Recall of MPs Bill

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; I am glad that he has made that point. That will be a crucial part of our consideration not only in Committee but in some of the wider discussion that is happening about the future of the Standards and Privileges Committee. The political membership is contentious in terms of MPs policing ourselves. We could address that by ensuring that the lay membership is genuinely credible with the wider public.

[Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

There has been some discussion about the need to ensure that we have more lay members involved in deciding whether to trigger a recall. Surely the lay members are called constituents, and we should have a mechanism that allows them to decide whether a recall is triggered. They are, after all, the lay members who count most.

[Stephen Twigg]

I know that the hon. Gentleman has campaigned on this issue for a very long time and has a consistent stance that is reflected in his intervention. I am going to set out my thinking on such a proposal in a moment, so if he could be patient I will respond to his point.

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[Mr Jones]

I am sorry, but that is not the point. Expenditure limits can be put on the recall election, but the campaigning in the lead-up to such an election would undermine the representative in getting their constituents—

[Douglas Carswell]

Trust the voters.

[Mr Jones]

This is not about trusting the voters, but about putting influence in the hands of a small group of very wealthy individuals. If the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), with the wealth he has, wanted to shift a Member of Parliament, he could do it.

[Mr Jones]

What happens in practice in the United States is that individuals who take against a policy or a state or national representative can use their tremendous wealth to use a campaign in the lead-up to the recall election to undermine such a representative. The idea that that is somehow empowering the voters is not the case. Recall empowers very wealthy individuals who could then—

[Douglas Carswell]

You don’t trust the voters.

[Mr Jones]

I do trust the electorate. The hon. Gentleman should stop chuntering from a sedentary position. The fact is that recall will give influence over who the Member of Parliament is not to the majority of the electors but to a small group of very wealthy individuals.

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[Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I feel so strongly about recall that I recalled myself. All three established parties pretended that they were in favour of recall, too, and went into the last general election offering voters a right of recall, but four and a half years on that has not happened. They have found time to debate a referendum on the alternative vote system and to talk at length about non-existent Lords reform. We have debated every subject imaginable under the sun, but somehow we have failed to pass legislation to make MPs meaningfully accountable to voters. And we wonder why there is such distrust in politics.

Worse, the coalition now brings to this House measures so deeply flawed that they are unworthy of the name recall. Let us be clear about what is being proposed. If an MP is suspended from the House of Commons for 21 days or more, a petition process is triggered. Should 10% of local people sign it, the MP ceases to be a Member of this House and there is a by-election. Therein lies the first and most fundamental flaw in the Bill: it is a recall Bill without a recall mechanism. As those on the coalition Front Bench well know, recall mechanisms involve a local referendum that asks whether the sitting MP should be recalled—yes, or no. It should be a binary choice, not a by-election. If 50% plus one agree, there should be a by-election, but it is up to local people to decide whether there should be—not 10% of local people, but a majority of local people. Where in the legislation is that mechanism? The coalition has forgotten to include a recall mechanism in the recall Bill.

Worse than being a recall Bill without recall, the Bill will have precisely the opposite effect to that which is intended. It is a proposal that is supposed to make MPs more accountable to voters that leaves the trigger firmly in the hands of Westminster grandees. A measure designed to make MPs answer outwards to the electorate ends up strengthening the power of Whips. As the Bill is drafted, MPs and Whips, not voters, will sit in judgment on errant MPs. It is an implausible Bill from an implausible Front Bench with an implausible record on political reform.

[Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)]

If there was a way to put more power back in the hands of the electorate to decide whether an MP should be recalled, although not necessarily without any grounds whatsoever, would the hon. Gentleman feel that that was a better way of proceeding?

[Douglas Carswell]

I certainly would. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) is going to table some excellent amendments, which I will do everything I can to support. That will ensure that we have a recall Bill worthy of the name and of the promise made to voters.

The Deputy Prime Minister has expressed his concern that real recall might leave MPs subject to partisan pressure and sectional interests, yet by leaving it to Westminster insiders to decide who gets to face a by-election, MPs are going to be vulnerable to precisely the sectional interests from which they most need protection—the party Whips.

I would like hon. Members to cast their minds back to the previous Member who represented Norwich North—Dr Ian Gibson. I mean no disrespect to the current MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), when I say that I have known Ian Gibson for over 20 years and I know what a good and decent man he is. More to the point, I know that his constituents in Norwich, a city I know well, knew what a good and decent man he is, yet he was thrown to the wolves by the Whips. At the height of the expenses scandal, after a couple of awkward headlines, he was judged by his party Whips to be guilty. Perhaps his real guilt lay in the fact that he failed to sign someone’s nomination papers; I do not know. However, had there been a proper recall mechanism in place, I am absolutely certain that Ian Gibson would have been exonerated by those who knew him best—Norwich voters. As MPs, we should have nothing to fear from recall.

[Richard Drax]

I do not want to get personal about other Members of Parliament, as I do not think it appropriate that we should in this place. On the hon. Gentleman’s very point, as I said earlier, if someone commits an offence, such as those during the expenses scandal, it is a matter of honour for the individuals in this House. An hon. Member should resign their seat if such an offence is committed. There is no need for laws, recalls or anything else to do the job for us.

[Douglas Carswell]

The point I was illustrating is that MPs often look at recall, but recoil from it because they fear it will somehow make them vulnerable. I would argue that MPs who do their job properly, stick to their promises and do their best by their constituents will find that their hand is strengthened by recall. It should in fact give them greater confidence to do their job in the knowledge that, if there is a question mark over whether they stay here, those who trust them the most will make the final decision.

There has been some suggestion that real recall would lead to vexatious attempts to remove MPs. Let us think about that for a second. This country has had a recall vote—we do not call it that, but that is what it was. In 1997, the Liberal Democrats won the Winchester seat at the election. The Conservatives claimed that the Lib Dems had done so by error and that they had been cheated of victory because they had lost by a mere two votes, and that that was somehow wrong. They got a judicially sanctioned recall, but it was seen by local people for what it was—a vexatious attempt by bad losers to overturn the democratic will of the people. What happened? Having initially lost by two, the Conservatives went on to lose by more than 20,000. I thus emphasise that we have nothing to fear from vexatious attempts at recall.

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

I have been following the hon. Gentleman’s arguments over a long time. In many ways, he talks a great deal of sense. Does he agree, however, that we have to draw a distinction between failure of conduct and professional judgment. For example, I have been running a campaign on incinerators in my constituency. Some 65,000 constituents voted no. I was actually on their side, but had I been against them, their recourse would have been to kick me out at the next election. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if I had gone against 65,000 people in my constituency, I would have been vulnerable to a recall Bill that is cast too widely?

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[Douglas Carswell]

I am a little surprised that my hon. Friend should recoil from the idea that voters might vote against Members on policy grounds. That is the whole point of us, is it not? Surely it is entirely legitimate for people to vote politicians out of office if they do not reflect their policy priorities. This idea that we can somehow separate the two—so that voters can pass judgment on us for our conduct but not our policy priorities—is absurd and ridiculous. Charles I would have agreed with my hon. Friend. I think it is a false distinction, which does not give the voters the respect they deserve.

Let us ponder for a second something that we are used to in this country—the idea of trial by jury. We trust 12 lay people to pass a judgment and to determine the guilt or otherwise of someone accused of wrongdoing. We trust those jurors to decide not whether they agree with the law that was allegedly broken, but whether the defendant has broken the law. We trust them to exercise good judgment. If we have a right of recall, I think we can trust that jury of 70,000 or 80,000 people to exercise good judgment, too.

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

Speaking as someone who recently faced a jury, may I say how grateful I was for their independence of mind and the verdict they gave? Like the hon. Gentleman, I have no fear of the electorate. Although I will support the Bill, I want to see it go into Committee and to find ways to make it far more liberal so that the electors get the opportunity, if they so wish, to decide to remove a Member of Parliament at some time. The important point is to get this Bill through tonight, get it into Committee and see what improvements can be made. I understand that the Prime Minister says that he believes this legislation can be improved.

[Douglas Carswell]

I am grateful for that powerful point. If I thought that this measure would allow lynch mob justice, I would be against it, but I trust the judgment of the people in aggregate. Just as we can trust a jury to decide and sometimes exercise perhaps more common sense than public prosecutors, so we can trust the electorate in aggregate to make decisions about the conduct of Members. If we proceed with this, I think we will discover that the voters are a pretty liberal bunch and a pretty forgiving bunch. I generally think that if we trust remote, unaccountable officials and grandees in Westminster, we are likely to get worse decisions than if we trusted the voters in aggregate. If we can improve the proposals by widening the body of people who decide, so much the better.

[Mike Thornton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his forbearance. He makes a good point about jurors, but before something gets to the jury, it has to be established whether there is a prima facie case to answer. The jury is thus deciding on a case that has already had some legs to go before the judge and jury in the first place. Following the hon. Gentleman’s reasoning to a logical conclusion, perhaps there should be some way of judging a case before it came before the public through the recall petition.

[Douglas Carswell]

That strengthens my point considerably. Until the 1930s, this country had grand juries to determine whether there was a prima facie case. If that had happened, we would not have had the number of cases being brought to court when common sense would have dictated that they should never have been brought to court. If we have grand juries and trust the people, we get better decisions in the courts. If we trust a wider body of people to determine whether or not an MP should remain, we get better judgments and more effective recall proposals. Wherever more people are included in a decision-making process, we generally get better decisions.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Further to the hon. Gentleman’s point about grand juries, does he accept that the last group of people who should act as a grand jury in relation to recall would be any Committee of this House?

[Douglas Carswell]

I absolutely agree. There are many good and decent Members who would never be given as fair a hearing by a Committee of grandees—people who spend their careers chasing the Whips’ baubles—as they would if they trusted the views of the voters. After all, it is the voters who know us best. If the majority of our constituents decide in a vote that, frankly, they want us recalled, there is no shame in that. We are clearly in the wrong job; we should go and do something else. The voters would be better off if we did; we would be better off and so would democracy.

[Zac Goldsmith]

It is worth pointing out the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee has already said on the record that he does not want this extra duty of this extra ballot. He recognises, as does everyone else, that if we want to exert pressure and to influence an outcome, it is much easier to do so with a fallible group of 10 people than it is with 70,000 constituents.

[Douglas Carswell]

Absolutely. I would ask people again to apply the Ian Gibson test. If the Standards and Privileges Committee had been left to make the key decision in those heated and fevered moments during the MPs’ expenses scandal, would it not have been under intense media pressure to make the wrong choice by that good and decent Member of Parliament? I think it would have been. It is wrong for the Standards and Privileges Committee to have this role. It is right, if we want more lay members to be involved, for us not to seek to increase the number of lay members on the Standards and Privileges Committee, but to trust the voters. It puzzles me that people still struggle with the idea that the voters should decide whether or not to trigger the process, for they are the ultimate jury.

I shall support the Bill this evening. I shall do so because I am confident that it can be amended and made meaningful, and confident that many of the amendments that will be tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park will be successful. Unless that happens, this recall measure will remain a sham, a fix, a pretence of change so that Westminster can stay the same. Proper recall will end safe seat syndrome, which is what has really hamstrung our democracy. In four of the past five elections, fewer than one in 10 seats have changed hands. Even at the time of the 1997 great Labour landslide, only three in 10 changed hands. In other words, seven out of 10 seats are safe seats. There is almost a zero chance of those Members losing their seats unless they fall foul of the Whips. They are fiefdoms. That means that MPs answer to other MPs. The great destructive mechanism in our democracy, the Whips Office, is all-powerful.

[Mr Charles Walker]

The hon. Gentleman said that recall would end safe seat syndrome. How will it do that?

[Douglas Carswell]

At present, the career trajectories of MPs in safe seats are determined by how obsequious they are to Ministers, and on whether or not the Whips think highly of them and give them promotion. If a Member is vulnerable to a recall election—if he is vulnerable to the views of the voters—he may start to face outward to the voters. Even if he is in a safe seat, he will know that he can lose his position if he breaks his promises and does not do what he said he was going to do. Recall would mean that instead of facing inward and chasing favour with the Whips, MPs would become outward-facing, and I think that that would revive and reinvigorate our democracy.

[Mr MacNeil]

Is not the ultimate battering ram against “safe seat syndrome”, as it has been described this afternoon, not a recall Bill but the single transferable vote system that we have seen in operation in, for instance, the Republic of Ireland?

[Douglas Carswell]

I would rather not get into the subject of electoral reform, although my views on it were not generally mainstream in my old party, and I am open to ideas and suggestions. Recall would be a key part of reviving our democracy.

[Mark Field]

I think that the hon. Gentleman is being rather unkind about “safe seat syndrome”, which has been the focus of much of his attention. My own seat —the seat that I currently occupy—has been Conservative for an unbroken period since 1868. However, I can assure the hon. Gentleman—and, perhaps rather more importantly, my 73,000 constituents—that I work extremely hard. I treat my seat like a marginal, and I think that the same applies to many MPs. It is an attitude of mind. It may be entirely irrational, given all the hard work that must be done in the run-up to an election, but I think that many MPs, whether or not they have safe seats, take a very diligent approach to their constituency work.

[Douglas Carswell]

My hon. Friend has made my point for me, rather eloquently. There are very good and decent people who come into Parliament with good and honourable intentions, but why is it so often the case that those who enter this place with good and honourable intentions do not—in the public’s eyes, at any rate—do what it was hoped that they would do? I submit that it is because they end up facing inward. They come here, and then they face what other MPs in Westminster determine should be their priorities. That is the problem. That explains why so many good and decent people come here and end up not achieving what their constituents hoped for.

I think that, by giving voters the power to sack MPs, recall will break open cartel politics. I am somewhat bemused when some Members seem appalled at the very notion that the public might actually vote out of office an MP with whom they disagreed over policy—shock, horror. Surely that is the whole point of politics. The Minister attacked the very idea of a politically motivated recall, but surely “politically motivated” is what we are supposed to be in this Chamber. I thought that that was the essence of politics.

I look forward to voting for the Bill, and to supporting the amendments that will make it meaningful.

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[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Although I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) that there has been too much self-flagellation as part and parcel of the process that has led towards this Bill, we cannot dispute that a lot of the concerns that underline these measures are to do with trust—I am talking specifically about trust in the political and parliamentary process. The public appetite for parliamentary recall was turbo-charged by the reputationally ruinous expenses scandal that broke in 2009. That brought to public attention the decades-long scandal of a self-regulated system in which secrecy and opaqueness by the political establishment were the watchwords. That was then compounded by the calamitous rearguard attempts by the parliamentary great and good to use the courts to prevent the publication of details of dubious expenditure claims of public money—a process that was sensationally broken open by The Daily Telegraph.

Slowly but surely this place has been dragged into playing catch-up. Ever since the expenses scandal, this House has paid lip service to the importance of restoring public confidence in the political process. A central part of that has been the public insistence for genuinely independent regulation. Yet the centrepiece of this Bill flies in the face of giving our voters, rather than political insiders, the authority to drive recall.

I regret that the coalition’s revolutionary intentions, as set out in May 2010, have been so watered down.

[Douglas Carswell]

Does the hon. Gentleman have any confidence in his party leadership’s record on political reform?

[Mark Field]

That is a rather unfair question. It was the hon. Gentleman’s party leadership until a few weeks ago. I have some confidence—perhaps hope springs eternal—that there will be other elements of reform going through. I am afraid that the constitutional record of the coalition Government has been lamentable in the way that it has worked out.

As hon. Members have said, it is entirely understandable that the Government have tried to find a mechanism to weed out trivial or vexatious complaints. For sure, there will be abject disagreement on purely partisan political issues, as well as furious disagreements between an elector and his or her parliamentary representative, but that should never trigger the recall process.

As I am now disagreeing with the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell)—my friend, but my former hon. Friend—I should congratulate him on his recent re-election. I know that he pays the closest possible attention to these issues. Although we profoundly disagree about the desirability of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union and about immigration policy—I think it is in the national interest that we have a calm and rational debate, rather than one that plays to members of his current party—we were, as instinctive democrats, in the same Lobby for the November 2011 referendum vote and with regard to House of Lords reform, which would have brought about an elected second Chamber. Our views are similarly aligned on the importance of sound money and the need for a much more urgent emphasis on deficit reduction than seems acceptable to Britain’s political elite.

More importantly, in this era of established political parties being set out in law, surely an elected representative’s decision to switch political parties should automatically trigger a recall. I would support an amendment to achieve that if the hon. Gentleman were to table one. I respect his decision and that of the erstwhile Member for Rochester and Strood to put their money where their mouth is and let their electors determine their future. Why should voters be deprived of the opportunity to hold to account an MP who switches parties but is unwilling to resign? Surely that should be a prima facie reason for recall.

I fear, however, that the Minister has instead boiled down the grounds of recall to just two small conditions, the first of which applies to criminal convictions and will operate along similar lines that already exist for expulsion from the House. However, the second condition, which applies if the Standards Committee imposes a suspension from the House of 21 or more sitting days, is much too open to party managers’ political manipulation. Let us not be naive about the conduct of party leaderships and the Whips Offices. They will, as they have always done, try to manipulate such a process to protect or condemn as they see fit. After all, that is what party managers do, and that is precisely why they must have no part whatsoever in the recall process. The overriding need to restore public trust is the reason why they should have no opportunity to interfere with the recall process.

The Standards Committee is still appointed, rather than elected by the House as a whole, so while its members are often able and diligent, that has the consequence that emollient and obedient MPs may be selected as its members, especially if a helpful outcome to a sensitive case is desired. As we all know, if cases come before that Committee, the House is able to impose penalties ranging from expulsion and suspension, to an order to repay moneys, when appropriate. It is all too easy to see how favoured sons and daughters—errant Ministers perhaps—might be made subject to stringent repayment conditions, but have imposed on them a suspension that is lenient enough not to trigger the second recall condition. I agreed with much of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) said about that.

I fear that this is not a wild academic concern. Let us consider some of the matters that have recently come before the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the Standards Committee, and then the House. For example, two former Cabinet Ministers were both ordered to repay more than £40,000 in inappropriately claimed second-home expenses by the commissioner. Following long and protracted inquiries, no doubt aided and abetted by an unhealthy interest from party managers, they were subject to a sanction that would not have triggered recall, even though the strength of public opinion meant that they both had to resign their ministerial office.

By contrast, in the past year two independent-minded Back Benchers—Patrick Mercer and Denis MacShane—have resigned from the House after being suspended for long terms, although neither had made similarly substantial personal financial gain requiring the repayment of public money. I do not wish to draw entirely direct comparisons between those sets of cases. I simply ask the House to reflect on the fact that the mere perception that pressure might be brought to bear to favour MPs closer to party leaderships, or indeed to militate against those regarded as more easily expendable, will only further undermine public confidence in this new process.

I very much agree with many of the sentiments expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) and look forward to these issues being debated at length in Committee. I do agree with the Minister that there is an increasingly strong case for a mechanism to allow constituents to recall their MP. In my view, there is an almost unanswerable case that we will have to have such a Bill. I am only sad to conclude that this Bill fails to rise to the occasion.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

It is customary to begin a speech by declaring an interest, but in this case I can declare a disinterest, as I am not standing at the next general election. Also, so far as I know, in the year of the great expenses scandal my expenses were the lowest of any Member of Parliament. However, I am firmly opposed to the Bill, and not because it does not go far enough, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) argues, but because it proposes recalls at all.

I was disturbed to hear the Minister describe the Bill as a first step. In my view it is the first step in a bit of fancy dancing at the top of what could turn out to be a very slippery slope heading in the direction of the things advocated by the hon. Member for Richmond Park. The proposition from the recall enthusiasts is that there should be provision so that MPs can be sacked between general elections—to quote the hon. Member for Richmond Park—

“for whatever reason if the majority have lost confidence in them”.

To say that that would be open to abuse by vested interests would be a grotesque understatement.

I believe that the introduction of a recall mechanism along the lines outlined by the enthusiasts would have proved a great hindrance to social progress in this country, and to a lot of the changes that have led to our society becoming more decent. I point out that things become a consensus; they do not start off as such. A lot of the things that we now enjoy started off as very unpopular ideas, and we should do nothing that restricts MPs from taking up unpopular ideas that they believe to be right.

Many of the things that I now value in our society, as I hope do many other Members, were seen as shocking when they were first launched by fearless MPs. They knew that their ideas were unpopular and would be seen as shocking, and the response from much of the news media and many people in here was not just an expression of opposition to their views, but personal vilification and smears.

[Douglas Carswell]

My right hon. Friend is arguing against allowing people to decide who their representatives are on the grounds that occasionally representatives might hold views that do not accord with the voters. Surely we should trust the voters, not to agree with everything a representative says, but to respect a representative for being frank and honest with them.

[Frank Dobson]

That is what I believe in. I do not believe that introducing a recall system will further that degree of independence.

There is a brilliant example from my own constituency —not me, I rush to point out. My distinguished predecessor, Lena Jeger, was the Member for Holborn and St Pancras South, which was an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic constituency in the 1960s. Lena Jeger was an advocate of abortion law reform. She was one of the sponsors of David Steel’s Bill that became the Abortion Act 1967. It would have been a simple matter for opponents of what she was advocating to get together 10% or 20% of people to oppose what she was doing.

[Douglas Carswell]

indicated dissent.

[Frank Dobson]

It is no good people who do not agree with me shaking their heads, because I am sure that is the truth.