Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: UK Delegation

Debate between John Spellar and Bernard Jenkin

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I pay tribute to the longest-serving member of PACAC, or whatever name it had in previous Parliaments. The hon. Gentleman has been an enormous fund of institutional memory on that Committee, and that is extremely useful. During our inquiry, he pointed out that his party already has a form of elections for its delegates that provides for the complexity of providing gender balance. Some of the objections that have been raised to say that we cannot do this are therefore clearly confounded by the experience of his party.

I think it would be a mistake to say that this episode has brought shame on our country. The hon. Gentleman is right to make comparisons with other countries that do things better. However, the Rules Committee made it clear that people might have misunderstood the confusion of roles that we have in this House whereby the Prime Minister is also leader of the governing party and sits as a parliamentarian. The more classical separation of powers that is expected does not exist in our constitution. That is not a matter of shame for us, but we are now a little behind the times. We should be demonstrating how, in our procedures, we expect the best, and the most open and democratic, practices to be adopted—not from the age of deference but the age of popular democracy.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I, too, commend the Chairman and the Committee for this report. I confess to finding it strange that the Prime Minister should have sought, in a fit of pique, to exclude troublemakers from the delegation to the Council of Europe, because in my time as a Whip we thought that was one of its purposes. Why does the Chairman think that the Prime Minister did not heed the unfortunate experience of Tony Blair and Robin Cook when they disastrously tried to intervene to change the chairmanships of the Transport and Foreign Affairs Committees? Can he explain this case of prime ministerial hubris without any regard to the inevitable arrival of nemesis?

[Mr Jenkin]

Without straying too much into Greek terminology, I think that what Prime Ministers have they tend to want to keep and not give up. There was perhaps a failure of imagination about the effect of what people wanted to do, but that has provided this House with an opportunity to review, to debate, and, I hope, in due course to decide on how to make sure that we bring our procedures into the democratic age.