Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Soley and Lord Finkelstein

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Finkelstein]

I am absolutely suggesting that.

[Lord Soley]

I intervene very briefly with a very short contribution. It follows what the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, is saying. The flaw in his argument is something he said some minutes ago, when he said any employer would have these powers in a private company. The mistake he is making is to assume that Parliament is like a corporate body. That assumption underlying his speech is a serious flaw because Parliament is and must be different. It must answer only to the electorate. The whole thrust for the past few hundred years in this country is that we have general elections when Members are elected to do their job as an elected representative, and that is it. We have already done too much of this—perhaps the noble Lord is following a tradition that has unfortunately developed in recent years where we are constraining the power of Parliament and treating it as though it is a corporate body, when in fact it is not.

[Lord Finkelstein]

Naturally, I am not against the power of Parliament to do dignified things. I am against allowing Parliament to do some of the things that this Bill would provide redress to the electorate to do. The power of recall does not belong to anybody else except to the electorate. The electorate will determine whether somebody is recalled. The electorate will determine the result of the by-election, and nobody else. The relation to Parliament, of course, must be independent on political grounds and on political issues. But the Bill proposes limited circumstances which have real effect, and have taken place—as in the examples I gave suggested, where Members of Parliament have remained in the House without challenge by the electorate. This Bill would enable the electorate to have the powers they ought to have.