Virtual Participation in Debate

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment (a) in line 5:

Leave out from “Members” to “to” in line 8 and insert “with a public health reason relating to the pandemic”.

Welcome to the Chair, Mr Speaker. It is good to see you in your rightful place. I suspect that I am not going to please everyone, because I have just had an email from a Philip Toler, who says: “Why do you constantly stand up in Parliament?” [Interruption.] Oh, hang on, I seem to have united the House with that. He goes on: “Why do you not express your appreciation of the hard-working Prime Minister and all his Ministers? They are only trying their best. The Government was voted in by 95% of the population and you should therefore show some respect.” [Interruption.] Sometimes the vote in the Rhondda is a bit like that, but I do not think it is quite the same. That sounds a bit like a Trump version of how elections are run.

It is a terrible shame that this has become such a scratchy debate. There is no need for that, in all honesty, because there is a very simple issue at hand: the Government think one thing and quite a lot of Members of the House think a different thing, and we should be able to resolve that without all shouting and screaming at one another. I regret the way that we have ended up with the debate today, because many of us have repeatedly said to the Government, to the Whips and to the Leader of the House that the simplest way of having a proper debate on this is for the Government to timetable a chunk of time for a debate with a vote at the end of it, so that the House can decide. Unfortunately, that is not what the Government decided to do. They decided to table the motion on nod or nothing, without consulting with the Opposition Whips beforehand. Nod or nothing is there for consensual motions. The whole point of nod or nothing is that if the whole of the House does not agree then it does not go through. It is not nodded through, so we get nothing. I must say that when the Leader of the House made his response to the urgent question more than a week ago now, I had the impression that the motion he was going to table was one that the whole of the House would have been able to live with. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. What happened was that we had the nod or nothing games on Wednesday night and then again on Thursday. We have had a version of them again today.

Today has been the oddest of the lot, because the Government Whips put a whole load of speakers into lots of debates earlier on in the day. The Leader of the House, as I said earlier, told my Select Committee, the Committee on Standards, this morning that he had allocated time for two very important debates we would have tonight on bullying in the House of Commons. He said that we were going to have those debates and then he did not move the motions for them. I think it is a shame that we are debating this motion, rather than dealing with bullying in the Palace of Westminster. It has taken far too long to try to solve some of those issues. Members were asking earlier, “What will voters think watching this debate?” They will think, “Why haven’t you sorted out the bullying issues in Parliament?” They will not be worrying so much about this debate.

It is a shame we have got to where we are now. I say again that the easiest thing in the world for the Government to do is table a motion on the Order Paper in the normal way and to allow a chunk of time for it to be debated, so that all hon. Members can be notified that the motion is be happening at such-and-such a time and they can take their own view.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It appears to me that the House is now in a wholly unsatisfactory position. We stand to have a Division soon in relation to House business, which, by convention, is not normally whipped, and many Members who are not here will have given their proxies to their own party Whips. It is difficult to see how any view expressed by the House at 7 o’clock will be genuinely representative of the views of all the House.

[Chris Bryant]

I will come on to that point later, but there is a prior point which is really important. It is vital to the way we do our business as a Parliament that we have some business which is not subject to the Whip. Obviously, there are conscience clauses. One could argue that every single vote we ever cast in Parliament is a conscience clause, but there are specific matters that have historically been treated in the House as conscience clauses, such as abortion, gay marriage and so on. Traditionally, there has been a very strong view that when it comes to how the House does its own business and orders things, it is not a matter for the Whips.

Now, some of my best friends are Whips. Some of my very best friends are Whips. [Interruption.] Yes, all right, some of my next-door neighbours are Whips. They play an absolutely vital role in enabling the business of the House to proceed. They are therefore, in the main, for the greater convenience of the House. However, there is some business that we should just decide, because in our own conscience, out of our own thinking, that is what we have decided. I think that this matter, in the middle of a pandemic, really should be a matter where our own personal decision is the only thing that counts. It seems odd to me that we have ended up in a situation where a Government Whip can have more than 240 proxy votes—the Opposition Whip, too—yet lots and lots of people cannot take part in the debate. If anything, it should be the other way around.

I want to come specifically to the Government motion and why I have a problem with it, as it is worded. First of all, it says we must be

“certified by a medical practitioner”.

Frankly, I think medical practitioners have better things to do at the moment than to be signing people off as “clinically extremely vulnerable”. Secondly, the idea that we should have to present some kind of certificate—I do not know in what form—presumably to you, Mr Speaker, to prove that somebody has been certified as clinical extremely vulnerable by a medical practitioner, puts you in an invidious position, because you have then to decide. Effectively, you become the doctor of the House, deciding whether people are or are not clinically extremely vulnerable. I do not have any problem with all those people who are clinically extremely vulnerable taking part in debates. I think they should have been allowed to do so for some time already. I am not upset about saying that I have had several letters from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care telling me that I should be shielding—I am not sure whether this is his way of trying to prevent me from taking part in debates. He is not directly addressing this to me—as far as he knows, it has gone out to 300,000 people, or whatever —but the truth is that my doctor says that I am not clinically extremely vulnerable and there is no need for me to shield, not least because I completed my treatment for my cancer back in February. I just think that this is an inappropriate way of us dealing with Members.

The second point is that there are many people who have responsibilities for other people in their households for all sorts of different reasons, as many and as various as the stars in the sky, no doubt. I simply think that it is invidious, therefore, to draw the line in one particular place. I say to the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown)—he knows I have enormous respect for him—that, on this occasion, I just think that it would be perfectly simple for him to vote for the amendment and then we would be able to get both the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan) and the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) able to participate in debates.