Oral Answers to Questions
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
Obviously, I always look at the hon. Gentleman’s suggestions very carefully, because he has made a number of sensible cross-party interventions over recent years, but I have my doubts as to whether another talking convention is the answer. I think we need to look at some of the constitutional issues that leave people feeling left behind, not least English votes for English laws, and make sure that we put those things in place. The disappointment I have with the Labour party is that it is prepared to talk about all-party talks on Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, but when it comes to empowering English people and making sure that they have rights in this House, it is completely absent from the debate.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Article 39 of Magna Carta contains the origins of our right to trial by jury. In a recent report, Sir Brian Leveson, not satisfied with undermining the right to a free press, wants to restrict the right to trial by jury. Will my right hon. Friend, as long as he is Prime Minister, defend our historic rights?
The Prime Minister
I am a great supporter of jury trial. I think it is one of the very important things we have in this country that safeguard people’s rights and freedoms, and I do not want to see it reduced.
Recall of MPs Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
New clause 3(7) reads:
“Nothing in this section shall be construed as affecting any provision of the Bill of Rights 1689.”
However, if the House of Commons were to introduce a new code of conduct and that were to be interpreted by—effectively—an election court, would it not risk contravening the Bill of Rights?
Dr Huppert
As ever, the hon. Gentleman makes a very interesting point, but the new clause does not suggest changes to the code of conduct or making it subject to court proceedings, so his point does not apply to this new clause.
I think that new clause 2 has been substantially improved to address the criticisms levelled in Committee —we can have the discussion about the code of conduct at another appropriate time. Furthermore, as I said earlier, it is not a unique proposal. The state of Minnesota has a similar scheme under which 25 petitioners submit a proposed recall petition stating the grounds for the recall, whether it be malfeasance, non-feasance or serious crime; and a public hearing is held by a judge within 21 days who then reports to the Supreme Court on the test of
“whether the persons proposing the petition have shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the factual allegations supporting the petition are true; and…if so, whether the persons proposing the petition have shown that the facts found to be true are sufficient grounds for issuing a recall petition.”
This then leads to the recall petition, in which case the system requires the signatures of voters equalling 25% of the most recent turnout, which is roughly the same as the 15% we are proposing. This system exists, therefore, and it seems to work, as shown by its operation since it was introduced in 1996.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I agree that it would be better for the decision to be made by the electorate—by the court—but is not the problem with the pledge being determined by the court that the pledge is fundamentally political rather than legal?
Mark Durkan
I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, but it can be legal up to a point; there could be some matters on which a clear-cut judgment could be made. I have chosen to offer the route through the court simply because it seemed to me that there was a will or a mood in Committee saying, “Well, if we’re going to allow any element of public petition to recall, then going to an election court could be the way that could be done.” I have simply taken that point and offered this new clause to try to test Members on whether they will follow through on the logic of the argument they made in Committee.
I do not commend the model in new clause 5 above all others. I still prefer the open rolling petition around a clear issue, but, again, I think that the open rolling petition should be on the basis of a pledge. I think the pledge as the basis for those petitions would create a much clearer standard for the public. It would also create a clearer standard for MPs, who would know, if they had committed to the pledge, whether they had abided by the code of conduct and could show whether they had upheld the standards of public life. That should not be too much to ask. MPs should not feel, “Oh, it’s hard to prove that we have upheld the standards of public life or lived up to the code of conduct.” It would send a very dangerous signal if Members felt that a pledge about the MPs code of conduct and the standards of public life would be difficult to uphold or could be abused in some untoward way. Then we would be seen to be trying to find ourselves some highly privileged protection where we decide that we always know best, even about the worst that we have done.
That is the simple point of new clause 5, which I do not intend to press to a Division. Its purpose is to ensure that if we are to improve the Bill, we take into account the absence from the Bill of a clear tool available to the public. Also, we need to make good the serious omission that we have all acknowledged—in circumstances where there is no serious job description for MPs, where is the bottom line? The new clause offers a bottom line.
Thomas Docherty
With your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker, may I just clarify the point for the hon. Gentleman? Members of the two Houses of Congress, and the President and vice-president of the United States, are not subject to the recall provisions. Those apply only at state level, because the courts have ruled that there is no constitutional provision in the United States at federal level for the recall petition. So, ironically, the one group of US citizens who are exempt are those in Congress; many who observe their proceedings might wonder from time to time whether they should be recalled.
Amendment 16, our third substantive amendment, deals with the quirk that under the Bill as it stands only offences committed after the date of Royal Assent are covered. We have previously highlighted our belief that this should apply to all new convictions, regardless of when the offence was committed. I do not intend to rehash previous examples, but where an offence comes to light only after a Member of Parliament is elected, surely it would be wrong to deny his or her constituents justice. Of course this should not apply where a conviction occurred before a Member was elected, because it is a reasonable assumption that the electorate have already taken that into account when choosing to vote for them, and there is precedent within the UK for that. However, how can a constituent know about an offence where no conviction has occurred? We hope that the Government will accept those arguments.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am sympathetic to most of the hon. Gentleman’s amendments, but I do have a query about this one. Is it not, as a general principle, unfair to apply a punishment to people that they did not know might be a punishment at the point at which they did the wrongdoing?
Thomas Docherty
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his argument, but of course that person was not a Member of Parliament when they committed the offence, so would not expect to be denied something going forward. Let me take his argument and reverse it. This place abolished capital punishment some 40-odd years ago. If somebody were today convicted of a crime that previously had capital punishment as a tariff, we would not retrospectively apply a punishment that no longer exists.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so generous in allowing interventions, but his argument also applies the other way around. If somebody were found guilty of an offence committed 40 years ago, for which the punishment was a maximum fine of 2 shillings and 6 pence, they could still only be fined that amount. It is a very important legal principle that the penalty may not be increased, but it may be reduced.
Thomas Docherty
I suspect the hon. Gentleman needs no reminding that this Bill is about providing rights to our constituents. I am talking about a right to recall where serious wrongdoing has occurred. Yet again, he tempts me to remind the House that, after being elected, my local Scottish National party MSP was found to have committed a string of domestic violence offences over a 30-year period. He was charged and convicted only after he became a Member of the Scottish Parliament, and there was no mechanism for recall, despite the fact that he had broken a frying pan over his step-daughter’s head. I believe the House will agree that it is absolutely right that, where offences have come to light and there is a new conviction, we provide justice to those constituents.
Chris Bryant
Yes, and it is remarkably poorly used, for the simple reason that it is regularly taken to appeal—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene again, I would be happy to give way to him, although I would probably be being generous with other people’s time rather than my own.
My argument is that these are imprecise terms. That is not a good way of legislating, not least because at the moment that a court decided that there had been misconduct such as that on which the hon. Gentleman wants it to decide and that none of the get-out clauses in new clause 3(5) applied, to all intents and purposes the court would have decided, in the public mind, that the Member of Parliament was guilty—end of story—and I cannot see how that would not affect whatever might happen in a subsequent recall.
I have one final problem with the drafting. I understand why the hon. Member for Cambridge has provided in subsection (7):
“Nothing in this section shall be construed as affecting any provision of the Bill of Rights 1689.”
That appears because several Members have pointed out that there is a problem: if the Bill of Rights says that no proceeding in Parliament should be “impeached or questioned” in any court of law or any other place, it would be a bit rum for a court expressly to be told that it can go forward on the basis of whether or not an MP has “misconducted” themselves in a proceeding in Parliament. The new clause expressly says that one of the criteria that can be considered is “conduct”, whether it be as a Member of Parliament or not—completely and utterly irrelevantly.
I believe that there is a fundamental contradiction in the new clause. Under it, the court could decide that how somebody had spoken in Parliament or engaged in a proceeding in Parliament could be considered as relevant to a misconduct hearing. That would limit free speech, which we should guard jealously in this House, and, essentially, undo the Bill of Rights. It is a contradictory provision. For all those reasons, I could not support new clause 3, tabled by the hon. Member for Cambridge.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am in a good deal of agreement with the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I came into this debate, most unusually, undecided as to how I was going to vote. No guidance was provided from the Whips about how I ought to vote, which I view as a great advance. It is to the great credit of my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) that he is not trying to tell people how to vote. It shows a considerable wisdom to return to the traditional practice of having free votes on constitutional matters. I hope that this will be continued by other parties and in other Parliaments. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda says that I do anyway, and he is probably broadly right, but I think this should be encouraged across the House.
I was interested in new clauses 2 and 3. There is a need and desire to widen the ability for recall and to make it easier for constituents to remove Members of Parliament who they think have behaved improperly. The main thrust of the Bill is too narrow, which is a lost opportunity but not a fatal one because it can be developed in future Parliaments. Constitutional development often happens at a slow pace, which is not something I am against. I think we want constitutional reform to take place at a pace with which people are broadly comfortable and that carries the nation with it.
New clauses 2 and 3, however, fundamentally misfire. Instead of making this something that will be decided by the electorate, the provisions introduce a third party—the courts—to try to determine what the hon. Member for Rhondda rightly pointed out are fundamentally political issues. The restrictions to which he referred, particularly the third example where the misconduct case is “brought for party political” reasons, are a complete negation of what is being tried to be achieved. Any complaint must be brought for party political reasons, and any attempt to unseat a Member of Parliament is going to be carried out by somebody who has a party political affiliation of some kind, and it will be to the benefit of a political party to remove a Member of Parliament from another party. Even if the petition and process were started by some wonderfully high-minded figure, of which I am glad to say we have a very large number in North East Somerset, politicians would get involved in it because they would see the advantage, particularly if the Government had only a small majority, of removing a Member of Parliament or indeed of causing such inconvenience that would make it almost impossible for that Member of Parliament to continue in office.
Another issue involved is the legal costs. Are we to provide a fund to help Members of Parliament defend themselves in these circumstances, or do we find that the Member of Parliament could be bankrupted by the very process—to see whether he had committed misconduct in public office—and thus removed from Parliament anyway, even though the misconduct in public office could not, in the event, be proved?
We in this House have always sought to keep the courts out of our own proceedings. There seem to me to be two valid sets of people who can intervene in our proceedings: the general public who send us here, and who have an absolute right not to send us here but to send other people in our place; and our own systems, procedures and Committees, which are able to regulate internal goings-on in the House—a right that we declared long before we achieved it in the Bill of Rights.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comment, but I am still discussing new clauses 2 and 3. I have not yet moved on to his amendments, towards many of which I am very sympathetic. What concerns me about the new clauses is that they would allow the courts to rule on what was going on in the House. It is very important to prevent that from happening, both from our point of view and from the point of view of the courts. The courts are rightly reluctant to rule on what they believe to be fundamentally political decisions, and it seems to me that new clauses 2 and 3 would give them authority in regard to fundamentally political decisions, such as whether someone’s standard had been that of a decent Member of Parliament who had committed no offence.
Chris Bryant
The hon. Gentleman may be interested to know that so reluctant are the courts—and rightly so—to judge on any proceedings in Parliament that when the court was considering whether Rebekah Brooks had ever paid a police officer for information, it was not allowed even to consider the fact that when asked on 11 March 2003, during a proceeding in Parliament, whether she had paid a police officer, she had said “Yes.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I happen to think that that is absolutely right, both from our point of view and from the point of view of the courts. It is important that our proceedings allow people to be honest and to speak freely without incriminating themselves, and that must be a protection that we seek to maintain. I think that if we undermine it by bringing the courts into the details of the behaviour of Members of Parliament, we will fail. I would go in the opposite direction. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), I would go the whole way and leave it to the British electorate. I would place my trust in them, and let them get on with it. But the worst of all solutions—worse even than a Committee of chums somewhere upstairs deciding that we have all behaved beautifully—is to involve the court system.
I also cannot agree with the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), which is rare, because I often do agree with him. He has proposed a “pledge” in new clause 4. I do not like the pledge. I think that it reads as a sort of bureaucratic announcement that we are all going to do good things, in that awful “speak” that is so common in conferences, about how you should be a leader and grab hold of your management skills, and all that waffle.
I do not like that at all. It does not accord with my vision of myself as a Member of Parliament. I think that Members of Parliament are here at the service of their constituents, and that their constituents will judge whether they are doing their job properly, rather than someone’s saying that they have not shown leadership. What on earth does “showing leadership” mean? If you are the Prime Minister it is easy, but what is a Back-Bench MP meant to do? [Interruption.] The Prime Minister always shows wonderful, clear, decisive leadership. The hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) is cackling from his Front Bench. Many people think it is a pity that he did not show leadership by trying to become leader of the Scottish socialists, which would have been very welcome.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Or even the Scottish Labour party, which is much the same thing.
I do not think this presents the right image of what a Member of Parliament is trying to be. A Member of Parliament is not trying to be some sort of second-tier bureaucrat. A Member of Parliament is someone who is there to represent his or her constituents, to take a view on the interests of the nation, both nationally and internationally, to stand up and be counted on the basis of what he or she says or does, and then to be held to account by the electorate, rather than making some waffly pledge.
I also think that in trying to get away from the oath we already take, it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the oath. The purpose of the oath is not to show we do not want to change the laws, and it is not to show even that we are necessarily monarchists—although, for the avoidance of doubt, I certainly am—but it is to show that we accept the norms and standards of the country as they currently exist and are willing to use those to change the law through Parliament, and subscribing to that is an indication that a Member of Parliament will behave properly in seeking change, rather than do it in a demagogic or potentially violent fashion. Therefore the oath as a statement of loyalty to the nation via the sovereign is a very important statement and does not preclude people from holding republican views. It merely requires them to express them and act upon them in a parliamentary and legal fashion. I think that is an important distinction and it is why I would oppose new clause 4 and it follows that I would oppose new clause 5. I also think, as I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Foyle, that the two did not go together—that trying to give it to the people and then giving it to a court did not work.
I want to finish very briefly on the amendments from the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife. By and large I think they are extremely well considered. I believe that the right of recall should be as wide as it can possibly be made. I would like it to be more generous, and therefore reducing the threshold is sensible. It is obviously sensible, in the atmosphere over the last few years and considering the sensitivity of expenses, to say that somebody who has committed an offence in claiming their expenses ought to face the risk of recall. That ought to be a basis of it because it shows that somebody in this House has behaved badly in their basic terms of membership of this House, so I completely support that, but I cannot support the final amendment on retrospection. I think this is unjust. I see the reasons for it and the case the hon. Gentleman made about the Member of the Scottish Parliament who had committed many serious crimes, but it indicates a problem with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament that it could not do anything about that.
I also accept that somebody at, let us say, 30 who goes out and robs a bank is not thinking, “Good heavens, if I get into the House of Commons in five years’ time, I may lose my membership because that may be part of the penalty.” I am sure they are thinking more immediately about the risk of a police officer being there and catching them in the act and hauling them off to chokey, but none the less it is unfair to penalise people in a way they did not know could apply to them before they committed the offence, and if this House does not stand up pedantically for the rule of law, nobody will.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does the hon. Gentleman wish to say something? He is wavering about whether to intervene. I may be persuading him; he may wish to withdraw his amendment on the strength of what I am saying.
There is a further protection, which has been overlooked throughout this whole debate on the issue of recall, and that is that if the behaviour is so egregious—so shocking to all good common sense—then this House of Commons has the right to expel that Member anyway. We should not forget that, or allow it to wither on the vine.
Thomas Docherty
Given that this Act will, assuming it clears the Lords, come into force at the start of the next Parliament, does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that anyone who chooses to stand for election at the general election on 7 May would know that, if they had committed an offence for which they were then prosecuted and found guilty, they would be subject to recall?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman puts as good a gloss on it as he can, but I do not think it changes the fundamental principle. We could equally say that a Member of Parliament who had committed an offence should be subject to double the time in prison, regardless of when the offence was committed. That would be fundamentally unjust. If we were to say that from tomorrow Members of Parliament who commit an offence should have double the time in prison, that would not be unjust. That would be simply saying that Members of Parliament should be held to a higher standard, and that is perfectly arguable, but to say for an offence committed previously that the punishment can be increased is to act against justice and that is something it is important not to do.
Dr Huppert
That is exactly what happened with police and crime commissioners in legislation for which I presume the hon. Gentleman voted. If they have ever been convicted of an imprisonable offence, they are debarred from the office.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I think the PCCs are rather an irrelevance to what we are discussing and I want to remain in order. I believe it is important to be pedantic about upholding the rule of law, and therefore I will oppose that amendment from the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife. I will support his other ones, but I must reject the proposal that we bring the courts—
Lady Hermon
May I put a proposition to the hon. Gentleman which is a possibility? On 17 July Lady Justice Hallett’s report was published and a statement was made by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In that report, it was identified that 14 terrorists of the republican movement had been granted the royal prerogative of mercy. They are unnamed, but it is believed they might include senior politicians representing Sinn Fein. If the names of those 14 recipients of the RPM whom we know to be republican terrorists were to be revealed and included a Member of this House, would the hon. Gentleman think differently?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I always give way to the hon. Lady and she always then serves up the most impossible and difficult interventions. I think she is the Michael Holding of interventions, with these very fast balls being bowled at me. My stumps have disappeared behind me, but what I would say is that I would apply exactly the same rules to those people as to anybody else.
Thomas Docherty
If someone commits an offence currently for which the sentence tariff is less than one year, it is quite reasonable that in future the House of Commons may change the disqualification Act to bring that disqualification down to less than one year. That would equally apply to them. Why does the hon. Gentleman not think that this House has the right to recall somebody who has committed offences prior to this date?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am not sure the hon. Gentleman is right about that because, interestingly, the ability to expel peers very carefully ensured it was not retrospective to the crime or to the sentence. It was right to adopt the principle that it is fundamentally unjust to punish people when they did not know that was the punishment at the time when they committed the offence, so I must oppose his amendment.
Conor Burns (Bournemouth West) (Con)
My hon. Friend will see that sometimes when the courts come to sentence someone who is brought before them for an offence committed many years previously, they are obliged to look at the sentencing guidelines that applied at the time of the offence. The case he is making is absolutely right: we cannot have retrospective cases such as this.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend and we have seen this in some of the recent celebrity sex offending cases: people have been sentenced under the old rules. That is a good principle of law and this House ought to maintain good principles of law. That is why we should reject that amendment, and reject the amendments of my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), because they bring the courts into our proceedings, but I think we should accept the amendments of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife that allow more free-flowing recall, because ultimately we should trust the good sense of the British people, especially those in Somerset where most good sense is to be found.
Michael Ellis
As usual, it is a great honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). May I start by agreeing very much with him about the issue of retrospective penalty? It is more than guidelines; it is a fundamental principle of the law of England and Wales that penalties do not apply retrospectively. I have prosecuted and, for that matter, defended cases in court which are often historical offences—this relates particularly to sexual offences, but it can relate to other types of offence as well—where the penalties have moved on and often been increased in the intervening years. The historical sex offence with which the individual defendant is charged carries a maximum that no longer applies, but the court is bound by the maximum sentence that was in place at the time of the offence.
European Council
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
The Prime Minister has saved the European Union from the crime of living off immoral earnings. That has made him enormously popular. Will he follow up his popularity by refusing the European arrest warrant, and most importantly by telling the Home Office that it is not befitting a great Department of State to give briefings that are not entirely accurate factually?
The Prime Minister
We need to have a proper discussion about how we keep the country safe given all the risks we face and given that we have secured a massive act of repatriating powers from Brussels to Britain in the huge amount of opt-outs in justice and home affairs, which I am sure he supports. My point on the European arrest warrant is that we have made changes to it, so we can now refuse arrest warrants in minor cases. British judges are able to consider whether extradition is proportionate and can block any arrest warrant where the incident does not amount to a crime in UK law. Those things have changed since the arrest warrant was first put before the House.
Recall of MPs Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Zac Goldsmith
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. In fact, an open recall system of the sort I propose gives local constituents the power to decide what constitutes serious wrongdoing. For my part, I believe that it would not be abused by voters. They would be able to tell the difference between a disagreement on a simple policy issue or a frivolous mistake in someone’s private life and issues that are so serious they merit recall.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am honoured to be allowed to intervene on this brilliant speech by someone who actually trusts the voters. It seems to me that if all we are concerned about is wrongdoing, that is covered by the Standing Orders of the House, under which we are entitled to expel Members who do something of which the House disapproves. That makes the Bill as framed—without my hon. Friend’s excellent amendments—unnecessary. We should do the whole thing properly, or not at all.
Zac Goldsmith
Again, my hon. Friend will not be surprised to know that I absolutely agree. My concern is that many of the arguments against recall imply that, to paraphrase Lenin’s infamous dictum, democracy is so precious that it must be rationed.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman will recall that the Procedure Committee discussed the question of lay members of the Standards Committee voting and concluded that if they did have votes, they would be outside privilege. Therefore, there is a real difficulty in having voting lay members on any Committee of Parliament.
Thomas Docherty
The hon. Gentleman will recall that the Committee was not unanimous on that matter. That is why we are offering to work on a cross-party basis—I see that the Deputy Leader of the House is in his place—away from the Bill, on a reformed Standards Committee that will genuinely command the confidence of the public and the House and also meet our constitutional requirements.
Amendment 46 relates to the issue of whether only offences committed after this Bill comes into effect should be subject to recall. That appears to be the case as the Bill stands. As an example of the problems that would create, let us take the case again of Bill Walker, the disgraced former SNP MSP. It was only after he was elected that it came to light that he had, over a 30-year period, repeatedly assaulted four members of his family. He was subsequently tried, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. However, as the Bill stands, had Mr Walker been an MP, he would not have been covered by the recall provisions. Of course, the recall provision should not apply if the electorate are aware of a previous conviction when electing a Member of Parliament, but it surely cannot be right that if an historic offence comes to light and a conviction is then forthcoming, voters cannot remove and replace that convicted politician. We hope that the Minister will recognise that important oversight in the Bill and work with us to tidy it up through this amendment or on Report.
Amendment 49 deals with offences committed by MPs who also hold other elected offices. Although the Bill is so narrowly drawn that we cannot extend its provisions to other elected posts, we think that it is at least sensible to extend it to cases in which MPs hold a dual mandate. Let us use as an example a hypothetical case in which an MP is also a councillor. If that MP is found guilty of a breach of the councillors’ rules, such as interfering inappropriately with a constituent, and suspended for a certain period, it would be bizarre if they could not be recalled by their constituents as an MP.
Our amendments are designed to strengthen the Bill. They seek to strike the right balance between protecting parliamentary protest and ensuring that MPs who commit wrongdoing are held to account. They would widen the scope for recall and lower the threshold to ensure that genuine wrongdoing does not go unpunished. I hope that they will command support on both sides of the House.
I want to turn briefly to the amendments in the name of other hon. Members, and to turn first to the amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Richmond Park. He has campaigned on this issue since he was first elected in 2010 and held consistently to his views. We are concerned, however, that he has not been able properly to define wrongdoing, despite being pressed to do so not just in Committee today and on Second Reading last week, but on many previous occasions. The dangers associated with not having a requirement to demonstrate any wrongdoing are clear: a well-funded campaign group or vested interest would be able to remove a Member of Parliament simply because it disagreed with his or her views.
Sir Edward Leigh
To be honest, I do not really understand that intervention. I have mentioned the hon. Member for Bradford West, Tam Dalyell and Ian Paisley, and I have done some research on which Members have been thrown out for expressing their opinions. Since the Bill of Rights, the only one to be thrown out has been John Wilkes, Before the Bill of Rights—this is quite important; people have always felt this to be a crucial part of the liberties of this country—it was quite common to throw Members out. For instance, one Member was thrown out for inventing orders from the Duke of York to down sail, which prevented England from capitalising on its naval victory off Lowestoft in 1665. Another Member, Edward Sackville, was thrown out because he denounced Titus Oates as a “lying rogue” and he disbelieved in the Popish plot. Another one was thrown out for associating with the Duke of York in alleged complicity in the meal tub plot, and so it goes on. So it was actually very common to throw people out for expressing opinions that the Executive did not like.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The early examples of people being thrown out were not necessarily because they offended the Executive, but often because they offended the House. The Popish plot was not popular with the Executive—they were reluctant to believe it—but the House of Commons was obsessed by it.
Recall of MPs Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Greg Clark
My hon. Friend takes us on to an area that could detain us for the rest of the day. He and I would prefer to be implementing all the Conservative party’s manifesto commitments, but the electorate did not give us a majority, so we formed a coalition, which I think has made great achievements, not least by turning around the economy through its effective, long-term economic plan.
Let me set out the provisions that will govern the debate not just today, but in Committee and on Report. There are two conditions under which a recall petition would be opened. The first trigger is if a Member of Parliament is convicted in the United Kingdom of an offence for which they receive a custodial sentence of 12 months or less. At present, any MP who is imprisoned for more than a year is automatically disqualified from Parliament, but if they receive a sentence of 12 months or less, they can keep their job until the next general election. The Bill will close that loophole.
The imprisonment of a Member of Parliament will, quite understandably, cause many constituents to question their faith in that MP. Incarceration not only indicates serious wrongdoing, but prevents that Member from doing their job effectively, so the Government believe that constituents should be able to decide whether there should be a by-election in such circumstances. Of course, it would remain open for the recalled Member of Parliament to stand as a candidate in that by-election, should they wish to justify the actions that led to that sentence of imprisonment.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I broadly support the Bill, but with regard to that point, is it strictly necessary? It is open to the House—this has been done in the past—to expel a Member who has been sentenced to prison. Is it not the failure to use our existing powers, rather than a need to create new powers, that is at issue?
Greg Clark
My hon. Friend, who is learned and reflective on these matters, is right that the power to expel a Member exists. However, constituents do not have the power to decide whether a seat should be vacated, but that would be available under the Bill.
European Council
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My intention is that Britain reforms the European Union and then agrees to stay in a reformed European Union. That is the right outcome. There are all sorts of economic analyses, which people can read, about the consequences for Britain either of remaining in an EU that is overly bureaucratic or, indeed, of choosing to leave.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Once again, my right hon. Friend is the toast of Somerset for his stand against Mr Juncker. Now he has done this bold thing, is it not the ineluctable logic of his position that he should oppose any further moves to the integration of justice and home affairs, which covered the first 13 paragraphs of the Council’s conclusions, and most particularly that we should not opt in to the European arrest warrant, which would give Mr Juncker, the Commission and the European Court of Justice additional powers?
The Prime Minister
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend once again. People seem to do a lot of toasting in Somerset, which I am sure is very good for the health in all sorts of ways.
On the issue of the justice and home affairs opt-out, what we have done is to achieve the biggest return of power from Brussels to Britain that there has been since we have been members of this organisation, by exercising that opt-out. We did that on the basis that it was important to opt back into a small number of measures that will actually help us to catch criminals and terrorists, and to keep our people safe.
Debate on the Address
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Edward Miliband
Here we have it: the country wants answers to deeply serious questions, and what do the Government do? They get every Tory Back Bencher to read out a planted Whip’s question. I have to say it: no wonder the public hate politics, given the way Government Members behave.
The first thing this Queen’s Speech needed to do was signal a new direction in the jobs we create in this country and whether hard work pays, and it did not rise to the challenge.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way to the question that I have obviously been given by the Chief Whip. In his opening and thoughtful part of his speech he called for a different form of politics, but as soon as he gets on to the detail it is business as usual and he criticises us for doing the same. May we go back to his first speechwriter, who was actually giving us something rather interesting?
Edward Miliband
I say to the hon. Gentleman that the man who called for a pact with UKIP clearly has great confidence in the prospects of the Conservative party and its ability to win the election.
Let me come to the child care Bill. We support measures on child care, which is part of the cost of living crisis, although the scale of that challenge means that we could go further on free places for three and four-year-olds. We also support the Bill on pensions, although we want to ensure that people get proper advice to avoid the mis-selling scandals of the past.
The next task for this Queen’s Speech is to face up to another truth: for the first time since the second world war, many parents fear that their children will have a worse life than they do. No wonder people think that politics does not have the answers when that is the reality they confront, and nowhere is that more important than on the issue of housing. We all know the importance of that to provide security to families, and we know that it matters for the durability of our recovery too. The Bank of England has warned that the failure to build homes is its biggest worry, and that generational challenge has not been met for 30 years.
House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I beg to move amendment 2, page 1, line 2, after ‘peer’, insert
‘and has been a peer for 10 years’.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 3, page 1, line 2, after ‘peer’, insert
‘and has been a peer for 10 years and is over the age of 65’.
Amendment 4, page 1, line 7, leave out ‘a witness’ and insert
‘two witnesses, both of whom must be peers of the same degree’.
Amendment 6, page 1, line 10, at end insert
‘after the date specified in 2(a) above’.
Amendment 7, page 1, line 10, at end insert—
‘(5) This section does not apply to unelected hereditary peers who sit in the House of Lords’.
Amendment 8, page 1, line 10, at end insert—
‘( ) An hereditary peer who retires or otherwise resigns in accordance with this section shall be deemed to have died allowing any heir to be eligible to be elected.’.
Amendment 9, page 1, line 10, at end insert—
‘( ) A life peer who retires or otherwise resigns in accordance with this section will upon petition to the Queen be raised to the state degree style dignity title and honour of viscount.’.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
With hindsight, how fortunate it is that we are not sitting in private to discuss these important matters, which will be of interest to the nation at large, concerning retirement or resignation from the House of Lords.
Amendment 2 would simply add a line to clause 1 to the effect that a peer may not resign until they have been a peer for a minimum of 10 years. If somebody accepts a great honour from the Crown, it seems to me that they have an obligation to live up to that honour. Circumstances might change and require a different lifestyle that makes it impossible for them to attend the House, but to enter lightly into the receipt of a peerage—that great honour bestowed by our sovereign of being a legislator in the second House of Parliament—and then to give it up after a day or two or, conceivably, even after a minute, seems improper.
People enter into a life peerage, and understand that they have done so for life, hence the name. It is amazing how often an obvious point about something is made in its title. There is no obfuscation in the title “life peer”. It is not a temporary peerage, a Parliament peerage or a dated peerage, but a life peerage. One of the glories of the House of Lords is that it represents age. It is not full of scribbling youths, but has people of mature years, of wisdom, of grey beards, and even of grey flowing locks, which shows how much they have learnt and experienced over the years.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
I was here for Second Reading, as the hon. Gentleman knows, and must recommend him to the BBC as a panellist on “Just a Minute”—he would be absolutely superb. In the light of his speech on Second Reading and his contribution this morning, which clearly will be enlightening, may I ask whether he opposes any kind of reform of the House of Lords?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The return of the hereditary peerage is the sort of reform that would improve the quality of the House considerably. I do think that there are opportunities for reform but, as I said on Second Reading—I had better not go through this all again, Mr Speaker—I have concerns about this process for reforming the second Chamber. I think that reform ought to have been proposed in a Government Bill and considered in a Committee of the whole House.
Although the Bill is simple, it would fundamentally change the nature of the House of Lords. Removing the absolute certainty that a peerage is for life would allow people appointed to the House to remain there for a term. That change in structure would allow Governments that are not necessarily as benign as this one—I will talk about this further in relation to some of my other amendments—to ensure that peers are in the House for only a certain period, and possibly to get them post-dated cheques for when they might resign. I think that that reform should have been handled differently, but there are certainly reforms that could be made to the House of Lords.
Amendment 2 ties in with amendment 3. The point of amendment 3 is to insert a minimum age for retirement, whereby no peer under 65 could retire. Being a peer—a legislator in the upper House—should not be a marker in somebody’s career. It should not be a point on their CV so that when they apply for jobs in merchant banks, or wherever, they can say “I was a peer for 10 years.” People who take it on should commit to do so for an extended period, so that if a peer is raised to that rank, style and dignity at the age of 40, there will be an expectation that the major part of their future life and career will be a commitment to serve the House—this country—in the second Chamber.
These two amendments, in essence, offer the House the choice of saying that there ought to be a minimum period and that it ought to be longer than a single Parliament. Ten years obviously equates to two Parliaments under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. That gets away from the risk that people might use the House of Lords as a means of advancing their political career in relation to the Commons, a point to which we will return in a subsequent group of amendments. The amendments are about expecting people to follow through on the commitment they have given, so that when their letters patent are issued they will be doing this for life.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
What is my hon. Friend’s preference between amendments 2 and 3?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. My preference is for amendment 3, as it would ensure that people retired from Parliament when they were coming to the end of their working career. It is wrong for people to use membership of the House of Lords as a point on their CV. It is not an internship that people do for a little while to get a bit of work experience before taking on another job. It is such an exciting and great honour to have—why would these people wish to give it up? I recall that when Disraeli went to the House of Lords, he said that he was not dead
“but in the Elysian fields.”
Who, having entered the Elysian fields, wants to come back down to earth? It seems extraordinary in the first place that anyone would want to leave those glorious red Benches and the gilt around the throne—the magnificence that the House of Lords shows to the world—and trot out into the humdrum life in front of them. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) asks whether this is a job application. I am by no means grand enough to enter their lordships’ House. I like representing the British people—vox populi, vox Dei—through this illustrious Chamber rather than in their lordships’ noble House. Given the question of why anybody would want to leave, they ought to live up to the commitment they have made. Ten years seems reasonable; I would have been happy with 15 or 20 years.
Moreover, crucially, when Ministers go into the House of Lords they may want to be there only while they are in ministerial office. That is not a proper way of treating the constitution. Ministers who go into the House of Lords ought to stay there for an extended period to show a commitment to the legislature, not just to being appointees of the Executive who are here today, gone tomorrow. These amendments are important and would improve the Bill. Had we been debating them in a Committee of the whole House, it is likely that some of these changes would have been made.
Amendment 4 is about the witnessing of the peer’s statement that he wishes to retire or resign. The statement may be witnessed by anybody, but I think that it should be witnessed by two people, both of whom must be peers of the same degree. Is that because I think that lots of fraudulent certificates will be issued by random people wandering around signing things and pretending to be witnesses to statements that peers have not made? No, I do not think that, but these resignations are essentially proceedings in Parliament, and they should be a formal parliamentary proceeding registered by people who are also Members of Parliament. This would be a safeguard to ensure that somebody did not resign in a light moment and then regret it, or have the statement signed in their office and send it in having been pushed into doing it by offers of who knows what—perhaps an offer of becoming a European commissioner or something grand and fancy such as that, although I know that there is a special way for such people to stay in the House of Lords with a formal leave of absence. We should ensure that the grave and important decision to leave the upper Chamber is made properly and thoughtfully and that there is a formal process by which to register that decision.
That ties in with amendment 6, which says:
“after the date specified in 2(a) above”.
The problem with reading out amendments without reading out the relevant part of the Bill is that they sound rather obscure, so it may be sensible to explain. The Bill says that if somebody signs a form resigning from the House of Lords, that notice is irrevocable from the point at which it has been signed, even if it is a long-post-dated cheque. So if a peer entered the House of Lords and said that he intended to resign in eight years’ time, the document would be irrevocable, even though all sorts of things may change. That person would then be ineligible to be a peer again in future. I think that that is a mistake. There should be an ability to withdraw the notice prior to its becoming effective; otherwise, appointments to the House of Lords are opened up to abuse.
I have heard former Leaders of the House of Lords—noble Lords themselves—talk about what happens when people ask for peerages. It may shock you, Mr Speaker, that people ask for peerages. I would have thought it was an enormous impertinence for anybody to say to the Prime Minister or to the Leader of the House of Lords that they would like a peerage, but people do. Apparently, they knock on their doors to ask to be given a peerage; they queue up outside their offices as though they were waiting for an omnibus. When they do so—I really have heard Leaders of the House of Lords make speeches along these lines—they say anything that the people dishing the peerage out may wish to hear. They say, “I’ll always vote with the Government line, I’ll never disobey, I’ll do what I’m told”, and so on and so forth.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Sadly, I have heard Leaders of the House of Lords talk only in general terms—they have not named names—so the hon. Gentleman cannot lead me down that route, and if I did I might be out of order because saying anything critical of a noble peer is against the forms of this House, and neither would I wish to do so.
There is the risk that peers, before they are appointed—therefore, of course, they are not yet peers—are in the position of asking for something that they want that is in the Government’s gift, and the Government want to have some leverage over them to ensure that they behave in the way the Government want when they are appointed. One of the glories of the House of Lords is that once people are there, they are independent because they are there for life. That preserves them from the terrors of the Whips. We in this House live in daily terror of the fierce power the Whips have whereby they may do all sorts of extraordinary things to us with any amount of instruments of torture that are maintained in the bowels of the Palace of Westminster, but in their lordships’ House those instruments are ineffective—they have rusted away because the peers are there for life. That is a great protection for them. If somebody could give a post-dated cheque—if someone could say, “I will leave the House a few years after going in”—that protection would begin to ebb away. But if they had the power to rescind the notice, whatever they said at the point at which they were grubbing round for the peerage, they would be able to withdraw it, and the independence of being a peer for life would be maintained.
This flexibility ought to be added to the Bill because it would allow peers to maintain that which is the essence of the success of our revising Chamber. What makes the House of Lords successful, and different from this House, is that because peers are not standing for re-election and do not need to be readopted by their parties, and because very few of them are Ministers, there are many fewer baubles that may be offered to them to maintain party discipline.
Party discipline is very important. It is important that a Government are able to get their business through, but party discipline in a revising Chamber is unhelpful, because instead of doing its job of revising it tends simply to go along with what is asked of it by the party managers. That is damaging both ways: it is damaging if Governments do it, because it means that they are not necessarily putting through Bills that have had the wisdom and benefit of the proper revising process, and it is equally bad when Oppositions do it simply to oppose what the Government are doing. We have seen that on a number of occasions in the House of Lords when, out of party loyalty, rather than according to the argument, the will of the House of Commons has been thwarted.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The Bill simply states that the notice must
“specify a date from which the resignation is to take effect”.
That could be any date in the future. There is no requirement that it be no more than a month or six months from the date of the notice being issued. That leaves a period in which it is perfectly reasonable to think that circumstances could change such that the notice might be withdrawn.
Dan Byles
I now understand my hon. Friend’s concern better, but I still disagree. For the reasons that he has given, I believe it is a serious step for a Member to take the decision to leave. One change that we made in Committee was to say that a Member who decides to retire or resign may not subsequently be reappointed to the House of Lords. We did that for the very reasons that he has given. Sitting in the House of Lords is a lifetime commitment and it should not be the norm to leave. One should not leave with the expectation that one may simply waltz back in later. When a Member decides to submit a notice stating that they wish to leave, it would not be helpful if they could think, “I can always change my mind before it comes into effect.” Perhaps my hon. Friend and I must agree to disagree on that issue.
Amendment 7 would exempt unelected hereditary peers from disqualification under the Bill. The two peers who would be exempted from disqualification, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Marshal, undertake various ceremonial duties in the House of Lords. I do not believe that either officer should retain their seat in the House of Lords if they wish to resign or if they are convicted of a criminal offence. I am of the view that it would not be possible for those officers to undertake their duties in the House and elsewhere if they were in custody for more than a year. I am confident that if that situation arose, the Government, in conjunction with the Palace, would put in place appropriate and effective measures to ensure that the functions of the officer were executed properly while they were in custody. I do not believe that Members of the House of Lords should be able to retain their seats if they are safely convicted of a serious criminal offence. I certainly do not believe that peers should enjoy the privilege of being exempt from that. I therefore do not support amendment 7, although I understand why my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset felt the need to raise and discuss the issue.
Amendments 8 and 9 would allow the heir of a retiring hereditary peer to take part in the by-election caused by their parent’s retirement and elevate the retiring peer to the status of viscount. It would be entirely wrong for this Bill to change the current position whereby heirs are not given an automatic right to enter the House of Lords. I would not want to support such a controversial amendment, because the Bill seeks to make straightforward and sensible changes to the membership of the House of Lords. However, this is a fascinating debate that might take place in other circumstances. Under the Bill, departing peers will retain their peerage. I therefore do not agree that those who retire should be elevated automatically to viscount status, nor that they should be entitled to any additional honour simply because they have been a Member of the House of Lords, so I do not support amendments 8 and 9.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I wonder whether my hon. Friend recalls the Agatha Christie book “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?”, in which the heart of the matter is who the witness was.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Without being able to find the witness and ascertain who they are, the existence of their signature is not much help to a court.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The amendment would merely exempt the officeholders from the ability to retire or resign. If they cannot resign as Lord Chamberlain and Earl Marshal, it makes no sense for them to be able to resign as Members of the House of Lords. I was trying to bring the two together.
Greg Clark
I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but it is relevant that they should be subject to the same procedures as would apply under the Bill to every Member of the House of Lords, whether through resignation—and the same circumstances might apply to them in wishing to resign—or through being convicted of a serious criminal offence. The points that my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire made in response to that capture the essence of the argument. It is not appropriate to permit peers on the basis on which they hold their seats to remain in the House if they are convicted of a serious criminal offence or if they want to exercise—they are under no obligation to do so—the opportunity to retire.
My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset raised a question about whether a writ of advancement should be available in the case of hereditary peers. There is no reason why a writ of advancement should not be available, but it is worth noting that if a hereditary peer disclaims his or her peerage under the Peerage Act 1963, there is no advancement for his or her heir while the disclaiming peer is still alive.
Amendments 8 and 9 would ensure that the heir of a retiring hereditary peer could participate in the by-election caused by his or her parent’s retirement. My hon. Friend’s ingenious suggestion of an improvement in social mobility by elevating a retiring peer to the status of a viscount is also contained in the amendments. I have some difficulty with the amendments, as I am sure my hon. Friend would imagine. The name of our venerable upper chamber is the House of Lords, not the house of heirs. It would be wrong to break with the tradition of hundreds of years to allow heirs to enter the Chamber just because their father or mother had retired from their role in the House.
My hon. Friend made it clear that he recognised the difference between attendance and membership of the House of Lords and the peerage. His amendment, however, would introduce a novel constitutional concept of the kind that he is generally inclined to view with a certain degree of scepticism. I think that, just like any hereditary peer who, extraordinarily, continues to enjoy a right to sit in the legislature, those heirs should wait until they have been elevated to the peerage as their forefathers did.
As for the question of the elevation of retiring peers to the status of viscount, I do not see the need to provide for such a possibility, given that we are talking about membership of the House of Lords rather than about the peerage itself. As I said earlier, my hon. Friend has advanced an ingenious argument for social mobility. He has anticipated the objection that the ratcheting up to the level of royal dukedoms might cause a problem for Her Majesty. In any event, I should have thought that before embarking on such an approach, one would need to be assured of the consent of Her Majesty, as the fount of all honour and dignity, and to have discussed the issues with Garter King of Arms. I do not know whether my hon. Friend has done those things.
I fully appreciate the attention that my hon. Friends have given to both the Bill and the amendments, but I do not think that any of the amendments is necessary to safeguard the purposes of the Bill from unintended consequences, and—as I hope I have been able to demonstrate—in many instances they would have unintended consequences of their own that would damage the Bill. I therefore urge my hon. Friend to withdraw his amendment.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I have listened enormously carefully to what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles), the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and my right hon. Friend the Minister. I have the impression that the mood of the House is against my proposals, and I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 3
Conviction of serious offence
Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 1, page 2, line 23, leave out ‘one year’ and insert ‘6 months’.
Thomas Docherty
I am in august company today. It is excellent to be in the presence of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), a fine example of the Conservative workers party if ever I saw one. However, I must chide him very gently about one matter, about which I have already spoken to him.
Both the hon. Gentleman and I serve on the Procedure Committee. The House recently resolved that, whenever reasonable, Members should publish explanatory statements. The hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) has published such a statement, but I have not, because, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset knows, the Procedure Committee said that it was not necessary to publish one when what a Member was trying to achieve was so blindingly obvious. However, I must gently tell the hon. Gentleman that it took me several attempts to understand exactly what his amendments would do, and that an explanatory statement would therefore have been useful.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am shocked that the hon. Gentleman is so slow on the uptake. I always thought that he was one of the faster thinkers on the Opposition Benches. If he waits for a few moments, however, and if you are kind enough to call me, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will explain all.
Thomas Docherty
I am most grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Let me begin by saying something about my amendment 1. The origin of the requirement—in this place, and, indeed, in the United Kingdom’s other Parliaments and Assemblies—for someone to have been given a jail sentence of more than a year to be disqualified is almost accidental. The hon. Member for North East Somerset will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that until the 1960s there were two classes of criminal acts, felonies and misdemeanours. I think that it was Roy Jenkins who, as Home Secretary, abolished the distinction. Until then, someone who was convicted of a felony would automatically be disqualified from serving in the House of Commons. Thankfully, it had been a long time since any Member had been sent to prison, so the rule had fallen into desuetude, and, at the time when the classes of felony and misdemeanour were scrapped, it did not occur to anyone to introduce a provision for that purpose.
Let us now fast-forward to 1981, and the election of Bobby Sands as a member of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. His election understandably prompted a great deal of public outrage, and the Government of day, Mrs Thatcher’s Government, introduced a law providing for the disqualification of anyone who had been given a sentence of more than a year. That would have caught Bobby Sands, and the other terrorists who were on hunger strike in the Maze prison. Again, no one really thought about it at the time. As far as I can ascertain after having consulted the records from the period, there was not a great deal of consideration about whether a year and a day was a particularly suitable target. The provision was designed to capture a very specific group of people; it met that test, and it was therefore passed.
As I think all Members know, there is a long and noble tradition of the right to protest, and, in particular, to engage in political protest. Anyone who visits the Tea Room will see a painting hanging at the Labour end of the room. If Government Members wish to pop down to our end to have a look at it, they are more than welcome to do so. It depicts one of the great protesters and pamphleteers of the 18th century, who was regularly incarcerated for speaking out against the Government. It is an important principle that we should maintain the right to speak against the Government, and that there should be protections against politically motivated arrests and imprisonments. We would not want someone who was simply sent to jail to be disqualified. Many of my constituents have talked to me about this issue, for reasons that I shall explain shortly.
While I strongly disagree with the views of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on fracking and, funnily enough, on many other issues, I respect her right to engage in political protest and to be arrested, and, if she were convicted and sentenced to a few days, it would be absolutely wrong for her then to be disqualified from serving in the House of Commons. The voters in Brighton, Pavilion should have the chance to do that in 14 months’ time.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for being pedantic. Members of the House of Commons who are given prison sentences are not disqualified from serving; they are expelled from the House, but they can stand again in a by-election.
Thomas Docherty
As ever, the hon. Gentleman has shown that his knowledge is superior to mine. He is absolutely right. My point was that such people would be denied the right to be a Member of Parliament for a period.
There is, of course, a huge difference between the length of a sentence that would be received by someone who had engaged in political protest and the length of the sentences that have been received in some of the cases that we have—regrettably—seen in recent years, in this Parliament and in other United Kingdom Parliaments and Assemblies. There was, for instance, the outrageous case of Chris Huhne, who perjured himself, and Opposition Members in the House of Commons as well as Conservatives in the other place have been jailed in connection with expenses. I think that there was a great deal of genuine public revulsion at the idea that politicians in either House, or indeed in any House, would be convicted of serious crimes and go to prison, but would not necessarily have to resign their seats or be disqualified.
The case that made me such a champion of reform in this regard arose in the Scottish Parliament, in my own constituency of Dunfermline. The local nationalist MSP, Mr Bill Walker, was convicted last August of 22 accounts of domestic abuse and one charge of breaking a frying pan over his stepdaughter’s head—which serves to demonstrate the scale of the violence he was showing to a group of women over a 20 or 30-year period. I praise the Sunday Herald, which did so much to bring this story to light. Owing to the way in which the Scottish courts work, the maximum sentence that Bill Walker could receive—and did receive—was one year, so he was not automatically disqualified from serving in the Scottish Parliament, and if he had been a Member of the House of Commons, he would not have been automatically disqualified from serving in this House.
I welcome the recent statement from the Leader of the House that he is interested in starting a dialogue about the rules of the House of Commons and I hope the Minister will set out the Government’s broader thinking about the rules of disqualification and whether or not we need to look at this again.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
North East Somerset, in the great county of Somerset, is always ready. We are on alert for whatever might come. I am fortunate in that my constituency is not under water, so it is perhaps easier for me to be alert than those in the rest of the county at the moment.
Mr Deputy Speaker
I know that the hon. Gentleman has great knowledge of these matters. He will know that he is allowed to mention such people as long as they are not Members of the House of Lords.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am extremely grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am also rather troubled, because that means that I can be rude about hereditaries who are not in the House of Lords. That would be deeply upsetting, however, and I would be shocked if I did such a thing. Anyway, the point about Nevada was that a judgment made there was not considered to be authoritative.
Thomas Docherty
Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that this would not apply to members of the royal family who had been sitting in the House of Lords as hereditary dukes?
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I think I can help the hon. Gentleman on that: we are not going to enter into a debate on the royal family. We are going to get back to the subject that Jacob Rees-Mogg has in hand.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is inconceivable that anyone would ever want to be rude about the royal family.
So, Nevada was not taken seriously and Earl Russell was found guilty of bigamy. My amendments distinguish between the jurisdictions of a variety of foreign countries, and with good reason. The reason for including Ireland along with the United Kingdom is that it matches the form used for exclusion from the House of Commons, and there seems to be a logic in maintaining that. It is also set down in statute that we recognise the unique relationship that the United Kingdom continues to have with Ireland. Irish citizens are the only ones other than Commonwealth citizens who are always allowed to vote in United Kingdom elections, and travel from the Republic of Ireland to the United Kingdom does not require a passport. Ireland is not viewed as a foreign country in the same way as other countries are.
The Commonwealth realms are either serious nations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada that have a legal form based on ours and that follow the legal traditions of the United Kingdom which they inherited from us, or they are smaller nations, nine of which have the Privy Council as their court of appeal. We can therefore say that any conviction within the Commonwealth realms will be of such standing that we can recognise it because it has been made in a nation with which we have the friendliest relations and the tightest of historical links.
Thomas Docherty
I am seeking enlightenment. The hon. Gentleman has mentioned “realms” a couple of times. If a Member of the House of Commons or the House of Lords were convicted of a crime in one of the Crown dependencies or the British overseas territories, would they automatically be disqualified? I truly do not know the answer to that question.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
They are not included in my amendment, although it would obviously be possible to amend the Bill to bring the Crown dependencies in. I am talking about the Commonwealth realms, which are the independent nations in the Commonwealth of which Her Majesty is still head of state. Nine of those nations have appeal to the Privy Council, which is their final court of appeal. They therefore have a standard of justice in which we can have confidence, because it is a standard that we ourselves implement.
Thomas Docherty
I am listening carefully. The hon. Gentleman has made an assertion a couple of times, both directly and in the round, that we have confidence in the Commonwealth judiciary. Without causing an incident by naming the countries, I am sure we can think of a number of Commonwealth countries where the judiciary, perhaps at a state level rather than at federal or national level, is less than it could be. Does he accept that is a concern?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. At the moment, I am talking about the Commonwealth realms and he himself said in his own speech that it would be peculiar if we did not trust the judicial system of Canada. I happen to share that view; there is no particular difficulty with Canadian justice. When we come to some of the smaller Commonwealth realms, they have appeal to the Privy Council and that is the safeguard—that it becomes essentially a British form of justice. In the end, a peer would be able to appeal to a court based in this country. It is actually based in the Middlesex Guildhall; if you have a good arm, Mr Deputy Speaker, it is a stone’s throw away from this palace.
With the Commonwealth realms, it is reasonable that the House of Lords should be able to recognise a conviction in one of them and it would then be able, by an ordinary vote, to expel the peer from the Lords. That seems a perfectly reasonable approach, because one can have confidence in the justice that would be meted out in those realms. In relation to other Commonwealth countries, expulsion would require the unanimous agreement of the House of Lords. That is because there are certainly Commonwealth countries where one would have some concern about the standard of justice that applied and would worry that having an automatic acceptance, or even a simple majority acceptance, of their judgments would not necessarily be helpful.
That relates to my broader question about other foreign courts. There are some Commonwealth countries where one can be imprisoned for a year for some quite extraordinary things. I do not know whether you knew, Mr Deputy Speaker, but if you should go on your travels to Singapore representing the Houses of Parliament, which would be a worthy trip for you to make, although Singapore is a great and civilised country—I am one of Lee Kuan Yew’s foremost admirers—it is illegal to connect to an unsecured wi-fi hot spot. It is classed as
“unauthorised use of computer service”,
it is punishable, for both Singapore nationals and tourists, by a fine of up to 10,000 Singapore dollars and/or imprisonment for up to three years. In 2006, a man called Garyl Tan Jia Luo received 18 months’ probation, nine months’ curfew, 80 hours of community service and an 18-month internet ban for use of an unsecured wi-fi hot spot.
Let us think of some young peer who travels to Singapore and accidentally connects to the wi-fi because he wants to read Hansard to find out what has been going on in their lordships’ house or attend to other matters of public business. If he is caught by the Singaporean police and if we accept judgments of foreign courts he could get three years in prison and be disqualified from the House of Lords.
Thomas Docherty
I am slightly troubled by the hon. Gentleman’s argument, because he seems to be saying that we have a right to look at other countries’ laws and say, “We think that’s a silly law.” Quite a lot of the world’s people drive on the wrong side of the road, but we respect their right to do so when we go to their countries. Should not that young lord have respected the rights and laws of that land, and made himself familiar with them before he travelled there?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I suggest that the hon. Gentleman visits Singapore; he will remember that people there drive on the correct side of the road. They know how to do things there. It is a wonderful country.
Breaking obscure laws that it is unreasonable to expect people to have knowledge of ought not to exclude people from the House of Lords. Uganda has been in the news recently for its stringent laws against homosexuality. Are we really to say that peers who end up in Uganda and get into trouble with the law there should be banned from the House of Lords? They could get a life sentence. Is that really a way of deciding who is in a legislature of the United Kingdom? What happens if a lord displays a flag in Kiribati? Someone who displays a flag in Kiribati or wears a uniform in connection with a political object can be sentenced to a year in prison. Lords would suddenly be excluded for doing all sorts of minor things that in this country would not be an offence.
Rather splendidly, in Swaziland it is illegal for any female under 19 to shake the hands of a man; I do not know what the punishment for that is. Under the Bill, a peer could be convicted, regardless of when the offence took place. A 90-year-old peeress, who as a 19-year-old girl had shaken hands with a gentleman in Swaziland, could suddenly be deported to Swaziland, put in jug for a year and excluded from the House of Lords.
There is a tremendously serious point in this. It is that around the world there are hundreds of countries. I have a list of them: Afghanistan; Albania; Algeria; American Samoa; Andorra; Angola; Anguilla; Antigua and Barbuda; Argentina; Armenia; Aruba; Australia; Austria; and Azerbaijan. That just gets us to—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I think we got the message after the first five. I do not want to hear the rest; I think we have a flavour, without a fully detailed world atlas.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Mr Deputy Speaker, I think you are a mind reader. I was going to read out only the As, so your intervention came at absolutely the right moment to help me to continue.
We know remarkably little about many of those countries. We have not carefully considered their legal systems. What is the law in American Samoa? What offences could lead to somebody being sentenced to a year in prison? If a peer went there on a parliamentary delegation, would they randomly find that they had committed some offence? What if somebody has a gin and tonic in Saudi Arabia? They may get lashed, but—
Thomas Docherty
One thing that I can point out to the hon. Gentleman that he probably should know about the “country” of Anguilla is that it is, in fact, an overseas territory and not a country.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It is listed as a country. [Interruption.] But then Wales is a country and it is also part of the United Kingdom. The hon. Gentleman’s pedantry is taking him down a blind alley, if I may say so.
There are also great countries—countries that we respect—that have a legal system about which we have doubts. I will mention two of the friendliest and most civilised countries that the United Kingdom has dealings with: the United States of America and Italy.
In the United States of America, the noble Lord Black was basically told that he could either plead guilty or face decades in prison if he was found guilty. There was a charge sheet against him as long as your arm, and there was a witness to give evidence against him. The witness was told, “If you plead guilty and turn the equivalent of Queen’s evidence, then we will give you a few weeks in a country club.” That approach to plea bargaining ought to raise serious concerns. In this country, it would not be allowed. There is not the possibility to say to somebody giving evidence, “We will give you something very cosy if you help us to find somebody guilty”, and guilty not just of an offence but a whole string of offences with huge sentences, and all in proportion to what was being alleged, so that people are bullied into pleading guilty. The reason that America does that is that it has so many constitutional safeguards to provide for a fair trial that it is consequently very difficult to get convictions. Plea bargaining is therefore used as a means of getting the result that was sought in the first place, but which the protections in place would have made it hard to get. That form of justice should not determine who sits in the House of Lords.
In the example of Italy, we see cases, and reports of cases come to us, of people being found guilty, not guilty and guilty again. In a British sense, that is not justice; it does not observe the requirements of double jeopardy. I know that in exceptional circumstances those requirements can be got round in this country, but as a general rule the oppressive state cannot charge and recharge somebody once they have been found not guilty. Many foreign countries are also willing to try people in absentia, so one does not even have the ability to defend oneself against the charge.
Therefore, it seems to me that when we in this country are deciding how our Houses of Parliament should be designed and who shall have entitlement to sit in them, foreign courts are not a valid place to determine membership. That is the right of our sovereign and of the British people; it is not the right of courts outside this country. Consequently, I support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles), which turns things round.
Thomas Docherty
The hon. Gentleman or the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) may correct me if I get this wrong, but where someone does not attend for a parliamentary Session—a whole year—they are deemed to have been disqualified from serving in the House of Lords. Someone who has been detained at the pleasure of the Italian Government for two or three years will not have been able to attend the House of Lords and will surely be disqualified on that basis.
Dan Byles
Let me clarify this. That was a flaw in the original drafting of the Bill, but in Committee we introduced a provision whereby the House of Lords has the right to vote to disregard the clause removing peers through being absent in certain circumstances, to deal with exactly the issue that the hon. Gentleman raises.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Indeed, on Second Reading we discussed what would happen to a prisoner of war and whether they would automatically be disqualified—the answer is, obviously, no. It would almost certainly be possible for somebody held in a prison of a vaguely civilised nation to apply to take leave of absence. So, on both counts—either in the special circumstances or on the leave of absence issue—the peer would not be forced to resign.
We should protect our own constitutional rights zealously. We should not allow other places to interfere in how we run our business. The right way to go about it is set out in amendment 23, which achieves what I was aiming to achieve and is pithier. It does not give any special status to the Commonwealth realms, which I was giving not particularly out of a sentimental attachment to them, but more because of the ability to appeal to the Privy Council and the safeguards that builds in. It ought to be the right of the House of Lords to expel people—this House has that right and it is unfortunate that the House of Lords does not. It would be a good power for it to have as part of regulating its own affairs. It has the power to imprison peers but it does not have the power to expel them. However, it should use that expulsion power only if it wants to do so; it should not be forced to do it because a foreign court has told it that it has to.
I was discussing the systems in America and Italy, great nations with which we have the friendliest relations. However, we do not understand—we are not party to—their legal systems. A British person accused in a foreign country is often at a disadvantage to a national accused in that country because they are not in sympathy with the systems that will be used against them. Therefore, having this protection whereby it must be an active decision of the Lords to expel somebody convicted in a foreign country will protect the peer arrested in Kiribati for waving a flag or in Uganda for being homosexual or in Singapore for using the internet unlawfully. It is absolutely right that a judgment can be made as to whether in our terms, under our law and under our rules a peer has done something so serious and manifestly wrong that that right of peerage to sit in the House of Lords should be removed or curtailed. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire has introduced amendment 23, which has saved me from speaking at much greater length on this important subject.
Stephen Twigg
I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) on, and thank him for, discussing his concerns about this issue on Second Reading. We have subsequently had the opportunity to reflect on and consider the matter, and we see that he has made a powerful and persuasive case. I was going to mention the anti-gay laws in Uganda to which he referred. Tragically, similar laws have recently been passed in another Commonwealth country, Nigeria. So simply to rely upon the laws and legal systems of other countries is not sufficient and not proper in determining our own constitutional arrangements. As he says, even in countries that have advanced legal systems and are our close allies, such as the United States and Italy, there are concerns in certain cases. So he was absolutely right to raise this matter on Second Reading and I warmly welcome the fact that the promoter of the Bill has responded with amendment 23, which intelligently addresses the concerns that have been raised. It says that Parliament automatically will seek to protect peers but has the option of disqualifying. That reverses the original provision and it is an intelligent way of responding to the serious and proper concerns that the hon. Member for North East Somerset has raised, both on Second Reading and again today.
I wish briefly to comment on the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), who also spoke about this issue in Committee. He rightly reminded the House today of the public revulsion at some of the crimes that have been committed, referring to the case of a particular MSP, the crimes of people from all sides of this House and also of some in the other place. He made an interesting argument about why there could be a disparity between the 12-month limit here and a lower six-month limit in the other place because Members in this place are subject to re-election. That argument interests me and it is food for thought as this debate moves forward. My instinct is the same as that of the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles), which is that if we are to look to a lower limit, it would be preferable if we had a lower limit across the board. Like my hon. Friend, I welcome the fact that the Leader of the House has said that we should open a dialogue on this issue as it relates to the rules of the House of Commons.
My immediate recollection is that even where Members of Parliament have been convicted of serious offences and sentenced for a period of less than 12 months they do, generally speaking, resign. That has certainly been the case in relation to recent issues that arose from the expenses scandal. The only case I can think of in recent history where MPs did resume their seats—I stand to be corrected on this by Members from either side of the House—was where they were briefly sent to prison for not paying the poll tax. I cannot think of any other recent cases where a Member of Parliament has been imprisoned for a period of less than 12 months and resumed their seat having come out of prison. There is a case for us to examine the matter, but I do not think that this Bill is the right vehicle for us to do so. I therefore hope that my hon. Friend, who has raised an important issue, will not press his amendment to a vote.
Greg Clark
What I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that this is a matter for the House. The Leader of the House has agreed that discussions can be initiated on this, and it is not for me to prescribe the content of those discussions. However, as the suggestion was that they should be cross-party, the hon. Gentleman has at least had the opportunity through his own party to raise that matter.
In amendments 12 to 14, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) proposes moving the words “It is irrelevant” from the start of subsection (3) to the body of the subsection. He always has an eye to elegance on paper as well as in verbal communication. I dare say that it was the aesthetics of the drafting that caught his eye.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Let me save my right hon. Friend some trouble. My amendments were merely to make sense of the changes to the Commonwealth realms and the Commonwealth to move the words from the introduction to the body of the subsection; otherwise, the subsequent amendment would not work.
Greg Clark
I understand the point now. I did think it was a rather more syntactical point, but I stand corrected. As I took it from my hon. Friend’s speech that he had been persuaded by the arguments put by my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire and that he was content with the simpler expression of the same intention, his amendments would not be required if my hon. Friend’s amendment were made. As my hon. Friend has indicated that he is content with the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire, I hope that he will consider it reasonable not to discuss his proposed equivalents in great detail.
Amendment 17 on pardons adds a duty on the Lord Speaker to issue a further certificate if a Member is pardoned, following the conviction of a serious offence. The effect of a free pardon is that the person is cleared from all consequences of the offence, and from all statutory or other disqualifications following on from the conviction, although it does not remove the conviction itself. On that basis, if a peer who has been disqualified was then pardoned, the effect of the pardon would be the removal of the disqualification, and it would be odd if it were removed in the case of a successful appeal but not of a free pardon.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Part of the reason for adding “or is pardoned” was that the pardon might come from a foreign court, and I do not think that the pardon from a foreign court would have any automatic effect in British law in any other circumstances.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Is it not the case that we cannot allow an appeal when it refers to this House, because the vacancy has to be filled, whereas in the other House there is no limit on the numbers? We have to have every constituency represented, and we could not have two Members of Parliament, which could happen if someone who was excluded was brought back.
Greg Clark
My hon. Friend is quite right to explain the differences between the two Houses. That is why it is right to focus on the fact that this is a Bill that proposes changes to the House of Lords. The Houses are not identical in every respect, but my hon. Friend has been careful in restricting his Bill to the House of Lords and to its procedures there.
It is right that their Lordships should review the circumstance in which a Member was convicted abroad in order to satisfy themselves that the offence is recognised as being serious in the United Kingdom and that the circumstances of the conviction are fair. I know that a number of Members raised this issue on Second Reading, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire for the diligent and sensible way he has managed to find an amendment that is elegant and to the point, and the Government are pleased to lend their support to it.
Thomas Docherty
I have listened carefully to the arguments, some of which have been most persuasive. Given the assurances that the Government are open to the whole issue and the fact that I do not want to hold up this Bill, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment made: 23, page 3, line 8, leave out subsection (9) and insert—
‘(9) A certificate under subsection (2) in respect of a conviction outside the United Kingdom may be issued only if the House of Lords resolves that subsection (1) should apply; and where the House does so resolve the Lord Speaker must issue the certificate.’.—(Dan Byles.)
Clause 4
Effect of ceasing to be a member
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 21, page 3, line 44, at end insert—
‘(9) A person who ceases to be a member of the House of Lords in accordance with sections 1 and 2 of this Act may not be elected to the House of Commons during the course of the next two Parliaments.
(10) A person who ceases to be a member of the House of Lords in accordance with this Act remains entitled to all the other privileges state degree style title and honour of peerage.’.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Amendments 19 and 21 aim to deal with the issue of Members of the House of Lords going from the Lords to the Commons. As the Bill was initially drafted and as we debated it on Second Reading, it would have been possible to have a revolving door or ping-pong back and forth, depending which phrase is preferred. It would have been possible for someone to leave the Commons, go to the Lords, leave the Lords, come back to the Commons and go back to the Lords again. I am glad to say that that was amended in Committee, which has at least to some degree ameliorated the situation. But there is a problem with the House of Lords being changed into a place that can be used as a way of preparing people for political life before bringing them to the Commons. As more and more professional politicians come through—I know this is a matter of concern to the electorate—people can have the following career path: becoming special advisers, going to the Lords and then coming to the Commons, without any real pause in between. As the Bill stands, it would be possible to resign a seat in the Lords immediately before the close of nominations for the House of Commons at a general election—
Thomas Docherty: There is already some precedent for somebody leaving the House of Lords, going straight to the House of Commons and then back to the House of Lords. I think I am right in saying that Alec Douglas-Home did exactly that in 1963 and was elected in Scotland to a seat that he represented for a number years and then became a life peer.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. There is indeed a precedent, which I was well aware of, and it is not just the late Lord Home of the Hirsel; Lord Hailsham did exactly the same. Both of them resigned their peerage for the 1963 Conservative leadership contest, at which point Tory leaders emerged from the magic circle—a very satisfactory way of doing it, but it is now done in a more modern way, and I am glad to say that all Conservative Members have an equal vote in our leadership elections. I cannot quite remember how the trade unions sort it out in the Labour party, but I know that they have a lot of fun with it.
There is indeed a precedent, but the hon. Gentleman will remember that when the ability to disclaim peerages was introduced, a limited time was provided when all peers could disclaim their peerage, regardless of when they had received it. Thereafter, peers who disclaimed their peerage had a limited time in which to do so after inheriting their peerage. It was all done so that Tony Benn, the then Viscount Stansgate, could get back into the House of Commons to be elected for Bristol. That was done to provide for an extraordinary circumstance where people had no choice but to be peers. They had become peers by the wonderful accident of birth that had raised them to such a status, which took them into the House of Lords and forced them to leave the House of Commons, whereas the precedent had already been set in relation to Lord Curzon and George V that the Prime Minister had to come from the House of Commons. Therefore, to allow the widest choice of candidates for that leadership election, peers were able to resign their peerages and come into the Commons. However, people becoming leaders of the party in that way is very different from it becoming a standard part of the career progression of a politician to go to the Lords first and then come to the Commons. The first should not be seen as a stepping stone to the other.
It is also a problem in relation to our constituency work, because it would not be inconceivable that an election result in a marginal seat could see a Member of Parliament defeated, and that his party might so value his or her services that they put them into the House of Lords, from which he has the ability to campaign for the marginal seat for the next five years, before resigning his seat in the House of Lords to come back to the House of Commons.
Thomas Docherty
Again, that situation already exists. We have had a number of cases of Members of the House of Lords being elected to the Scottish Parliament, but it has not led to widespread problems.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The devolved Parliaments are different, because the simple logistics of needing to be in Edinburgh or Cardiff and also in the House of Lords make it much harder to work on that basis than between these two Houses, where the role, the position, the place of activity are so very similar. It is perfectly reasonable to foresee someone who has just lost a seat spending five years as a Lord preparing to campaign for it again. As it becomes clearer, and parties are well aware of this, that to win seats we have all modelled ourselves on the Liberal Democrats—I say that with not a single one present in the House now—we have worked out that to win marginal constituencies—[Interruption.] I was not aware that there was anyone that I could see in the Galleries.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that we make no mention of the Galleries, only this Chamber.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That is why I did not see anybody in them, Mr Deputy Speaker. Although, there is, as you know, the right to speak from the Gallery in the event that the House is full. Sadly, it is not full today.
Mr Deputy Speaker
I think that that is something of the past, not of the present.
Mr Deputy Speaker
I can help the hon. Gentleman a little more. It is also up to the Chair to decide who speaks, and on this occasion I have decided to hear a little more from Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am very grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker, although I will let you into a secret: one of my ambitions is to speak from the Galleries one day. I think that it was last done in the 1950s.
To return to my point, it has been established that the best way to win marginal seats is to select candidates early and have them working in the constituencies for a long time in the run-up to a general election. That presents difficulties, however, because candidates have to earn a living, need to find the resources to finance their campaign and have to put other parts of their life on hold. If they can do that from the House of Lords, that is an enormous advantage. It gives them an income of sorts and it gives them status, which they can use to intervene in constituency affairs—a local council or Government body will take a letter from a peer just as seriously as a letter from a Member of the House of Commons. There is the risk of setting up an MP and an unelected peer to fight for a constituency for five years, with the peer simply standing down before the election to put himself forward and conceivably take the seat and go back to being a Member of the House of Commons. That seems to me to be fundamentally undesirable.
Members may say that the risk is slim and that that will never happen, but we are becoming a more professional political class. There is certainly evidence that length of campaigning in constituencies helps. There is currently a very good proposal from “ConservativeHome” to provide candidates with funds to help them with that. How much easier it would be if there was a nice, cosy billet in the House of Lords from which it could be done. Admittedly, that could not be done again, because the peer would have burnt all his bridges in relation to returning to the House of Lords, but that is not too bad, because they would still have got 15 years out of the system: one Parliament as an MP, one as a peer and, if they are clever, another as an MP. It begins to look like a means of forming a political career.
If that system becomes a means of forming a political career, it also becomes—I return to what I said earlier—a means of the parties asserting more control over their lordships’ House. A key thing about being in their lordships’ House is that there really are no further baubles the Government can offer. There are very few carrots and no sticks. That encourages independence of mind. It encourages peers, once they get there, to be more rigorous in considering the merits of the issues before them and to act in the proper way of a revising Chamber. The more possible it is for Governments to encourage, coerce and persuade peers to stick tightly to the party line, the less use their lordships’ House will serve, because it will be unable to do its job as a revising Chamber effectively.
Even if the risk is relatively slim and the numbers involved will not necessarily be huge, it seems to me that some sort of stop ought to be placed on that and that people go to the Lords knowing that they have accepted it for life, as we have already discussed, and that it disbars them from the House of Commons. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that people should face the consequences of decisions they have freely made. That is where it is different from hereditary peers and disclaiming, because a hereditary peerage is not a decision freely made; it is an accident of birth. However, any life peer has received a letter from the Prime Minister saying, “Do you want to be a life peer?”, has had letters patent issued by the sovereign and has had to pay Garter King of Arms to draw up the paperwork. They have had to do something to get that noble status. They know, because they have been told, that it excludes them from the House of Commons, by their voluntary choice.
Some argue that that is against their human rights, which is an absolutely ridiculous understanding of human rights. I know that it has been argued that it is against their human rights to stop them coming back to the House of Commons, but they are the ones who chose to be ineligible for the House of Commons. Surely with rights go responsibilities, and surely people must face the consequences of their actions.
I think that the failure to include that exclusion in the Bill is a mistake. It is something that ought to be remedied, because it could lead to problems in future. It could damage the standing of the House of Lords. It could easily be misused by a powerful political party, because obviously the party in government is more able to decide who the working peers will be, and therefore to use it for its marginal seats, to the detriment of opposition parties. No party is in government for ever, so it is always worth all sides bearing those difficulties in mind. It also fundamentally takes away from someone the consequences of their actions, which I think is wrong. I think that people should bear those consequences, and once they have been elevated they should not be allowed to sink back down, at least for a period.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The proposal would not put in an artificial bar but maintain the status quo, because currently a specific Act of Parliament would be required for a life peer to come into this House. Lord Young could not have been Margaret Thatcher’s successor without an Act of Parliament allowing him to disclaim his peerage.
Thomas Docherty
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that this door has been opened by the Bill, and I recognise that he is trying to shut it. That was my point in talking about putting in an artificial bar. I hope that the Minister will clearly set out how the Government intend to respond to this issue. I think that the hon. Gentleman is seeing a mischief where there is not one. I hope that when he responds he will reflect on what the two Front Benchers have said.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I have listened very carefully to the speeches in this debate. I am very reassured by the Minister’s commitment that the matter will be reviewed if it turns out to be a problem: if my fears turn out to be real, it will be looked at, and if they turn out not to be, it will not matter. I am also reassured that the honorifics that go with a peerage will clearly remain. I do not want to risk the Bill by pushing my amendments to a Division, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Third Reading
Queen’s consent signified.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Unfortunately, the rule has a caveat that the House must be full for someone to speak from the Galleries, and sadly that is not the case today.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) for her incredibly generous comments, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) on piloting this Bill. I am surprised that I find myself supporting a reform Bill of any kind, as I am normally with Lord Palmerston: “Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?” My hon. Friend has piloted this Bill with incredible courtesy, efficiency, and a willingness to listen to the points that have been raised. Although I think all its proceedings should have been on the Floor of the House, it is a rare event for a Back-Bench Member to pass a constitutional Bill and it requires a good deal of patience and perhaps responsiveness.
Thomas Docherty
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would agree that the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) is much more successful at such things than the Deputy Prime Minister appears to be.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
For once, I will praise the Lord President of the Council, because to be fair to him—my right hon. Friend!—having not been able to get through a massive reform of the House of Lords that would have had enormous constitutional implications, he has shown good grace in not sulking in his den and trying to obstruct this reform. This Bill allows transitions to take place which, although minor in themselves, are actually quite fundamental. A life peerage is now no longer for life, the problem of peers committing offences is dealt with at last—which in some ways is long overdue—the House of Lords is now able to expel peers, and non-attendance has a sanction. I think those reforms make the upper House stronger. That is not to say that I do not have minor qualms about some of the detail, but my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire has been incredibly successful in piloting the Bill, and has done so in such a way that even those of us who are accused of being Neanderthal about constitutional matters are on his side.
Detainee Inquiry
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Mr Clarke
I would expect that, certainly, and absolutely nothing in this report casts doubt on that integrity at all. The right hon. Member for Blackburn has the misfortune of being named in it because he had that most responsible office at the time, but he has already given his statement, as it were, to this House and it is quite obvious that the problems he was dealing with were immense and unprecedented, and that a great deal was done while he was Foreign Secretary to protect this country from further harm.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Following on from the questions from my hon. Friends the Members for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) and for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), will my right hon. and learned Friend be able to give an undertaking on behalf of the Prime Minister that the reserve power to refuse sensitive information to the ISC will not be used?
Mr Clarke
As there is that reserve power, I cannot give an absolute guarantee that it will be a dead letter when we start. The Prime Minister is as anxious to get these matters resolved—to draw a line under them—as everybody in this House is. So it is inconceivable to me that the Prime Minister will be persuaded to start using reserve powers just to cover up embarrassment or to avoid the thing going too far, and I certainly hope that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is reassured by that; it is not what the reserve power is for. Unfortunately, there are occasions when there are just disagreements about how dangerous it is, or otherwise, for particular information to be disclosed widely at all. The Prime Minister has the invidious task of making the final decision on that if a real conflict arises, but there is no reason to anticipate at this stage that the ISC and the agencies are going to be in any conflict that would give rise to that.
Apprenticeships and Skills (Public Procurement Contracts) Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Andrew Gwynne
And of course it says “certain public procurement contracts”, not all public procurement contracts, and it will be for the public body to determine whether it requires them. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the body of the Bill, he will see that it says “may”. I hope that clarifies his point.
We clearly have much more to do to transform educational opportunities and our culture for the forgotten 50% of young people nationally and the 68% in my area who do not get the chance to go to university. An important way of doing this is to offer quality apprenticeships that give a real and sustained route to a good career and to make the best use of public procurement contracts to help to achieve this.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I think what the hon. Gentleman is trying to do is thoroughly worthwhile, but I wonder whether it would be allowed under EU contract procurement rules.
Andrew Gwynne
The simple answer is yes, and when we get to that part of my contribution I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be won over to my argument. Actually, it is already happening in many local and central Government Departments, but there is a lot more we could do, which is why I hope he will support my Bill today.
Apprenticeships provide us with inspirational ways of realising our ambitions and enabling us to break the current cycle. One good example is the 50/50 scheme set up by my own Labour-controlled Tameside council, which awards up to 50 apprenticeship grants of £1,000 to employers who take on a 16, 17 or 18-year-old Tameside resident. Over the past few years Tameside council, working closely with the Connexions service, has gradually reduced the number of young people in my constituency who are not engaged in employment, education or training. Some of those young people want to learn while they are in work, and the initiative is intended to ensure that they have the opportunity to do so. Schemes such as 50/50 recognise the particular problems faced by young people in the current economic climate, and support them. They are training a new generation for economic recovery in places such as Denton and Reddish.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. I am confident that by the end of my speech and those of other Labour Members, the sceptics sitting opposite me will be won over to the cause of young people in their constituencies, which is equal to that of young people in Newham, Tameside, Salford, Hull, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Scunthorpe and Scotland.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am delighted to hear about all this rejoicing in Scotland. As I am being won over by the hon. Gentleman’s impassioned oratory, I wonder whether he ought to take the Bill a step further, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), and make it clear that it is above and beyond European law by putting in a “notwithstanding” clause. It would say, “Notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972”, and that would make things absolutely certain.