Strengthening Standards in Public Life

Anthony Browne Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire]

It pains me to have to remind the Leader of the House that Government Members seem to think that it is all right to try to change the rules to get someone off the hook, but not to change the rules to ensure that someone is properly sanctioned; I still call on the Government to deal with that situation.

We do not need to accept this situation. We can take the first step to changing it, and our motion today would do so. The public deserve more than where we are at the moment. They deserve a Government who will act in their best interests and in the national interest. I believe that that is a Labour Government. The public have shown that they want reform and reform is what the Labour party will do. We must never be complacent. We must protect and strengthen standards. We must have a democracy that the British public are proud of, and that people trust and believe in.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

If a Labour Government would be so keen on reforming the system, why did the last Labour Government do nothing to reform lobbying during their 13 years in power, and why did Labour vote against the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I can go back to the list of things that Labour did: the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000; the ministerial code; freedom of information; public registers of donations and national election spending; the Electoral Commission. The clear difference here is that a Labour Government did not rip up the rulebook when one of their own was found wanting. This Government did. They did it two weeks ago and they tried to keep going. Only now that they are finding that the public do not like it are they being dragged here, kicking and screaming. But, unfortunately, from the reaction of Government Members, it looks to me like they have no intention of voting for our motion tonight. If they have no intention of doing so, let them come clean in their speeches as to why.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I am speaking today not because I take any pleasure in taking part in this debate, but because I truly believe that strengthening standards in public life is one of the most important issues facing us. I actually welcome the fact that the Labour party has secured this important debate.

I should start with a declaration of interest in that I used to be a Lobby journalist. I was chief political correspondent of The Times, and one of the “feral beasts”, as Tony Blair used to call us. I used to write stories about standards in this place when rows erupted. Standards rows are very good for political journalists—they give us good work and get us on the front pages—but they are very bad for trust in democracy. I think it is very important that we do everything we can to raise standards to make sure that Lobby correspondents and political journalists have nothing to write about in this place.

There is something else I learned when I was Europe editor of The Times and was responsible for covering European politics, and this comes back to the points my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) was making. A former Labour Cabinet Minister—let us call Peter Mandelson, because that was his name—who had resigned not just once, but twice, from the Cabinet over financial-related scandals, got appointed by Tony Blair as a European Commissioner. He came to give evidence to the European Parliament, and all the journalists from other countries came up to me really excited to know why this man had had to resign from Cabinet not just once, but twice. I told them why—we do not need to rehearse that here—and those from lots of different countries said to me, “What, you mean he got no personal gain from public funds? Then it is not corruption, so why did he have to resign?” Even the German journalists, and we think of German politics as having very high standards, said that there was no way somebody doing what he had done would have to resign in Germany. So we do have very high standards in public life here already. We are very good at talking ourselves down as a country, and I think there is a risk that we unfairly undermine trust in politics.

It is important that we have high standards, and it is important that we have even higher standards. One of the things I welcome about this debate is that there is actually cross-party consensus that we need to raise standards in public life. The motion brought forward by the Labour party and the amendment brought forward by the Prime Minister are, in substance, very similar, although there are differences that I will come to.

I truly support recommendation 10 in the 2018 Committee on Standards in Public Life report, “MPs’ Outside Interests”, on banning payment and jobs for political and parliamentary consultancy. That is because we cannot be a gamekeeper and a poacher at the same time. When we are in this House—deciding what to say in debates, deciding what meetings to have, going to meetings with Ministers and so on—we are serving only one paymaster, and that is our constituents. There should be no conflict in our role.

We cannot have a situation in which MPs have discussions with a Minister—I have had a couple of meetings with Ministers already today—where they talk to us about different policy areas and things they are doing, and MPs then go and sell that information to some outside interest. When we are here acting as MPs, we should serve only our constituents. Actually, I am sympathetic to having outside roles, for the arguments that others have rehearsed, but I absolutely agree that we should stop political and parliamentary consultancy.

I also support recommendation 1, which the Prime Minister has called for, which is that MPs should not have outside work that is not within reasonable limits. That is common sense. The question mark with both recommendation 10 and recommendation 1 is actually how we define it, and various hon. Members have talked about that. I think it is absolutely right that this goes to the parliamentary Committee on Standards—its Chair, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), spoke earlier—to define the real details and get cross-party consensus on how we do that in a way that is completely enforceable and reasonable.

I have mentioned that I have some reservations about the Labour motion. One is that it does not mention recommendation 1, while the Government amendment includes recommendation 1 and recommendation 10. In fact, the Labour party motion covers only recommendation 10, and actually talks only about parliamentary consultancy, not political consultancy. Although people may think they are the same; they are actually different, and we do not want to clamp down just on parliamentary consultancy and not political consultancy. That is why I fully support the Prime Minister’s amendment, which I think is a lot more robust and more wide-ranging. It has two different recommendations, not just one, and also covers political consultancy, and that is why I will support it.