Committee on Standards: Decision of the House

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

I see that the Leader of the House is in the House, so it is a surprise to see the Minister for the Cabinet Office at the Dispatch Box today. He and I have faced each other across the Dispatch Box many times, and it is always a pleasure, but I am sure he, like me, wishes that his days as the nightwatchman were a thing of the past. Defending valiantly against hostile bowling on a sticky wicket of his Prime Minister’s creation—it is as if 2019 never ended.

That is because last week the Prime Minister damaged himself, and, despite the bravery of some Conservative Members, he damaged his party; but most importantly, he damaged our democracy. We are fortunate in this country: voters may not always agree with politicians—they often do not—but they do trust that disagreements are sincere, that their representatives are acting in the way that they think is in the public interest, and that we can resolve our disagreements in debate and at the ballot box. But when the Prime Minister gives the green light to corruption, he corrodes that trust; when he says that the rules to stop vested interests do not apply to his friends, he corrodes that trust; and when he deliberately undermines those charged with stopping corruption, he corrodes that trust—and that is exactly what the Prime Minister did last week.

Now, today, the Prime Minister does not even have the decency to come here either to defend what he did or to apologise for his action. Rather than repairing the damage that he has done, the Prime Minister is running scared. When required to lead, he has chosen to hide. His concern, as always, is self-preservation, not the national interest. It is time for everyone in this House, whatever their party, to draw a line and to send a message to the Prime Minister: enough is enough; we will not stand by while he trashes our democracy.

The case of the former Member for North Shropshire is simple. Everyone in this House has enormous sympathy for the tragic circumstances in which he lost his wife. His pain and his anguish are unimaginable. I wish to express my condolences to him, as I did at the time. The Committee on Standards rightly took those awful circumstances into account when considering his conduct. There was a serious and robust process. He had prior notice of the charges against him. He had legal advisers with him. He was invited to appeal against the commissioner’s findings in writing and in person, and he did so. The findings were clear—

“an egregious case of paid advocacy.”

He took money to lobby Ministers. That is against the rules, as it is in any functioning democracy, and it is corrupt. The Prime Minister should have told the former Member for North Shropshire that the right thing to do was to accept his punishment. His duty of care demanded that he do that. His duty to defend standards demanded that he do that. Basic decency demanded that he do that. Instead, the British people were let down, and the former Member for North Shropshire was let down, used as a pawn in an extraordinary attack on our commissioner for standards. We had threats to have money taken away from schools, hospitals and high streets unless Members voted to undermine the commissioner; Ministers sent out on the airwaves the morning after the vote to call for her to consider her position; and a sham committee proposed so that the Government could set the judge and jury for future cases. This was a deliberate course of action, but the Government were caught off guard by the public outcry and they have climbed down.

This was not a tactical mistake or an innocent misjudgment swiftly corrected by a U-turn—it was the Prime Minister’s way of doing business, a pattern of behaviour. When the Prime Minister’s adviser on the ministerial code found against the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister kept the Home Secretary and forced out the adviser. When the Electoral Commission investigated the Conservative party, the Prime Minister threatened to shut it down. When the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards looked into the Prime Minister’s donations, the Prime Minister tried to take her down. Government corruption—there is no other word for it.

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

Will the Leader of the Opposition give way?

[Keir Starmer]

I will in just a moment. It is said that the Prime Minister does not believe that the rules apply to him, but it is worse than that. He absolutely knows that the rules do apply to him; his strategy is to devalue the rules so that they do not matter to anyone any more and to go after those charged with enforcing the rules so that breaking the rules has less consequence. That way, politics becomes contaminated. Cynicism replaces confidence and trust. The taunt that politicians are all in it for themselves becomes accepted wisdom and, with that, the Prime Minister hopes to drag us all into the gutter with him. No way. It only serves to convince people that things cannot get better, that Government cannot improve people’s lives, and that progress is not possible because politics does not work.

In the right hands, used in the right way and for the right reasons, politics can work, because politics can be a noble cause to build a better country and a better world. For some, it is also a great personal sacrifice. The plaques in this House to Airey Neave and Jo Cox, and the empty seat where just weeks ago Sir David Amess sat, are testament to that price. If we are to honour their memory, we have to defeat the politics of cynicism propagated by this Prime Minister.

[Mr Carmichael]

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for giving way. One of the rules we have always observed in this place is that we do not whip House business. Just about everything that has happened since last week can be traced back to the determination of the Government to whip that. Does he share my concern that we have heard nothing from those on the Treasury Bench today to say that, if we on this side of the House participate in future exploration of the rules, there will be no repetition of whipping the votes either for or against when those measures return to this House? Indeed, without that undertaking, it would be very difficult for anyone on this side to accept that what we hear from those on the Treasury Bench is a good faith exercise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alberto Costa]

I want to move on, as other Members want to speak.

I believe that there is an important role for the Committee on Standards, in particular with its lay people. I think that it ought to be a Committee that drafts and amends the code of conduct and the associated rules. I do not think that the Committee on Standards is the appropriate body for me or my 13 colleagues to adjudicate on Members against whom a complaint has been brought. But I would go further: I think that the commissioner needs to be empowered and that the rules need to be clarified. The commissioner should have the same role as she does with the independent expert panel, which is that she investigates and presents her case to the panel, but importantly, she does not advise the judges on that panel. Also, we need to amalgamate the IEP and bring in more former High Court judges to help us in this process, to ensure that Members of the highest governing body of the United Kingdom—this House of Commons—are disciplined by people who have the requisite judicial experience when it comes to regulatory and disciplinary matters.

[Mr Carmichael]

I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for the independent complaints and grievance procedures. Does he now think, with the benefit of hindsight, that he was wrong to vote against them?

[Alberto Costa]

I want this process to move forward. I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Gentleman; we have worked together on a cross-party basis on a number of things. I am trying to give the House the benefit of my experience. I was the only lawyer on that Committee until recently. If Members do not want a system that is adjudicated upon by the best people in our land, they are not just doing themselves ill service; they are doing their constituents ill service as well.

I want to wrap up, because I know that many Members want to speak. I say once again that the lay people on the Committee on Standards and the commissioner are people of the utmost integrity, but being of the utmost integrity does not mean that they are suitable for adjudicating on disciplinary matters affecting Members of the House of Commons. Mr Speaker, I invite you to assist this House in coming together and moving towards the process that we rightly adopted for the IEP, in amalgamating the IEP and in having a panel of very senior people with judicial experience, so that we never again have the situation that we had last week, when a Member felt that he did not receive the proper system that he felt entitled to receive. I stand by the comments I made in the report—my name was on that report—and I look forward to coming back to the House with a draft of an amended code of conduct and a new process. I also look forward to hearing the Chairman of the Standards Committee finally confirming to this House that, at almost every Committee meeting, he has listened to my concerns about process.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I thank you, Mr Speaker, for accepting the application for today’s debate from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain). It is, unfortunately, very timely and necessary, and I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing it, and on the manner in which she introduced it.

I listened to your statement before the debate, Mr Speaker, when you spoke about the best traditions of the House, and my mind went back to a conversation that I had with a colleague not long after I was elected to this House. It was basically to the effect that the day anybody found me standing here making a speech about the best traditions of the House, they could take me out and shoot me because my useful life would be over at that point. The House will therefore appreciate, I hope, that I have picked my words and what I am about to say with extreme caution.

I do not think that the convention of not whipping House business is the best tradition of the House, but it is certainly a very important one. I do not know whose decision it was to whip the motion and amendment last week, but it was a seriously colossal error of judgment. They have damaged the authority of the Prime Minister, they have damaged the credibility of the Leader of the House, and they have seriously undermined the ability of the Government Whips Office to do the job with which it is charged. Some might say that that is a silver lining, but the cloud, which is the damage to Parliament as a whole, is otherwise impenetrably dark.

As others have said, we now need to move on and look at what we do to go ahead. I take the point of the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) that we need to consider questions of process. I remain to be convinced about the need for an appeal, but given that this is a committee and not a court, and the process is not informed by legal practitioners, I see the argument for there being a fresh pair of eyes on such matters. If, however, all we do in the process about which the Leader of the House was speaking last week is tinker around with a few procedural matters, we might as well not bother. That is simply not equal to the task before us of restoring public confidence in the House’s ability to deal with its own standards and discipline.

On those right hon. and hon. Members who have outside interests or second incomes, I do not favour an outright ban on second jobs, as that would have the unintended consequence of making more people see this as an occupation from which there would never be any departure. The idea that people can come here for a term or two and then return to whatever profession or occupation they had beforehand is good and sensible, but this weekend I saw reports about the time given by some right hon. and hon. Members, and the money they received in return, which I think is simple indefensible. As we look to what we do in future, we must consider that, and at very least we must have a cap on such matters.

Let me return to the point that I made in my intervention on the Leader of the Opposition. If the Government are approaching this as a good faith exercise, we should hear a commitment from the Treasury Bench that not only will there be no repetition of whipping House business, but that when any proposals are brought forward they will give us a cast-iron guarantee that Members will not be whipped. When you are in a hole, stop digging. The Government look as if they have stopped digging, but I still get the sense that somehow they cast rather envious and wistful glances in the direction of the shovel.

[Several hon. Members rose—]