Recall of MPs Bill

Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

Oh yes, I know all about that, because they tried to get rid of me on two or three occasions. I know all about reselection. But that, in a sense, is not the point. It is for the electors, at the end of the day, to make the decision, and they have to take into account the record, and the assiduity, of the Member of Parliament.

When I was canvassing I used to say, “No Member of Parliament is ever a mirror of all your beliefs and prejudices—and everybody has both. You have to decide which candidate is better able—or best able, if there are more than two candidates—to represent you. You have to decide which is the one with whom you can identify on more fronts than not”. Constituents will take into account not only the record of the Member, but his attendance record.

In one sense I sympathise with the motive behind the six-month provision. But if a Member has not attended for six months, why is that the case? Somebody has already cited the Sinn Fein Members of the other place. They have been legitimately elected, and they should not be illegitimately ejected because they have done neither more nor less than they promised to do.

[Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes (Con)]

In that precise context, does my noble friend not recall the occasion when Bernadette Devlin crossed the Floor and hit Reginald Maudling, and was not expelled from the House but was defeated at the next election?

[Lord Cormack]

I well remember that: I was sitting just behind when Reginald Maudling made his Statement. It was after Bloody Sunday, and it was a moment of high drama and great tragedy. A diminutive figure came dashing across the House and started to belabour the Home Secretary. As she did so, one of his Front-Bench colleagues grabbed at that slight figure, and Lord Home—Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he was in the House of Commons—said, “Just you be careful what you do with a lady”. I shall never forget that. It is one of the vignettes I often recall. She was motivated by high emotion and did something that truly she should not have done. I remember a Labour Member punching Jeremy Thorpe when the result of the vote to go into the Common Market was declared. The Member was restrained, but was anything done? Of course not. At moments of high drama, things that should not be done sometimes are done; but subjecting such MPs to the sort of quasi-judicial process that this series of amendments propose—in good faith, I know—is just not on. Although it is, as I say yet again, for the House of Commons to determine its rules, we—particularly those of us with long experience in that place—have the right not to throw this measure out but to say, “Hold on a minute”. I hope that in the next Parliament there will be—to use the awful American jargon—a revisiting of this Bill.