Standards in Public Life

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Caroline Lucas

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I pass my sincere thanks to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) for bringing to the House this very important motion on the need to implement, quickly and in full, the recommendations made by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which found four areas of particular concern that required significant reform.

Given the time constraints, I will limit my remarks to what I consider to be the most pressing issue: the ministerial code, which, under this Government, has hardly been worth the paper it was written on, and the role of the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests. I can assure the House that if it divides this afternoon, the SNP will support the motion; if anything, the issue has been given even greater urgency as a result of the hurried, self-preserving changes that the Prime Minister made to the ministerial code in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Sue Gray report.

Of course, the Government have tried to spin the changes that they introduced as being in line with what was recommended in the report, but we all know that the changes made to the ministerial code last week were made to protect the Prime Minister’s personal position, and to change the rules governing behaviour ahead of the upcoming inquiry by the Privileges Committee. He appears to have viewed the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life as a smörgåsbord of suggested reforms, from which he could choose those that suited him and leave out those he did not much fancy.

Surely if this was a genuine attempt at a fresh start, if the Prime Minister wanted us to believe that he had truly been “humbled” by the Sue Gray report, and if he wanted the public to believe that he had changed, he would have accepted the committee’s recommendations in full, particularly this recommendation:

“The Independent Adviser should be able to initiate investigations, determine findings of breaches, and a summary of their findings should be published in a timely manner.”

Rather, the Prime Minister has decreed that his independent ethics adviser will not be given any such powers, and will instead have to seek the Prime Minister’s permission before launching an investigation into possible ministerial misconduct.

In picking and choosing those bits of the report that suit him, the Prime Minister has, understandably and rightly, been accused of rigging the system and moving the goalposts, simply to get himself off the inconvenient hook on which he has been caught. Those on the Government Benches need to understand that the optics of this are absolutely dreadful—but then again, when has that ever been a concern to this Prime Minister of an increasingly authoritarian Government, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be allergic to scrutiny, on issues ranging from Prorogation to the awarding of PPE contracts?

On 25 May, in response to the publication of Sue Gray’s withering and damning report on the Prime Minister’s conduct and the toxic culture he allowed to fester in Downing Street, he stood at the Dispatch Box and told this House:

“I apologised when the revelations emerged, and I continue to apologise. I repeat that I am humbled by what has happened”—[Official Report, 25 May 2022; Vol. 715, c. 299.]

His humility and contrition, if they were ever there at all, lasted all of 48 hours, because the ink was hardly dry on Hansard’s report of the Prime Minister’s grovelling mea culpa before he was brazenly changing the ministerial code, not to strengthen parliamentary standards, to increase transparency and accountability or to rebuild the shattered public trust in this Parliament—not a bit of it—but in a way that would afford him greater protection from this Parliament and from scrutiny, and entrench even greater powers in his hands. With the Prime Minister having been publicly humiliated in the Sue Gray report and forced to pay a fixed penalty notice for breaking his own laws, and with an investigation by the Privileges Committee hanging over him, one would have thought, or hoped, that a period of self-reflection and humility would have been in order, but sadly not. Once again, his instinct for self-preservation came to the fore, and he watered down the ministerial code to save his own skin.

Had anyone else done that, we would have been shocked, aghast and disbelieving at such a lack of good faith—but were any of us really that shocked? Apart from the 211 unfortunate, gullible souls on the Conservative Benches, were any of us that surprised at what he did? Probably not, because we, and increasingly the public, know the character of this man, and they can see that there is no one and nothing that he will not bring down in his desperation to cling on to power. From the day he assumed office, we have seen the Prime Minister dismantle, degrade, debase and demean standards in public life.

This crisis has been long in the making, because the bigger problem is that there are no real rules. There is only the expectation that those in power will adhere to a code of behaviour based on personal integrity and common decency, and the whole system is all hung on a vague concept of individual honour. Of course, that all falls apart when a powerful individual decides that they will not behave with decency and honour, and matters are made considerably worse when it turns out that the person at the very top lacks integrity, is devoid of a sense of shame, and completely lacks a moral compass. What then happens, as we are discovering, is that the system of ensuring standards of behaviour in public life falls apart, and there is very little anyone can do about it. The sad truth is that if someone at the very top of Government is so thick-skinned that they do not see being fined by the police or publicly eviscerated in a report about their personal behaviour as a resignation issue, and decides to tough it out until the news cycle inevitably moves on, then it appears that there is almost nothing we can do about it.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. Does he agree that if the Prime Minister —any Prime Minister—can always simply bail out a ministerial colleague, even if they have been shown to have clearly broken the ministerial code, that undermines not only the code and the role of the independent adviser, but the role of all of us? We are all besmirched by the same sense that we cannot get our own house in order, and that is damaging to democracy and to the parliamentary and political system.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I absolutely agree. The system has to change, and that change has to start with us in this House. When the problem is staring us in the face, and when we know that what we see is wrong, then unless we act, we become complicit—we become part of the problem. I believe that history will judge us on whether we opposed or facilitated this dismantling of democracy.

Of course, in Scotland we know all about the dismantling of democracy. Despite the Tories not winning an election in Scotland since 1955, yet another Tory Government are imposing policies on us that we rejected. They are led by a Prime Minister whose unpopularity is plumbing such new depths that they will have to find new ways of measuring them. Interestingly, there are signs in Scotland that even his side is turning on him; most Scottish Tories are now struggling to defend his behaviour. As former MSP Adam Tomkins wrote recently,

“When a government asserts that the laws do not apply to it—that assertion offends not only the law itself, but our very idea of constitutional government.”

Even the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the noble Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, told Channel 4 a few weeks ago that it was clear that the Prime Minister had lied to Parliament, and his position was therefore untenable. With characteristic steely determination, even the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), decided that the Prime Minister had to go—or maybe he did not have to go; or perhaps he should go, but maybe not right now; or maybe at some unspecified point in the future, he might have to think about resigning. Safe to say, it was not a ringing endorsement from the hon. Member for Moray; but then again, maybe it was—who knows? After all, we are talking about a man with more flip-flops than a seaside shoe shop.

But regardless of the hon. Member for Moray’s many different deeply considered and principled positions on the future of the Prime Minister, this whole sorry episode has made it clearer than ever that Scotland’s future lies far away from this place and its never-ending merry-go-round of scandal where standards in public life are shredded and burned by a rogue Prime Minister. Scotland deserves a better democracy than the charade that is currently being foisted on us by Westminster, and the offer to change it once and for all will, I believe, prove irresistible when we have our independence referendum.