that history will judge us on whether we opposed or facilitated this dismantling of democracy.

Of course, in Scotland we know all about the dismantling of democracy. Despite the Tories not winning an election in Scotland since 1955, yet another Tory Government are imposing policies on us that we rejected. They are led by a Prime Minister whose unpopularity is plumbing such new depths that they will have to find new ways of measuring them. Interestingly, there are signs in Scotland that even his side is turning on him; most Scottish Tories are now struggling to defend his behaviour. As former MSP Adam Tomkins wrote recently,

“When a government asserts that the laws do not apply to it—that assertion offends not only the law itself, but our very idea of constitutional government.”

Even the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the noble Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, told Channel 4 a few weeks ago that it was clear that the Prime Minister had lied to Parliament, and his position was therefore untenable. With characteristic steely determination, even the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), decided that the Prime Minister had to go—or maybe he did not have to go; or perhaps he should go, but maybe not right now; or maybe at some unspecified point in the future, he might have to think about resigning. Safe to say, it was not a ringing endorsement from the hon. Member for Moray; but then again, maybe it was—who knows? After all, we are talking about a man with more flip-flops than a seaside shoe shop.

But regardless of the hon. Member for Moray’s many different deeply considered and principled positions on the future of the Prime Minister, this whole sorry episode has made it clearer than ever that Scotland’s future lies far away from this place and its never-ending merry-go-round of scandal where standards in public life are shredded and burned by a rogue Prime Minister. Scotland deserves a better democracy than the charade that is currently being foisted on us by Westminster, and the offer to change it once and for all will, I believe, prove irresistible when we have our independence referendum.

United Kingdom Statistics Authority

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

On behalf of the Scottish National party, I too congratulate Sir Robert Chote on his appointment. There is absolutely no doubt that he is more than eminently qualified to take up the role of the chair of the UK Statistics Authority. He is highly respected, as we heard from the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), as chair of the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council in the last year and of course from his tenure as the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility for the best part of—indeed, for a full—decade.

I do share the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins). She raised some very interesting points about diversity, and I share her support for Sir Robert’s commitment to transparency, which is perhaps more vital now than ever before.

Finally, I pay tribute to the out-going chair, Sir David Norgrove, and thank him for his five years at the UK Statistics Authority. I put on record our best wishes to Sir Robert Chote and wish him every success for his time in office.

Easter Recess: Government Update

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I agree very much with Lord Denning, and that is why I apologise in the way that I do.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Having read the Prime Minister’s apology, may I say on behalf of the people of Argyll and Bute, is that it? It is no wonder I have been inundated with emails from constituents who believe the Prime Minister has been treating them like fools. Typical of the emails I have received is one this morning from Cathy in Helensburgh, who described the Prime Minister as

“a self-serving, truth-twisting charlatan.”

Of course I would never use such language in this place, but Cathy’s assessment is absolutely correct. Does the Prime Minister recognise this to be a widely held view of his character?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I have asked for moderate and temperate language; that is not a clever way of getting around that. I ask the hon. Gentleman to think long and hard before doing that again—and this might be a warning to others. I am sure the hon. Gentleman would like to withdraw the way he put that.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Mr Speaker, with respect to you and the Chair, I withdraw the remarks I made.

[The Prime Minister]

In that case, I humbly remind the hon. Gentleman of the apology I have given.

Oral Answers to Questions

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

The Financial Times has reported that the checks on food imports that were due to be introduced in July will be delayed yet again. In the middle of a Tory cost of living crisis and a period of food insecurity that may have short-term benefits, but, as the British Veterinary Association has highlighted, it is not sustainable, and it serves only to highlight the absurd claim that Brexit would reduce red tape. What possible Brexit opportunity can the Minister identify from delaying these checks yet again, because of the extreme harm they would have caused, and what long-term solutions are the Government exploring?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The SNP once again wants to be ruled by the European Union. This is the most extraordinary claim from a party that wants to be independent. It wants to be independent for one minute, and then it says to our friends in Brussels, “You take over because we are not able to do it for ourselves; we are too weak, feeble and frail to be able to stand on our own two feet, so we’ve got to get somebody else to do it.” The great advantage of being out is that it is up to us. We have the single trade window coming forward, which will be world-beating, and potentially one of the best systems anywhere, cutting out bureaucracy not just for people with whom we are trading in the European Union, but globally, because we in the Conservative party have a global horizon, rather than this narrow Brussels-based horizon of the Scottish nationalists.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will attempt to pick the bones out of that one when I read Hansard. Hearing of Brexit opportunities reminds me of that classic comedy, “Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion” when Bud and Lou get lost in the desert and come across an ice cream parlour that everybody knows to be a mirage except them, and that is exactly what this is—a mirage. Many of our performers are now having to rely on the charity, Help Musicians, for a £5,000 grant so that they can afford to take their performances to Europe. Why do our performers now require charitable help, and what happened to that promised post-Brexit bonfire of red tape?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

In 1661—[Interruption.] I am not with Abbott and Costello; there is a much better Carry On where they are in the desert and Kenneth Williams is leading them in the Foreign Legion. Let us go back to 1661. In 1661, outside in Old Palace Yard, the public executioner took all the Acts that were passed by the illegitimate Cromwellian Parliament and burned them. I have to say that I would like to do something similar to what was done between 1972 and our departing from the European Union. We are building up the kindling wood thanks to the readers of The Sun who are sending in their brilliant suggestions.

Appointment of Lord Lebedev

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I shall heed the warning about moderation and good temper, which I am sure my SNP colleagues would say is in my DNA and runs through me like the writing in a stock of rock. Should I stray, I am sure that you would bring me back into line, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I was fascinated by the start of the Minister’s speech and I tried to intervene, but he would not take my multiple attempts to do so. When he got to his feet, he began by questioning the appropriateness of the Opposition holding such a debate on this topic. Literally minutes before he questioned how appropriate it was, Lord Lebedev said:

“There’s a war in Europe”—

hon. Members will recognise the phrase—

“Britain is facing the highest cost of living since the 1950s. And you choose to debate me based on no facts and pure innuendo.”

That was precisely the Minister’s opening gambit, which prompts the question: did he write the Minister’s speech or did the Minister write his tweet?

That assertion was absurd, because we have come to learn, often through painful experience in this place, that when this Government and this Prime Minister assure us that there is nothing to see, it is wise to keep looking. That is why we fully support the motion and why, when the House divides, we will vote for the Government to hand over all documents, all minutes of meetings and all electronic communications containing or relating to the advice that they received about the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.

I reiterate in the strongest possible terms that today’s debate is absolutely not about being Russophobic, as the Minister would shamefully have us believe. He said that to try to throw up a smokescreen cover for his beleaguered Prime Minister, and it does the Prime Minister and this House no service whatever to try to suggest otherwise. As has been said many, many times in this Chamber, our fight is not with the ordinary Russian citizen, but with Putin, his political leadership in the Kremlin and his friends, including the oligarch billionaires who have plundered Russia’s wealth and resources and shipped them overseas, all too often to the UK and the City of London. Once they were in the UK, those billionaire oligarchs found many people in business and politics who, in return for their slice of the cake, were only too willing to facilitate the kleptocracy by hiding the oligarchs’ plunder for them while providing them with what they desired most: a cloak of respectability.

The UK’s willingness to welcome vast amounts of Russian money with very few questions asked about the source of that wealth means that there are now many Russians with close links to Putin who are very well integrated into the UK and who simply, because of that enormous wealth, have attained significant influence among the UK’s business, social and political elites.

Since this Prime Minister came into office in 2019, £2.3 million of Russian-linked cash has been funnelled directly into the Conservative party. That has happened to such an extent that even the Intelligence and Security Committee raised serious concerns about undue influence being sought and, indeed, gained by friends of President Putin with the UK governing party.

That influence of dirty Russian money has not gone unnoticed abroad. Professor Sadiq Isah Radda, the most senior adviser to Nigeria’s President on all matters of anti-corruption, described London as

“the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world today”.

That is where we currently are in the world standings.

In January this year, as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine, the Centre for American Progress warned the City of London that

“uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative party, the press, and its real estate and financial industry”.

It was always going to be the case that when Putin finally did unleash his illegal war in Ukraine, the UK would be forced to look at our role and how we have facilitated his gangster regime.

[Stewart Hosie]

My hon. Friend will have noticed that the Minister described the motion as a misuse of powers, implied that it would impede the Prime Minister in his constitutional role and argued that it is about a witch hunt against a single person. Is the truth not that the motion is about allowing us to understand whether or not the process of appointment has been corrupted? As my hon. Friend has mentioned Russian money, can he throw some light on why the Minister has doubled down on those ridiculous arguments?

[Brendan O’Hara]

Perhaps the Minister could reply for himself. I have no idea why he would double down on those ridiculous arguments.

My right hon. Friend is right that this is not about an individual. It is about a corruption of process, and that was always going to lead us to a re-examination of the Prime Minister’s decision to send Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords for philanthropy and services to the media, as he put it. As we have heard, Mr Lebedev is a Russian businessman who derives his enormous wealth from his father, Alexander Lebedev, a former London-based KGB spy turned oligarch who still has investments in illegally occupied Crimea. At the start of this month, The New York Times said of Evgeny:

“Nobody is a better example of the cozy ties between Russians and the establishment than Mr. Lebedev.”

Just how cosy that relationship is can be seen from the fact that the British Prime Minister personally campaigned for a peerage to turn plain old Evgeny into Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation, for the rest of his life.

I could go on about the absurdity of the House of Lords—the absurdity of a so-called democratic Parliament having an unelected upper Chamber into which family chieftains, high-ranking clerics of one denomination, failed and retired politicians and those with deep pockets who are prepared to bankroll a political party are thrust—but I will resist.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I make it clear that I have never met Lord Lebedev; I do not think I have ever been in the same room as him—but Dmitry Muratov has. He is editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper in Russia. The House will remember that he is also a Nobel peace laureate. He has said:

“The narrative being peddled in parts of the British media about him and his family is not only misjudged but actively dangerous. I urge you to consider who benefits from such untruths being told about a family that is known to be vocally critical of the Kremlin.”

Is the Scottish National party doing the same thing?

[Brendan O’Hara]

With the greatest respect, we most certainly are not. If this Government are so scared of shining a light that has to be shone, at this of all times, there will be accusations of a cover-up and a belief that there is something to be hidden—something that this Government do not want seen. The debate today is all about allowing transparency. That is what this House should be all about, but unfortunately the Government and Conservative Members seem to be terrified of it.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. Is not the real concern that the Prime Minister seemingly ignored Security Service advice? That is the issue. We do not make criticism of appointing the person as a peer; the concern is that the Prime Minister ignored security advice and appointed him despite that advice.

[Brendan O’Hara]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. This is about why the Prime Minister chose to ignore the advice of the security services, but there is also a hugely important back story about what got us into the position where he did so, and the implications of that.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

My point is a rather similar one: if there was no problem with Lebedev being appointed as a peer and if the guidance from the security services was benign, what is the problem with scrutiny of that advice, which would put to rest all the concerns that people have?

[Brendan O’Hara]

That is right. A theme appears to be emerging on this side of the House. All we want to do is see what was there. All we want is to be reassured that the advice of the security services was not ignored, and that the appointment of Lord Lebedev was above board and beyond reproach. I do not think that, in a democratic system, that is too much for the House to ask.

As Putin’s army continues to commit its war crimes in Ukraine, we have to get to the bottom of how a man with such close connections to the Kremlin was parachuted into this Parliament. We have to establish exactly what advice was given to the Prime Minister by the security and intelligence services in the summer of 2020, and whether or not he chose to overrule that advice, or sought to alter it in any way, in order to get the outcome that he required.

We know that this was not a straightforward appointment. It could not possibly have been, particularly since, almost a decade ago, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, made it clear that he did not consider it at all appropriate for Mr Lebedev, then the owner of the Evening Standard and The Independent, to join him at MI6 headquarters for lunch. Advisers to the Prime Minister would have known for years of those security service concerns, and one would have hoped that an aspiring politician—or an aspiring Prime Minister—might be wary of becoming too close to Mr Lebedev, but that was not the case. It would appear that in return for favourable headlines in the Evening Standard, Mr Lebedev gained access to the centre of power in the Conservative party, and, particularly after 2019, the centre of the UK Government itself.

Surely Mr Lebedev’s very public utterings about the illegal annexation of Crimea should have set alarm bells ringing in the Conservative party. Did no one in the Conservative party hear or take notice of him calling on western Governments to “stop cold war rhetoric” when they condemned Russia for its aggression in Crimea? Did no one notice his justification that because Crimea had been Russian “for many years”, this was not something to get overly upset about? Did his claim in 2014 that Russia would not be making

“any further incursions into any land”

fall on deaf ears?

The clues were all there, if people chose to look for them. On Syria, Mr Lebedev said that Putin had “shown leadership” in the conflict, and urged the west to accept his offer of a coalition. He followed that up by saying, “Let us keep Assad in power”, because it would be the least worst option, and he doubled down on that by saying:

“On this point I am emphatically with Putin.”

The list is endless. Where was the condemnation of the events surrounding the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, and how in the name of the wee man did our Prime Minister end up having an off-the-record talk with Lord Lebedev—or Evgeny Lebedev, as he was then—48 hours after the Skripal poisonings?

[Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman at least concede that it was the Conservative Government who led a very robust international effort to respond to the Skripal poisonings, and that the Labour party was, at that time, led by someone who refused to condemn them?

[Brendan O’Hara]

The Skripal poisonings fit into this debate beautifully, because the fact is that an off-the-record meeting was held between the Prime Minister and Mr Lebedev within 48 hours, at the time of an international crisis, and we do not know why. [Interruption.] I am sorry; I thought that Members wished to intervene, but they are just chuntering.

Mr Lebedev and the Prime Minister socialised. They are widely known to have socialised in Mr Lebedev’s castles in Italy and elsewhere, and in London regularly. Mr Lebedev was present in 2016 at the private dinner when the now Prime Minister decided he was going to back the Brexit campaign. I have no idea what Mr Lebedev’s view on Brexit is, but I do know that, in the year before, he wrote this in his newspaper:

“I have no doubt, based on conversations with senior figures in Moscow, that the Kremlin wants to make an ally rather than an enemy of Britain. And I also believe that it is in Britain’s best interest not only to work constructively with Moscow, but to be an active, engaged player on the world stage.”

I opened this speech by saying that when the Government tell us there is “nothing to see here”, we should keep looking. The danger here, however, is that there is almost too much to see to make sense of. We know that the Prime Minister has been absolutely compromised by his relationship with Lord Lebedev. The public have a right to know if the Prime Minister gave an individual a seat for life in this Parliament against the advice of the security services. Desperately not wanting that to be the case is no reason for Conservative Members to block the release of this material. If there is nothing untoward, the Government should publish the material and put the matter to bed for once and for all. Then we could let Baron Lebedev return to doing hee-haw in the other place, as he has done with aplomb since he arrived there 18 months ago.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

I end by calming some concerns that there may be about threats of early general elections. Of course, that is an entirely hypothetical possibility brought to the House’s attention by the Opposition spokesperson. I could not imagine what circumstances would bring that about. There is always a danger of a Prime Minister capriciously seeking early electoral advantage. However, that tends to backfire, as it did in February 1974, when the question was asked, “Who governs Britain?”—from the outcome, that was clearly not the Prime Minister—and indeed as recently as 2017.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I rise to speak in favour of the Lords amendment, which would require any Government seeking to dissolve this House early and call a general election to first seek and receive the support of a simple majority of the Members of this House.

Last year, when the Bill was first introduced by the Government, it was presented as a non-controversial resetting of a mistake that David Cameron made in his attempts to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. We were told that Cameron had made a bit of a mess of things, that this Bill would simply take us back to exactly where we were prior to 2010, and that we could almost pretend that it never really happened. However, as we have heard in this place and in the Lords, that is not the case. The Bill is not about reinstating what was in place prior to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, but rather creates a situation whereby the Executive have even greater powers and the monarch, who hitherto had prerogative powers, merely enacts the Executive’s will to dissolve Parliament.

This Lords amendment seeks to place a very minimal check on the Executive’s power by making any Dissolution of Parliament a decision that has to have the support of the majority of this House. I do not think that our constituents would think that it is too much to ask for those who have been elected to this place, and who serve their constituents in this place, to have some say if a Parliament is to be dissolved early and a general election called.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, which is typically gracious of him. He calls it a “minimal check,” but the reality is that it is an absolute veto. If a Government do not have a majority in the House and if the Opposition sense that a Government might well win a majority if they went to the people, the Opposition are basically saying, “We are not going to allow the Government to get a mandate from the people.” That is precisely what would have happened in 2019 if Labour had not, for some reason, given way in the end.

[Brendan O'Hara]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but that is a decision for this Parliament to take. We are elected to take decisions, and to abdicate that responsibility to the Executive is a dangerous route to go down; we should not do that. He says that it is the people, but we in this Parliament are the voice of the people, and there has to be a check on the powers of the Executive.

[Patrick Grady]

What we are hearing, especially from Government Members, is continued Westminster exceptionalism: that this place, particularly the Executive, once elected, knows what is best. That is why I raised the comparison with the devolved institutions, which operate to strict fixed terms. If they are to devolve early, that has to be a decision taken by the legislature as a whole.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and he is right. What we are seeing is, as he describes it so eloquently, Westminster exceptionalism, because this does not go nearly far enough. It is the absolute minimum that one would expect.

As Tom Fleming of University College London and his colleague Meg Russell, the director of the constitution unit there, said of this Lords amendment:

“Requiring prior Commons approval for an early general election places some check on the executive, while reducing the likelihood of either the monarch or the courts being embroiled in damaging political disputes.”

They are right, but the problem for Tom Fleming and Meg Russell is in believing or hoping that that this Executive would welcome having checks being placed on their power, be they parliamentary or judicial, because they simply do not.

[John Redwood]

Can the hon. Member explain why Opposition parties in this House are so keen to prevent there being an early election? I thought Oppositions welcomed early elections.

[Brendan O’Hara]

It is very witty to frame this debate in those terms, but I think the right hon. Gentleman is missing the point. This is not about the power to hold a general election; this is about the power being ceded from this place to the Executive and what the Executive choose to do with that power when they get it. I will come on to what their powers could if that happens.

By opposing this Lords amendment, the Government are saying that the decision to dissolve this Parliament and call an election would rest entirely with the Prime Minister, and that that could be done without any parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever and in the absence of any judicial oversight. I suspect that many people watching our proceedings will be surprised to see that the Government are so opposed to the Lords amendment given that it is so limited and that all it seeks is a simple majority in this House.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Is it not strange that Conservative Members who we have had to listen to banging on and on for years about Parliament being sovereign and Parliament having control are now willing to cede that control to the Executive for cheap political gain?

[Brendan O’Hara]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I suspect he may have been reading my speech earlier, because I will come to that issue shortly.

This Government are determined that the Prime Minister, without consultation with or approval from this House and free of the threat of legal challenge, can call a snap general election when it is politically expedient for him so to do. Regardless of what is happening at home or abroad, basically, electoral calculus and the position of the governing party at the time will decide when we have a general election. It is wrong, and I believe it is unacceptable in a modern democracy.

Of course, as my hon. Friend says, a great irony here is that the very limited check that the Government will vote down this evening will be voted down by people who were elected on a promise that this House would take back control. Well, they should realise that they are not taking back control; they are surrendering control. The collective outrage displayed at the general election of 2019 about the perceived emasculation of this Parliament by Brussels and the European Union—they were absolutely determined to restore the sovereignty of what they like to call the mother of Parliaments—is going to look rather hollow when, at the first time of asking, they vote to take powers away from this legislature and hand them over to the Executive. I hope that when they go through the Lobby tonight, they understand that this is not taking back control. Voting with the Government this evening is about this House handing control to the Executive and about abdicating responsibility to the Executive.

At the risk of adding a note of discord, let us have a look at who we will be handing those increased executive powers to. They will be given to a Prime Minister who has illegally prorogued Parliament, who sought to purge his party of all but his most loyal followers, and who had to remove the Whip from a long-standing and highly respected Member simply for being chosen to head a Committee over his preferred candidate. We will be giving greater executive power to a Prime Minister who, in defiance of the security services, ennobled the son of a former KGB officer turned billionaire Russian oligarch, a Prime Minister whose career three weeks ago was hanging by a thread and who has been revealed to be up to his neck in dirty Russian money, and a Prime Minister who is currently under investigation by the Metropolitan police.

If Conservative Members vote to defeat this Lords amendment tonight, that is the character of the man to whom this House will be handing even greater executive power. I advise them to think very carefully about their decision, because this Lords amendment is there to protect the role of the House of Commons, to avoid executive overreach and, ultimately, to protect democracy.

[John Redwood]

Opposition parties are struggling a bit with this idea of democracy, are they not? Taking back control was to have control by the people and for the people, and offering the people an early general election so that they could choose an effective Government when a Parliament was logjammed, hopeless and not prepared to govern with clarity and passion was the right thing to do. I just cannot understand why Labour and the SNP are still queuing up to defend the indefensible, and to say that because they may well be faced again with a situation in which they do not dare face the electors, they need some kind of legal rigmarole and manipulation of votes in a balanced or damaged Parliament to thwart the popular will yet again. “Never let the people make the decision,” they say: it must be contained within Parliament, even when a Parliament has obviously failed, as it did when it could not implement the wishes of the British people over the great Brexit referendum.

I want assurances from the Minister that this new policy will protect the Crown—the Queen—from the difficult business of politics. I think the Minister’s version of it is better than the version from the other place. Of course, it must keep the courts out. There is nothing more political than the decision about when we go to an election and when we give the people their power back and the right to make that fundamental choice. It is a choice that now can mean something, because we do not have to keep on accepting a whole load of European laws that we have no great role in making. Again, we need that absolute guarantee that we will have this freedom so that that can happen.

Those who say that they do not want the Prime Minister to have this much power have surely been in the House long enough to know that, while the Prime Minister has considerable power from his or her office, they are also buffeted and challenged every day by a whole series of pressures in this place and outside. If a leader of a party with a majority wanted an early election that their supporters did not want, I suspect that that would get sorted out without an early election. So we are only talking about what happens when a Government have lost their majority and the Prime Minister is doing his or her best to govern as a minority. We get the extraordinary position we got when the whole Opposition wanted to gang up to thwart the public making a choice, but did not want to govern. That was totally unacceptable, and the Opposition should hear the message from the doorsteps in the 2019 election. The public wanted a Parliament with a Government who could govern, so they decided to choose one. Those who sought to block it made themselves more unpopular, and they showed that they do not understand the fundamental point of democracy that, when Parliament lets the people down, the people must be able to choose a new and more effective Parliament.

Oral Answers to Questions

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The whole House will want to join me in thanking Colin Bell and wishing him a very happy 101st birthday.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Q10. People across these islands have displayed remarkable generosity, including in Argyll and Bute, where Oban Helps Ukraine has been overwhelmed by donations of money, clothes and offers of shelter. Sadly, the Government’s reluctance to allow fleeing women and children to come here lags far behind the desire of the people here to provide them with a roof and a bed. Does not the Prime Minister fear that, when this war is concluded, and despite whatever else they may have done, his Government will stand accused of lacking the one thing that the Ukrainian people needed most: basic humanity?

[The Prime Minister]

I really do not think that that question reflects the views of people around the world. Nor does it reflect reality because this Government have done more than any other European country to support people by way of direct bilateral humanitarian aid, and we have two very generous schemes for allowing people to come to this country. This is a Government who believe in welcoming people fleeing from zones of conflict.

[Brendan O'Hara]

indicated dissent.

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Member shakes his head. Look at our record. Look at what we have done just in the last two years. He should be proud of what we have done.