Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Nadine Dorries

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, because not giving way is the maxim by which I live my life. I totally understand his point about the coalition. However, it has been reported tonight that the Prime Minister and the Chief Whip will not be voting for these amendments because the Liberal Democrats have asked them not to. How does that benefit government? How is that principled?

[Crispin Blunt]

I have absolutely no idea. The Prime Minister is trying to run a coalition. He has to keep within this coalition our colleagues who are helping us to govern and delivering a majority in voting for taxes that make for some form of fiscally sensible arrangement. Of course there are going to be grubby deals—they have to be done. My hon. Friend has possibly given an example, although I have no idea of whether what she says is accurate.

The proposals by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park open us up to the possibility of being subject to recall all the time. That would make it immensely more difficult to support a Government in maintaining a coherent programme. There is a reason why Governments do the difficult things in the first few years of the Parliament: it is because they know they are going to be unpopular.

Part of my hon. Friend’s argument was to say, “The key thing here is about public confidence.” I accept that there is a lack of public confidence in this institution; that is why the Government have finally got round to proposing this measure. However, we must ask ourselves whether that will be addressed by our cowering yet lower in the face of it, or whether we should get off our knees, have some institutional self-confidence, and make the case that we are, in fact, regulated to an enormous extent as Members of Parliament. We have the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the criminal law—which, if we are convicted, will result in our being thrown out—the Standards and Privileges Committee, the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and all the rest. An enormous number of bodies now oversee this place and our behaviour.

The question is whether this Bill is trying to address a real, practical problem about our behaviour, individually or collectively. The answer, I suggest, is no. Is there a reputational issue? Of course there is, and we have to work out the right solution to that. The Government’s proposals, which try to find a limited way of doing something to create the principle of recall, are not right and do not address the issue practically, while the proposals by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park are frankly dangerous. I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) and my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) about the dangers that they open up. Those arguments were also made by the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones).