Conduct of the Right Hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

The fact is that we are here today because we have a Prime Minister who has spent the past two years undermining the very institution of liberal democracy.

On cash for honours, it is one thing to bestow meaningless medieval titles on people but it is quite another when those titles guarantee a seat for life in this building, subject to zero democratic oversight, zero elections and zero accountability—but it was ever thus. In the days of Maundy Gregory and Lloyd George, there was a price list for honours: £10,000 for a knighthood and up to £50,000—£2.7 million in today’s prices, funnily enough—for a peerage. At least that predated the introduction of VAT and kept prices down for eager customers.

When the law finally caught up with Mr Gregory, he was fined £50 and got two months in jail. He is still the only person to have been convicted of selling honours and, even then, he escaped any prosecution over the sale of British honours—instead, he was collared for punting Vatican ones. That fact alone is incredible given all that we know about the past 100 years of the Lords and political honours, but his sentence also tells a tale about the establishment’s attitude to someone caught in the act: they simply are not interested. Not a single person has ever been convicted of selling British honours. If someone believes that that means that honours have not been sold, I have a bridge or two I can sell them—not a garden bridge or a bridge to Northern Ireland, because only a mug would think that those were feasible.

The British establishment, with the Prime Minister at its apex, has shown over decades that the House of Lords is unreformable. The plain fact is that the Lords’ main function is not to revise and amend legislation as part of democracy’s checks and balances, because the only checks that are required for appointment to the House of Lords need to be made payable to Conservative central office.

The Prime Minister has shown himself time and again to be unfit to decide who sits in that place. He is not the first, but he is possibly the worst. He has used his untrammelled powers over honours to stuff what is supposed to be an upper Chamber of Parliament full of cronies and chums. He should be thoroughly ashamed, but it is not even clear that he has the ability to feel shame.

It is time for Scotland to rid itself of this stink and follow a different course. Whatever challenges independence will bring—and there will be challenges—we will at least have a functioning democracy based on accountability and plurality, rather than the absolutely rotten system that we live under today. We will also no longer live under the Prime Minister and his open contempt for democracy.