Debate on the Address

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for putting that on the record.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. If we go back to the Bradlaugh case, it is well established that this House is entitled to limit the voting rights of individual Members. The House refused to let Bradlaugh take the Oath, and it was upheld by the courts that that could not be interfered with outside this Chamber, and that is in our Bill of Rights.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, on whom we can always depend for his historical exegesis, but I think that does rather underline why it would be imprudent of me to say anything beyond what I have said today. I note what has been said by other Members, and I think it sensible and wise to leave it there for today.

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[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I will try to be disciplined in my taking of interventions. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). I shall not follow him down the route of devolution for Wales, despite the fact that my name is Davis.

The House will be unsurprised that I find a great deal to approve of in this Queen’s Speech; it is, after all, the first to be delivered by a solely Conservative Government for nearly 20 years. I particularly welcome the European Union referendum Bill. Contrary to what has been said, it is asking the people’s permission to do something—stay in or leave. It is not anything else beyond that and it is long overdue.

I also welcome the education and adoption Bill, which involves two sets of moves in the right direction. I would do more myself, but the moves are, at least, beneficial. I welcome the enterprise Bill, which will build on the economic success of the past few years. It will create jobs so it will probably do more to reduce poverty in this country than any other social measure. I welcome the childcare Bill, which doubles free childcare to 30 hours a week—indeed, I would again go further and reduce some of the restrictions on that childcare provision. That would help underpin the lives of ordinary people in a beneficial way.

I also welcome the right-to-buy Bill. It is controversial, but done properly—that point matters—it will improve ordinary working people’s ability to get on to the property ladder. The failure to do that has been decried on both sides of the House. At the same time, it will release money to allow new social housing, which every Government in the past 20 years have failed to provide on a sufficient scale. Indeed, the last Labour Government failed in 13 years to provide as much social housing as was built in one year under Margaret Thatcher. We all have to face that fact.

I want to talk about three areas of concern, many of which have been mentioned, especially by my right hon. and learned Friend the erstwhile Attorney General. The first is the Scotland Bill. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) is not here, because he would have some views on this. Despite my being a firm Unionist, I have long been an advocate—since 1998, in fact—of more fiscal autonomy for the Scottish Parliament. When I was the Public Accounts Committee Chairman in 1998-99, I went to see Gordon Brown to tell him that the mechanism that he had chosen, of having Holyrood dependent on an opaque, virtually incomprehensible subvention formula, was a grievance machine: it would create grievances in Scotland and England. As such it was a destabilising measure, not a stabilising one.

We need to grip this issue. We need to enable the Scottish Parliament to pay its own way from funding that it raises and controls, both in policy and Executive terms, and to ensure that subventions provided from the rest of the United Kingdom, in the form of pensions and other welfare costs, are properly costed, as are all the other taxes raised in Scotland that do not go to the Scottish Parliament. We should make our judgments in future on the basis of knowledge, not of assertion and counter-assertion from the two sides of Hadrian’s Wall. That is one issue, and we will come back to it in detail no doubt during the debate on the various measures relating to both Scotland and England.

Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the aspect of this Queen’s Speech that worries me most is the whole question of Human Rights Act repeal, and, with that, the introduction of the counter-terrorism Bill and the communications data Bill—the so-called snoopers charter. I am very pleased that the Government have decided to step back from an immediate rush into repealing the Human Rights Act. That seems very sensible. With only 19 days to go until the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, it at least shows some sensitivity to the history of our country and what we stand for—something to which my right hon. and learned Friend referred. We should remember that the biggest lesson of Magna Carta is that the acquisition of liberty and loss of liberty in our history has often happened by accident as much as by plan. We must think about the unintended consequences of what we do when we set about changing these major constitutional issues.

Before this debate I spent a little time looking through the list of adverse judgments against the United Kingdom by the European Court of Human Rights since we joined, but mainly since 2001, when the HRA came into effect. Bearing in mind that I was the person, along with Jack Straw, who brought to this House the motion that stopped the imposition of prisoner votes on this country, I have a very sceptical view of the ECHR, yet I found that I agreed with some 90% of the judgments, on such diverse things as taking away from the Government the right to keep the DNA of innocent people for years, through to preserving the right of British citizens to wear a crucifix while at work. That is the level of diversity that we are talking about. The number of things I did not like was quite small, and that came about largely as a result of the nature of the Court as a body without any feeling for the history and tradition of Britain, with a lot of people from different countries who have no reason to know about our history.

Ideally, therefore, I would like us to keep the main thrust of the HRA but bring the Court judgments back to our own Supreme Court. Unfortunately this produces for us a serious conundrum to which I have not yet heard any Government Minister give an answer. As it stands, the European convention on human rights, in the hands of Strasbourg, is entrenched; no British Government could change it. If we bring its provisions back to the United Kingdom, then it is no longer entrenched. Looking at the history of the past 20 years, I ask myself how Governments would have responded when, let us say, 90 days’ detention without charge went across this set of tramlines, or control orders, or DNA, or anything else. What the Government would do, of course, is change the constitutional measure that was put in place to uphold the Court.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

On the point about entrenchment, my right hon. Friend referred to Magna Carta. Three clauses of Magna Carta still remain the law today, 800 years later. Entrenchment is not needed for the law to survive if it is good law.

[Mr Davis]

That was my view 20 years ago. Since then, I have lived through three sets of Governments, none of whom I would trust with the protection of liberty in this country. Three clauses are left out of how many? I have forgotten; a very large number have disappeared. The harsh truth is that in the modern world Governments are very quick to modify things that are inconvenient to them. When the Blair Government were in power, they were very happy to do things that were just procedural issues that the public did not pay any attention to, even though their effects were enormous.

The only way to deal with this is to undertake a written constitution for the United Kingdom. That could not be done on a partisan basis—it would have to be bipartisan— and it would take years, more than a single Parliament. I am afraid that at the moment, as it stands, I am unwilling to support Human Rights Act abolition unless I hear an answer to that conundrum, as well as the others put to the House by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield.

I have concerns about the counter-terrorism Bill, which intends to move us from stopping people making speeches that incite violence to stopping ones that incite hatred. I suspect that many people in this House have made speeches that incite hatred, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. How on earth we are going to make the judgment as to what crosses this line and what does not without massively impeding our freedom of speech, I do not know. Let us remember that Voltaire’s comment, accurately, was this: “I despise what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” I repeat: “despise what you say”. We must remember that freedom of speech is the right of people to say things we do not like and are not comfortable with.

On the communications data Bill, I differ dramatically from the previous Attorney General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. I have watched over many years the operation of our agencies and the foreign agencies. Most of them, pretty much all the time, behave honourably in collecting data, but they take the view that collecting data is not wrong; only looking at it is wrong. I am afraid that is semantic nonsense. If one holds the data, one has the power of the Stasi even if one does not behave like the Stasi—the power of a totalitarian state even if one does not behave like a totalitarian state. All those of us who have been here for many years have seen Governments, from time to time, misuse the data they have in front of them. I would be very unwilling for us to move further down that route, particularly because the Americans, as we speak, have passed the USA Freedom Bill—Act, as it will be—by some 330 votes to 88 votes in Congress. That will reverse exactly the sort of mass collection of data that is being proposed here. It is implausible to argue that the Americans do not need it but somehow we do.

I welcome the main parts of the Queen’s Speech, but some are incredibly difficult in terms of liberty and justice in this country. We are in a small-majority Parliament. I do not want a return to the trials and tribulations of the ’92-’97 Parliament, but I do want a Government who do not just try to solve everything in Whitehall or in a specially selected Committee with specially selected Members. I want these problems to be solved on the Floor of this House, and I hope that they give us the time to do it.

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[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

May I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker? It is a real pleasure to see such a distinguished member of the Procedure Committee looking after our affairs this evening.

I really want to congratulate the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) on his superb maiden speech. It was the ideal maiden speech, containing everything that a good maiden speech should have. It was serious minded, enormously respectful of the House of Commons, generous to his predecessor—against whom I imagine the hon. Gentleman had quite a good campaign to have won so successfully—while also having a little bit of steel that good maiden speeches need so that we know that he means business in this House. I congratulate him most sincerely on a brilliant speech, supported by so many of his compatriots and fellow members of the Scottish National party. Looking at my own Benches, I fear it rather puts us to shame.

Speaking as a parliamentarian, the Scottish Nationalists have shown us how to behave today. They have come here more smartly dressed than the Conservatives; they have sat through the debate in greater numbers than those of my own party; and they have even let the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) have his usual seat. Their good manners and respect for the House of Commons is something that those on the Government Benches will look forward to taking very seriously over the next five years, because those of us who are Unionists recognise that their right to be here is just as great as those of us from England, Wales or Northern Ireland. That will be an important part of how this Parliament develops.

Let me turn to the Queen’s Speech. The Gracious Speech divides, I think, into two parts. There is the natural business of government—the important and urgent business of government, starting, of course, with the economy. What the coalition managed is beginning to yield considerable fruit. The latest monthly deficit figure was much ahead of forecasts, with a significant increase in tax revenues coming through. That is what it would have been reasonable to expect.

Tax revenues are a lagging indicator of economic performance, and the fact that they are now coming through more quickly probably means that the deficit will decline faster than it is currently forecast to do. That will give us a strong background ensuring that we can live within our means, and that the legislation to prohibit an increase in national insurance, income tax or value-added tax will be a type of legislation to which we can commit ourselves very easily. Nothing particularly difficult will be involved, because, in my view, the revenues have now been boosted, but also because any increase in VAT would probably reduce the tax take for the Government. It is already clear that businesses reaching the VAT threshold are deciding not to grow and not to take on extra customers, because as soon as they do, their costs will become 20% higher. I think that 20% is as high as VAT can reasonably be.

We saw that the 50p income tax rate raised less money than the 45p rate is raising now, and we all know the lesson of the Laffer curve: higher rates do not produce more income for the Exchequer. When we consider national insurance and income tax together, we see that the Government are, among other things, taking lower earners out of tax. If those people were put back into tax, they would merely have to be paid more in benefits, thus increasing the deficit.

On that side of things—the fiscal, or tax, side of things—the Queen’s Speech is admirable. Given that it is a continuation of the work done by the coalition, I suppose that it would be mean-minded not to pay tribute to the Liberal Democrats, who, although now reduced in number, played an important part in that work. I think that the nation should be grateful for the big decision that they made in 2010, at considerable cost to their party’s fortunes, to ensure that the country could get out of the mess that had been left.

Beyond that, however, there are the constitutional matters, which, to my mind, are of a piece, whether they concern English votes for English issues, more devolution, the European referendum or human rights. I say that because, between 1997 and 2010, the Government started a whole process of constitutional reform which they did not complete or round off. One example is devolution. It began in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but nothing was done for England. That is because it is very complicated to come up with a solution for England that meets the requirements of constitutional propriety, while also recognising that England contains 85% of the population. If England demands exact parity with Scotland, we shall probably have broken up the United Kingdom anyway. If the English want the Union, the onus is on them to recognise that, and to be generous to the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom.

That is why I support—although I note that there is opposition to it—the use of Standing Orders at some point during the progress of a Bill to allow English votes. Standing Orders are easy to suspend. A Standing Order could be suspended if, for example, a future Government were dependent on Scottish votes for their continuation. There might be a political cost, but the Government of the country could continue, and Members of Parliament from Scotland would remain exactly the same Members of Parliament. It would be like an extension of a Grand Committee. There would be an issue in which some Members of Parliament were not involved, but ultimately it would once more be in the power of the whole House to decide on it.

That is a much more flexible system than a legislative system that would create a Parliament within a Parliament. A legislative system would mean that the franchise would change, and the ability of MPs from other countries in the Union to vote on issues would be permanently reduced, whereas a Standing Order is essentially a self-denying ordinance that could be overturned for a single vote. Standing Orders are suspended fairly routinely when it suits the Government for business to run a bit late, or when they want Second and Third Readings to take place on the same day. That cannot be done with legislation. Standing Orders are not a means of playing some wretched trick on Scottish MPs, but a way of ensuring that the system in the House of Commons can work and can be fluid. However, I should prefer that to be a fairly limited aspect of our law-making, involving issues that are so clearly and unequivocally English—or English and Welsh—that no reasonable person would think otherwise. I do not want the standing of individual Members to be determined by the nation from which they come.

The other issues that we face—the European issues—stem, in a way, from the same source. They involve a loss of power from the House of Commons to the continent and to continental courts, or even to judges in our own country. I worry about that, not because I think that out of nowhere has come a common sovereignty that we must fight to the death to protect, but because we hold that sovereignty in trust for our electors, and we must and ought to have returned it to them every five years. Instead, we have given it away to judges in Strasbourg, and to some of our own judges across the road in the Middlesex Guildhall. That has made it easy for legislation to be overturned, and hard for it to be reinstated by the House of Commons.

I do not deny that there are some very clever judges. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), the former Solicitor General, said that there were judges who understood the law better than us mere politicians, and that may well be true. Nevertheless, we make the law, on behalf of our constituents, for the judges to interpret, and if we do not like the judges’ interpretation, it is for us to change the law. If we give away that power so that the judges become the final arbiter, we shall have given away something that does not actually belong to us, but belongs to our electors and to the British people.

The reform that I want is a reform that reasserts the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament, not as an end in itself, but because it supports democracy. That is where I think all the constitutional issues become involved. They are about respecting the will of the people, including the will of Scottish people to have more devolution, which I cannot deny, however much I want to. I stood in Scotland once; I got 9% of the vote. I did at least hold my deposit in Glenrothes, which is a fine town, and I very much enjoyed the experience. It is that level of democracy that we need to retain, be it in respect of devolution, Europe, or human rights.