Principles of Democracy and the Rights of the Electorate

Bob Seely Excerpts

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Dowden]

I say to the hon Gentleman that a deal was put forward by the last Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), and I voted for that deal three times. I do not remember the hon. Gentleman being in the Lobby with me.

Since that moment of unity on the outcome of the general election campaign, parliamentarians have got stuck. We have talked endlessly about this. There have been hours of debates, motions, votes and Committees, and extraordinary parliamentary manoeuvres on all sides. Three whole years have ticked by, and while we have been double-checking the finer points of “Erskine May”, the public have been wondering what on earth we have been doing in this place.

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

The Minister has talked about the spirit of unity. Will he join me in congratulating the 11 members of Her Majesty’s major Opposition party who are attending this debate? Having forced us back after demanding that Prorogation should not happen, the rest have all gone home.

[Oliver Dowden]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I remember the cries of outrage on Prorogation and the demands that Parliament should return because we had so much to discuss. Opposition Members were desperate to discuss these things, yet here we are, mid-afternoon on a Thursday, two days in, and I think I can count the number of Labour Members present on the fingers of one hand.

None of us came into Parliament to avoid making decisions, to duck the issues or to indulge ourselves in parliamentary processes, but to the outside world this appears to be exactly what the House is doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I have to say that it has been a pretty bad-natured 24 hours and, as far as I can see, a fairly bad-natured two years, so I will try to make some fairly blunt points, but I will do so in moderated and moderate language.

I do not think I am above anybody, and I am happy to be criticised; actually, I try to judge my own party more harshly and to have higher standards than others, because I think that is a good way to conduct oneself.

I am a big fan of democracy, because my parents’ lives were shaped by tyranny. My British granddad was burned alive in his tank in 1942, killed at the hands of the Nazis, and my German grandmum was killed by the Soviets, so the Nazis killed one of my grandparents and the Soviets killed another. I am lucky that I live in a democracy, and I hope I always respect and appreciate that.

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) talked about threats. I say just for the record—this is not a competition with anybody—that the last threat to my health and safety that had to be reported to the police was last week. I do not make a song and dance about it. I do not make out that I am a victim. I do not use it for political capital. I make sure my staff are okay; we report it to the police; and we crack on. I take is as part of the job, but I do not become a diva about it. At various points in my life—as a foreign correspondent, as a soldier, as a Member of Parliament—I have had people try to kill or harm me, or tell me they are going to kill me or harm me. I am delighted to say that so far they have been unsuccessful, and I am content for that to continue.

As to rules of public debate, I think that public debate should be conducted in good faith. A critical element of that is that those who lose elections and referendums need to respect the results. This Parliament is trying to worm its way out of that fundamental issue of respecting the 2016 mandate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) on her speech, but for me it was simply more of the same: “The European Union vote was not about the European Union.” I think that it was. There is one thing that is worse than that vote for remainers—I am a Brexiteer and am happy to leave—and that is not respecting that vote, because the contempt of the British people for the political classes will simply grow.

I believe that the language of this place needs to be temperate. We have seen, I am afraid to say, months of poisonous and hysterical language—often from the left, but not always—about coups and dictatorships, and a level of personal abuse aimed at this Prime Minister unseen since the days of Mrs Thatcher. [Interruption.] I am happy to give way to the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) if he would like. I have found that language to be entirely corrosive to the public debate.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), whom I admire and think is a decent representative, has talked about knifing her own leader in the front. That is violent imagery. Today, the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) tweeted to Piers Morgan:

“It’s early doors Piers but I say this hand on heart: go”—

eff—

“yourself. You’re a waste of space, air and skin. Trying to use Jo against us whilst encouraging the fascists is shocking even for a scrote like you. You make me sick.”

That is an MP engaging in political debate now. I have seen a lot of the literature that came out of the Labour party conference. There was, “How to get rid of Tom Watson”, who is a “treacherous incumbent”. I will not even begin to talk about the debate on antisemitism.

There is a problem with the left in this country. There is a problem with the hard-Brexit right—not in Parliament, but on the fringes UKIP for sure—but there is a problem with the left about moral purity. Some Opposition Members are seeing that in the deselection campaigns that are being fought against them. We make no such claim of moral purity. For us, politics is not about moral purity; it is about doing the best job we can. Personally, I think people on the other side of the House are generally wrong, but I do not subscribe to them a moral motive; I do not believe they are immoral.

Fundamentally, too much politics in the modern day is about moral purity and finding moral benefit over other people, which I think is profoundly wrong. Respecting each other but thinking that we can do a better job than those on the other side of the House is the way to make progress in a democracy. There is a corrosive debate in the Labour party, which is affecting not only the futures of Opposition Members but politics in general, and it needs to end.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

In Dulwich and West Norwood, 77% of people voted to remain in the EU—the seventh highest pro-remain vote in the country. My constituents are not remoaners; they are not anti-democratic. They are citizens with deeply held and sincere convictions. Yet since June 2016, 77% of my constituents and 48% of voters across the country have been told that we must be quiet and that our views no longer count. We have been told to be silent in the face of the Government’s own evidence that Brexit will harm the UK economy. We have been told to be silent as we raise important questions about the future of scientific research, the supply of medicines, the regulation of chemicals and the future of trade. We have been told to be silent as we raise grave concerns—not discussed at all during the referendum campaign—about the impact of Brexit on the Good Friday agreement and peace in Northern Ireland. We have been told to be silent as we have raised concerns about the increase in hate crime and the anxiety of EU nationals living in our communities.

The continual dismissal and denigration of the views of 48% of UK voters—77% of my constituents—has been extraordinary. It is not how Governments should, or usually do, behave in a democracy.

In 2016, faced with a very narrow result, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) had the opportunity to define Brexit in a way that reached across the divide—in a way that took seriously both the result of the advisory referendum and the concerns of almost half of those who voted about the impact of Brexit on our economy, security, rights and access to medicines. Instead she spent six months saying nothing but “Brexit means Brexit”, while the right of the Tory party, and Nigel Farage, moved into the vacuum and defined Brexit as the hardest, most extreme Brexit possible.

It is a principle of democracy that we all seek to win the argument—that we seek to provide evidence to justify a position, to reassure and persuade those who disagree with us, and ultimately to achieve a mandate to proceed. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead put her Tory-party-facing version of Brexit to the people in 2017, and they took away her majority and her mandate.

In this context, it is no surprise that my constituents’ pro-remain views and their deep fears about what Brexit will mean for them, and for our country as a whole, have only grown and strengthened, these past three years. The Government have done nothing to reassure them; nothing to provide evidence that their concerns are unfounded; nothing to prove that they respect and take seriously their values and their views. Instead we have a Prime Minister who is facing down his opponents with the language of hate, a Government who have failed to provide any assurance that our communities—

[Mr Seely]

I do not quite understand how the hon. Lady can keep talking about the language of hate when I have just given her examples of the abuse that Labour MPs are putting out there about their opponents, and also material from the Labour party conference, which I presume that she may have been at, where she sees the abuse from extremists aimed at moderate Labour party MPs. The abuse is coming from the left.

[Helen Hayes]

To be absolutely clear, the reference to a surrender Bill—the language of “traitors”, the language of “surrender”—is the language of war, and that is being used by our Prime Minister, in an utterly irresponsible and reckless way.

As I was saying, the Government have done nothing to prove that they respect and take seriously the values and views of my constituents. We have a Government who have failed to provide assurance that communities will not face job losses, shortages of food and medicine, and lower environmental standards; and a Government who are prepared to put at risk peace in Northern Ireland, casting aside the Good Friday agreement.

Democracy is a process of governance, not a moment in time. In a context where the Government have failed to reach out, failed to engage and reassure and failed to provide evidence and win the argument, the only option is to allow that process to continue—to hold another vote, not on the same proposition as the first, but on what we now know, to allow people to vote again on whether they have confidence that the Government have been able to negotiate a deal that can secure their future, protecting their jobs and security.

I say this again: my constituents are not remoaners; they are engaged citizens—internationalist and outward-looking in their views and values, worried about their families, their communities and their future, and this Government have ignored, denigrated and failed to reassure and convince them. They deserve better than this failing Government and our reckless, irresponsible Prime Minister. They deserve more democracy, not less. They deserve a people’s vote.