House of Commons Commission Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I begin by offering the apologies of my hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House, who is out of the country today. The task of representing Her Majesty’s Opposition therefore falls to me this afternoon.

As the Leader of the House said, we support the Bill. We thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and his Committee for the work they put in and the speed with which they produced their report, which has allowed us to make these straightforward alterations ahead of schedule.

For those who are not familiar with Commons procedures, it is worth touching on the role of the Commission. The Commission is not like a Select Committee: it does not have the powers of a Select Committee or perform a scrutiny function; it does not summon witnesses or produce reports. That role is performed by the Finance and Services Committee—to become the Finance Committee—and the Administration Committee. The Commission is a governance body. Clause 2 states:

“The Commission must from time to time set strategic priorities and objectives in connection with services provided by the House Departments.”

As the House of Commons Governance Committee highlighted, one of the defects in recent years has been that the Commission did not necessarily understand its own role, and it certainly was not understood by the wider membership of the House and beyond, so we welcome not only the changes being made but the new provision which, for the first time, I think, sets out explicitly the role of the Commission to make strategic choices.

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

While the hon. Gentleman is talking about the responsibilities of the Commission and how it will work, may I ask whether it is still envisaged that the commissioners will be elected, and if so, will that be by the whole House or by the individual parties?

[Thomas Docherty]

I will come on to that shortly.

One of the major challenges facing Parliament when we—or perhaps our successors—return in May is the need in the next Parliament to make a decision on restoration and renewal. I pay tribute to the right hon. Members for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) and for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) for their work on tackling the early stages of thinking on restoration and renewal. Restoration and renewal is not optional. We will have to spend money—taxpayers’ money—and Parliament must take huge decisions on the appropriate timetable for carrying out those works and how to ensure best value for taxpayers. The Commission will have a crucial role in providing leadership, so it is absolutely right that we ensure that it accurately reflects the views of the House. It is also important that the Commission has external members who will be able to provide strategic advice. It is no criticism of Members of this House, but not all of us have business experience or are used to grappling with some of the issues that the Commission will have to deal with.

The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) will understand that it is not for me to speak for other parties and their internal processes. He is probably slightly more familiar than I with how the Conservative parliamentary party operates. It is clear that two of the members will be the Chairs of the Administration and Finance Committees, so that is a matter for post-election arrangements. The question was asked during the debate on the Governance Committee’s report, so let me say clearly that the Opposition do not believe that the commissioners who are not Select Committee Chairs should be paid an additional sum to carry out this work, in part because we do not believe it is appropriate in the current climate and our constituents would not regard it as sensible, and in part because serving on the Commission should not be more onerous than being a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the European Scrutiny Committee or, indeed, the Finance and Administration Committees. What is important is getting people who come forward and are selected by their party because they have a particular interest or knowledge.

We welcome the progress made on the appointment of a Director General. The Leader of the House is right to say that it is necessary to complete that process after the election, but we do not see that as a significant obstacle to the Bill’s progress.

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[Thomas Docherty]

With the leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will respond briefly to two points made by the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso). I may have picked him up incorrectly. The Opposition do not think that the Commission members who are not Chairs of Select Committees should be elected by the whole House. It is a matter for the parties to elect them. If I can extend the principle of Select Committees, members of Select Committees are not elected by the whole House; they are elected by their parties. Their role on the Commission will be to represent, as the Leader of the House has already said, the views of those parties. As Members of Parliament, it would not be democratic for Labour Members to have a say on who represents the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats or the minority parties. Therefore, for the avoidance of doubt, the parliamentary Labour party position is that it would be for those individual parties.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does the hon. Gentleman think that the finance commissioner, for example, should be elected by the whole House, even if he is not saying that the commissioners without portfolio should be elected by the whole House?

[Thomas Docherty]

That is something that we will look at. My position is that the current arrangements for the Select Committee Chairs have worked well in this Parliament and they should continue in the next Parliament.

It is critical that there is no ambiguity about the position of the parliamentary Labour party. We do not believe that the other commissioners should be paid, because the work is no more onerous than being a member of the Finance and Services Committee or the Administration Committee or the Foreign Affairs Committee, and they do not receive payment. My understanding is that the Commission meets once a month and it would be slightly strange if the only member of the Commission who was not receiving an additional payment ended up being the shadow Leader of the House, because the shadow Cabinet are not paid. The Commission itself does not have an onerous meeting schedule—

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 24th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

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[Thomas Docherty]

rose—

[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.

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[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.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 3rd November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

May I first welcome the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) to his place? I understand that yesterday in the south-west he was seen on television but not heard. This evening we have had the benefit of both seeing him and hearing his wisdom. I shall deal first with a number of the points he made before turning my attention to the rest. He talked about minimum versus maximum and explained that he was looking to change only two letters, which perhaps is a new record, even for his minimalist approach. However, I am slightly surprised that he tabled the amendment: I know him to be a great believer in parliamentary process, yet he is seeking to overturn the advice of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. Although we recognise the strength of his argument, we were slightly surprised to see him going against his colleagues.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman will recognise that I take the view that the Chamber is the final and highest authority.

[Thomas Docherty]

I thought the hon. Gentleman took the view that Her Majesty was the final authority; he is obviously becoming a republican in his older age.

We have a great deal of sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s argument. He was right to talk about having two constituencies side by side, or indeed one surrounding the other—I think that his constituency completely surrounds that of Bath—and made some valid points about the square mileage and number of hectares in each. We do not necessarily agree that the situation differs for rural and urban constituencies. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) pointed out, that would be determined more by public transport links, particularly the provision of bus services.

None the less, we think that the hon. Member for North East Somerset has raised a valid point. For example, we are concerned that Ministers are not at this stage able to give us greater clarity about opening hours, and that relates to a broader point. I refer the House to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s report, which set out a concern about the use of Henry VIII powers. That simply means that the Government are seeking to state in primary legislation that all the detail will be covered by secondary legislation, and they have not yet had a chance to set out those provisions.

We are concerned that the Government do not have a clear position on opening hours. There is an argument that opening hours should be from 7 am to 10 pm, as they are in a general election. Equally, however, if the Government are proposing ultimately to use city chambers, town halls and council offices, perhaps it would be unreasonable to require additional opening hours over an eight-week period. My understanding is that central Government would pick up those costs, rather than individual local authorities, so I wonder whether the Minister, if he receives inspiration before having to reply, could say, when the Government worked out the £55,000 cost of running a recall petition, was that based on opening hours of 9 am to 5 pm in up to four locations, or opening hours of 7 am to 10 pm?

The hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) raised an important point about security—if I recall correctly, she made the same point last week during the Committee’s first day of considerations. The Government must accept that clearly more work needs to be done to answer those points. Several hon. Members have made the point, rightly I think, that the Government are yet to set out whether in practice they would use a marked register. If we take the example of having just one location for signing a recall petition—I am conscious that we are in danger of slipping into consideration of clause 18, but this relates to the question of where a petition can be signed—is it the Government’s intention that the petition officer would be sitting with the marked register and would cross off constituents’ names as they sign the petition, or would it not be made available?

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 28th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

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[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.

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[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?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[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—

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I beg to move amendment 19, page 3, leave out line 29.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Armed Forces (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 24th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful to the Minister for that attempt to clarify her position. I hope that she will have another stab at it later on.

The key point is that such attacks are too common, and that is unacceptable to this House and to the country, as I know from the feedback I have had not only from my constituents, but from the number of people who have contacted me, particularly since the summer. Indeed, there are people in the House service who have told me only this week how delighted they are to see the Bill coming forward. It is about sending a clear signal that we stand with those who risk their lives for our country to protect our freedoms and that it is unacceptable to attack, physically or verbally, a member of the armed forces because of that service.

I do not wish to try to take the Minister’s argument apart just yet—I will hear what she has to say first—but I suspect that on this occasion the Ministry of Defence, building on her point, will say that it is very difficult to look into somebody’s mind. With the greatest respect to her, this is an amendment to an existing criminal justice Act. Actually, the hon. Member for Shipley makes a valid point about this being a criminal justice matter. If the Minister wishes to go to the Library and get out the Hansard report from 2003, she will see that the debate was had then about how in principle to go about determining the motivation. The key point is that the Bill is a simple amendment of that existing principle. The Minister—and I forgive her for being a lawyer, as I am sure the whole House does—knows that it is the job of lawyers to prosecute and make their case. It will be a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service to set out why the motivating factor was the fact that the victim was in uniform rather than a general disagreement or some other factor.

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

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that even if questioning motivation is bad criminal justice law in the first place, there would be no harm in extending the provision to the armed forces? If the question of motivation applies in other areas, it is only reasonable to extend it to this category. The previous debate covered motivation and that is not at issue today. What is at issue is the category of people included.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am incredibly grateful to the hon. Gentleman because he has, as ever, made my argument more successfully. The onus is now on the Ministry of Defence. I am certain that the Minister does not dispute the validity of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and I am sure that she and her Department are full supporters of the principles it contains. The only issue before us today, therefore, is whether the protection it gives to specific other groups should be extended to members of the armed forces.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Oh dear, the hon. Gentleman gets so over-excited on these occasions that he intervenes far too early. What I was going to come on to say is that the matter of what happens in Parliament is, rightly, not covered in the Bill. It is the duty of Parliament and the House of Commons itself to regulate its own affairs. If the Bill interfered in the procedures of this House I would oppose it. We have an absolute right, under the Bill of Rights, to freedom of speech in this House, and members of the public have the right of access to Members of Parliament. That absolute right must be defended. Members of the public must be free, whether individually or collectively, to express their views to Members of Parliament. If MPs fall foul of the high standards that are expected of them, then that is a matter for the Privileges Committee to deal with. We have powers not only to expel Members if necessary, but to imprison them, and they have no right of appeal to any court in the land.

That is how we should proceed in terms of Parliament. Government is another matter and that is why it is right that part 1 deals with the lobbying of Ministers of the Crown and of civil servants. That is a matter rightly confined to legislation.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, but he just mentioned civil servants. In fact, the Bill does not cover civil servants, just permanent secretaries. Is that not a failing and an oversight of the Bill?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I do not think it is. It is important to deal with the senior figures who will be important in decision making, and the Bill is right to do that.

The Bill is also absolutely right to confine itself to professional lobbyists. It is surely reasonable that when a public company—for example, Coca-Cola or Shell—has a meeting with Ministers, we know and understand that they will be promoting their own business. However, when an obscure lobbyist wanders into Downing street, we want to know who that obscure lobbyist is promoting. [Interruption.] Bing Crosby? I do not think he has been going to Downing street recently. As far as I am aware he is no longer alive. It is right that regulation should be at ministerial level. Crucially, the Bill defends the liberty of people to lobby, so it has got that difficult balance right. There has been talk about the long gestation period of the Bill. That has been because it has not been easy for the balance, between the protections of freedom of speech and the need to regulate lobbying, to be correctly aligned. The Government, in their wisdom, have succeeded magnificently in doing that.

Part 2 is even better—it is the highlight of the Bill. It is so sensible that we should regulate third parties in the same way as political parties. The idea that a third party in a general election should be subject to less regulation than a political party that is openly fighting an election is the height of absurdity. The panic that we have had from the Opposition Benches and some in the charities section is glorious to behold. The hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson) said that there was a firestorm—a literal firestorm—in Hampstead. I was hoping that London’s noble fire brigade was not going to go out and be disappointed—that it would not react as when it was summoned by Matilda, as you will remember, Mr Deputy Speaker: it came out in all its glory and, of course, there was no fire, because Matilda called the fire brigade when there was not a fire to be seen. Eventually, there was, and she burnt to death. That is the danger of saying that there are firestorms, when in fact this is a perfectly sound Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, because I intended to come to the point she made. It is an important point and one that I raised this morning. I had a meeting with the Deputy Leader of the House and the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith). It was very civil and I got a cup of coffee out of it, but I do not think we made much progress in agreeing on very much.

The problems with the Bill are so fundamental that even the impact assessment is wrong. The civil servants who drafted the Bill—who, ironically, would not be covered by the lobbying Bill they are seeking to introduce—have failed to understand the lobbying industry. That is not surprising, given that they failed to meet anybody, from either side of the argument, in the last 12 months. They have not met Spinwatch, Unlock Democracy, Charter88, the charities or the Association of Professional Political Consultants—I could go on. Those civil servants have met nobody. They have stuck their fingers in their ears and produced a Bill that no one in the industry or on either side of the argument is prepared to support. That is a shocking state of affairs.

The civil servants who drafted the Bill have also misunderstood how to calculate the number of lobbyists. Their impact assessment claims that there are between 800 and 1,000 lobbying firms, but the evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee shows that there are fewer than 100. So the £500,000 that it will cost to set up the register, and the £200,000 a year running costs, will have to be met by 50 or 60 firms. Great free-marketeers and defenders of business such as the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) should join us in the Lobby tonight, because the burden that that will place on the companies caught by the legislation, many of which are small businesses, is ridiculous and disproportionate. The Bill will do nothing to solve that problem.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

If one takes a free-market view, the conclusion is not that we should have more regulation of many more people, as the hon. Gentleman wants to have.

[Thomas Docherty]

I believe in a level playing field. It should not matter whether someone works in-house or elsewhere, or whether they work for Rio Tinto or Oxfam, for Bell Pottinger or CAFOD. The same set of rules should apply equally to all of them. I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman does not think that the rules should apply to all those who are paid—handsomely in some cases—to carry out this work.

I want to return to the point raised by the hon. Member for St Albans, and to take it slightly further. As I said to Ministers this morning, there was a case recently in which a Minister of the Crown met a third-party consultant—a commercial lobbyist, as I think they are called—to discuss a planning application in their constituency. The Government seem to define that as a private discussion. If that consultant had chosen to raise other issues at the meeting, that activity would not be covered by the Bill because the consultant would say, “I am meeting the Minister not in their role as a Minister of the Crown but in their role as a Member of Parliament. I just happened to raise a general issue of Government policy that might be of interest and over which the Minister might have some influence.” That would be ludicrous.

For that reason, if for no other, the rules should apply to all parliamentarians. Ministers of the Crown—whether in the House of Lords or the House of Commons—are all parliamentarians. Extending the rules would avoid any double standards. Many Members of Parliament are members, and chairs, of influential Select Committees. They have a greater amount of influence in shaping the early stages of Government policy than those who serve as Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State. Anyone who has read Chris Mullin’s excellent book, “A View from the Foothills”, will remember the ceaseless slog of the life of an Under-Secretary. I see a Parliamentary Private Secretary smiling at that suggestion. Select Committee Chairs are hugely influential. Similarly, Members of Parliament who sit on Bill Committees help to shape our legislation. They are the people who should be protected from unscrupulous lobbyists, and if we did that we would provide the public with far greater confidence in the process. The rules have to apply to all those who exert influence.

The rules cannot only be about those who directly communicate with those in a position of power. In all of my eight years as a lobbyist, in the House and in consultancy, I met a Minister on two occasions, at most. I used to advise others on who in the Government, in Parliament and in the Scottish Parliament it was best to go and see, on the correct issues on which to press them, and on what their arguments should be. The Bill does not cover any of the people who do that.

The Bill is so narrow that it does not even cover those consultants who sit in the room during meetings, because a person has to actually communicate with a Minister or permanent secretary in order to be covered. The consultant might have done all the preparatory work and the strategy, and we have all taken meetings that have been facilitated by the consultant, but they might not actually be in communication with the Minister or the permanent secretary. For example, if a consultant were to contact the diary secretary of the Leader of the House, that would still not be covered by the Bill.

This is a dreadful Bill. It is not worthy of further progress and I hope that the House will reject it and ask the Government to come back and do their homework correctly.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 22nd March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

There is a union of people whose seats have “North East” in their names and who make helpful interventions. I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman because he leads me right to my next point, which is about the absolute essence of where growth will come from. I refer right hon. and hon. Members to page 56 of the “Economic and fiscal outlook” produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which contains charts on household leverage indicators. That is crucial because about three-quarters of the economy is dependent on private consumption. What we needed, and what has taken time, is for household budgets and balance sheets to rebalance at the same point as the Government balance sheet and budget.

In these charts we see that income leverage—interest payments as a percentage of income—is now at an historic low. That is important because it means that households can now afford to spend. Even more important, asset leverage is back alongside historic averages, so households are no longer over-geared in the way they were in 2007 and 2008. I actually think that the figure on household leverage is overstated because there is still a lot of bad debt in the system that the banks have been reluctant to write off because of concerns over their balance sheets. That is what has happened over the past few years. By following stable and sensible policies, the Government have allowed households to shore up their balance sheets, which means that they will now be in a position to begin to spend again should they wish.

Having looked at the big macro picture of two crucial things—Government expenditure under control, and household balance sheets restored—it is worth considering some of the positive detail within the Budget. The £2,000 cut in national insurance for businesses is fantastic. We know that small businesses are the ones that create new jobs—a series of data from the United States show that, on average, large companies shed 1 million jobs a year, while small companies create just over 1 million jobs a year. The reason for that is straightforward: large companies are always looking to cut costs, but small companies are where new ideas are built up. Anything that helps small businesses is welcome and national insurance is a very bad tax on jobs. I hope that ultimately the Government will look at national insurance in the round, but that will need to be in a time of boom, rather than a time of austerity.

The other policy that is relevant to today’s debate, which was opened by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, is the £10,000 tax threshold. That is a joy to behold because it gets us away from the taxation and benefits merry-go-round where people on low incomes are taxed and then given back some of their own money, once the Government have taken a cut for administration. We want to get that threshold as high as possible so that we do not tax people and then give them benefits. We want to get people out of that altogether, and out of the dependency culture that exists when we tax people on low incomes.

This measure has a further benefit if it can be extended and if the national insurance threshold can be raised, because that will reduce the administration of employment. If the national insurance threshold can be raised towards the £10,000 tax threshold, employers will be able to pay their employees without having a big administrative burden on top. I hope the Government will look at that as it would be a fantastic boost to employment. I think it could possibly be paid for simply by shifting the band for employees national insurance into line with the increase that would be made from the current level to £10,000. I accept there would be a gap on employers, but that might be minimised by doing it in the way I suggest.

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman is making a far more eloquent case than the Chancellor managed for this set of policies. He seems to be saying, however, that we should not have a contributory system towards the welfare state. Is that where his argument is heading?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

No, that is not where I am heading. I am saying that the contributions of people at the lowest end of the pay scales should be minimised.

The hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) spoke of the Government’s housing scheme. It is potentially a very exciting scheme, and the most important part of the Budget. There has been some talk of the risk, but I believe there is very little risk. I have had a look at the house prices figures produced by the Land Registry from 2008 to date, and at inflation over the same period. If we combine the two, we see that house prices on the Land Registry index have fallen in real terms by nearly 25% since 2008, which means that the scheme is being introduced at a point when house prices are sustainable, and when the risk to the Government’s balance sheet is limited. The scheme has the great potential not only to allow people to buy properties for the first time or to move into better properties, but all that goes with that, such as refurbishment, extra spending on DIY and so on. The measure could be a boost to consumer expenditure as well as free up the housing market.

I have one caveat to make before I conclude. I am concerned about the general anti-avoidance provision, which may threaten the rule of law. I will speak more about that later.

Sittings of the House (22 March)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

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

Of course, many of us wish the House to sit at every possible opportunity, because it is the debating chamber of the nation and its sitting gives us an opportunity to represent our constituents and hold the Executive to account in a way that keeps them properly on their toes. When I read the amendment, I must confess that I was struck by the nobility of the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) in wishing to offer up the Leader of the Opposition as a sacrificial lamb. He is put out weekly and then resuscitated, only to be brought back again and laid on the Dispatch Box of slaughter before our great Prime Minister, who week in, week out—

[Thomas Docherty]

I had the pleasure of being in the hon. Gentleman’s company last night at Buckingham palace, where fizz was available. May I suggest that if he thought that the Prime Minister won earlier today, he might have had a glass or two too many?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because his intervention allows me to inform the House that I am observing my Lenten abstinence and, therefore, took great delight in nothing stronger than Her Majesty’s Sandringham apple juice.

On occasions such as this, one’s mind always turns to cricket, because there is a great similarly between Prime Minister’s questions and cricket. The Leader of the Opposition has six questions, and those Members who are up on their cricket will know that there are six balls in an over. That takes us back to 1968, to the great occasion at Glamorgan when one Malcolm Nash came on to bowl. I see the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) as the Malcolm Nash of Prime Minister’s questions, but I see our Prime Minister as the Garfield Sobers. Malcolm Nash runs in to bowl and the Prime Minister smites the ball for six. The next ball goes over Big Ben. The next goes over the Victoria Tower. The fourth ball is in the Thames, and the fifth is at the London eye.

[Thomas Docherty]

As a member of the all-party group on cricket, I understand the hon. Gentleman’s metaphor. Surely the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be Geoffrey Boycott, because he simply runs his colleagues out?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It is a great joy to have a Scotsman in the Chamber who is knowledgeable about cricket. It is a triumph of English civilisation spreading north and is extraordinarily welcome. Mr Geoffrey Boycott is one of the most successful cricketers of all time. If the Chancellor is like him, a man of noble dedication to his task, the only batsman to have averaged over 100 in a season twice in his career, one of the highest-scoring batsmen in the history of cricket, and that is what a socialist thinks of him, what then will a Conservative say of a man of such aplomb, ability and foresight?

Let us get back to the issue of Wednesday and what I think is the Christian charity of the Leader of the House, who feels that it is unfair to put the Leader of the Opposition through the torment of Prime Minister’s questions on an additional unnecessary occasion and that it would be showing off to allow the Prime Minister to smite him to the boundary once again. Therefore, we will come back on a dutiful Friday, a proper working day, rather than one for doing other things. I cancelled my commitments with pleasure so that I could be in the House, not necessarily to speak, but for the pleasure of listening to others debate the Budget, enumerating the triumphs of Conservatism, the success of the proposals that will have been brought forward and the enthusiasm we will have for the way this Government are boldly, satisfactorily and rightly marching forward to get the economy back in shape after the horrific errors made by the socialists. I must therefore oppose the amendment.

[Thomas Docherty]

Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that Tony Blair was a socialist?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

His party was socialist, his Government were socialist and his successor was a socialist; I think that there is a lot of socialist still left in the Labour party.

We will have that Friday, a day of jubilee, to come in and praise the Government for what they have done and for their wisdom and foresight. We are being kindly and charitable—nice, really—to the Opposition by not inflicting upon them the terrible experience they must have every week. None the less, I must confess that I admire the nobility of the hon. Member for Wallasey in bringing forward her amendment. For the Labour party to take this on puts one in mind of the charge of the Light Brigade. How does it go?

“Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them”

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I will not speak for long, Mr Speaker, as I am sure that you, like many other Members, are keen to hear Fatboy Slim, who is on the Terrace this evening. I know that is why so many Members are present. Some of us remember Fatboy Slim from The Housemartins. For the benefit of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), The Housemartins were a popular beat combo from the ’80s—the 1980s.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

What on earth is a beach combo?

[Thomas Docherty]

Perhaps my broad Scottish accent is to blame, but I said beat combo. The hon. Gentleman is, of course, very familiar with a Fife accent. We had the pleasure of his company in central Fife in 1997. He mentioned cricket earlier, and was slightly surprised that cricket is played in Scotland. Dunfermline Knights are a very good cricket team. I am sure he will recall that central Fife, which is now ably represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy), has also got a useful local cricket club. Perhaps we could arrange a visit.

First, may I commend the Leader of the House on the Government’s relatively early U-turn and the fact that we are having this debate early in the month? Some other U-turns have tended to come much closer to the date. I also want to pick up on the valid point made about Cambridgeshire’s finest parliamentarian. I think the Leader of the House has made a pretty good start to his tenure in his current distinguished and important role. I was going to suggest he was probably going to be the finest Cambridgeshire parliamentarian since Cromwell. I am conscious that we have colleagues here from across the water who will tempt me into debating Oliver Cromwell. Whatever his faults, Oliver Cromwell was always a great believer in the rights of Parliament to hold the—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Oliver Cromwell used his troops to stop Members voting the wrong way in a Division—even the Whips do not try that one.

Commercial Lobbyists (Registration and Code of Conduct) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 1st February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

The Commission is examining that matter, through the Administration Committee, and I did not wish to cut across the work of the Commission, for which I have the highest regard. My personal view—I think I am on record as having said this to the Administration Committee—is that former Members should not be allowed to have passes. I hope we can examine that in the Committee stage of this Bill. I would certainly be receptive to the idea of making alterations to remove the reference to former passholders, but I am mindful that this issue is on the Administration Committee’s agenda and I did not wish to prejudge anything. I hope that has provided some reassurance to the hon. Gentleman.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue, because he has led me on nicely—perhaps he read my mind—to the registration of lobbyists, which is dealt with in clause 1. As set out in the Bill, those who undertake this activity—I hope we have had a good discussion and have now established what the definition is—

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

rose—

[Thomas Docherty]

I see I have roused the hon. Gentleman.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, but I am not entirely sure that we have clarified the definition. I would like to return to his example of the priest who lobbies on behalf of his religion. For proselytising religions, surely lobbying is part of the function for which they receive remuneration, even if, in the case of a Catholic priest, it is only a modest income to allow them subsistence.

[Thomas Docherty]

I have an incredible amount of respect for the hon. Gentleman, with whom I have the privilege of serving on the Procedure Committee, but I do not share his analysis of the role of a Catholic priest or, indeed, any other person of the cloth. It is not in their job description to be lobbying on public policy issues. I am sure that on another day the hon. Gentleman might be tempted to start the debate about the Reformation and the limitations placed on the Church of England to prevent interference in the monarch’s role in legislating, but I know that he is saving that for another day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty]

I am sure that as this day goes on, my arguments and those of other colleagues will persuade the hon. Gentleman to change his mind. In fact, we might even be lobbying him later.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am more sympathetic to the Bill than my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge) is, but there is a grey area that has not been satisfactorily defined. That involves people who, within their paid work, end up doing a bit of lobbying. It would be hard to explain that they were being paid to work 39 hours a week and that for one hour a week they were volunteers. I do not see how we could make a legal definition along those lines.

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman has made a significant point. I served as a lobbyist, both in-house and as a third-party consultant, for a number of years. He is right to suggest that someone could undertake what most people would define as lobbying activity on a part-time basis. For three years, I worked in the nuclear industry, for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. My official title was press and public affairs officer, and, in effect ran BNFL’s operation in Scotland. I was responsible for working with the local community on a range of stakeholder issues, I drafted the press releases for the Chapelcross and Hunterston sites, and I looked after Sellafield’s inquiries in Scotland, which involved going to the Scottish Parliament. I also recall spending two or three wonderful days in the Western Isles making a presentation to the council on technetium discharges into the Irish sea.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that someone can undertake lobbying activities without that being their sole purpose. Any relatively reasonable individual—I can think of no better description for the hon. Gentleman—who looked at a job description and saw lobbying activities among the core functions, or the outcome of lobbying as a measure related to pay, would draw a reasonable assumption from that.

I must remind the House that the definition I have used is the one used by the UK Public Affairs Council in its submission to the PASC inquiry on this subject. I have met representatives of a wide range of organisations, including the Association of Professional Political Consultants and Unlock Democracy, and they have been satisfied that the definition is suitably robust. The Bill tries to strike the right balance by using a definition that goes as widely as is reasonable without inadvertently drawing in the kind of individuals that Conservative Members have mentioned, such as members of the local chamber of commerce or people who come along to make representations to their Member of Parliament or local authority.

I will make some progress now, as I am conscious that other Members wish to speak in the debate. A registration process exists at the moment. The largest single organisation is the Association of Professional Political Consultants, which has been in existence for about 18 years. It is made up of most of the well-known lobbying and public affairs companies and many small companies, as well as political consultants—that is, third-party lobbyists. The association has a membership of about 50 companies and individuals who work as sole traders. They all sign up to the association’s register, and they have to abide by its code of conduct. They also have to publish on a quarterly basis a list of their clients, including those for whom they are doing paid work and those for whom they are working pro bono. It is interesting to note that a number of companies undertake pro bono work. They do so for various reasons, and I dare say that some of them do it to get some good PR for themselves.

In 2009, when the then Cabinet Office Ministers were considering their response to the previous PASC report on this issue, a number of the leading players in public relations got together. They included not only APPC members but representatives of the law firms that have public relations arms and of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. They decided that they had a choice, and that a statutory body would be set up if they took no further steps and failed to recognise the significant problems that the PASC report had identified, which Ministers were considering. That was one of the clear outcomes of the PASC report. They therefore set up the body known as UKPAC—the United Kingdom Public Affairs Council.

I was the secretary of the Scottish branch of the APPC for a while, and I attended one of the meetings in the summer of 2009 at which the APPC board discussed UKPAC. I remember counselling the board that a voluntary system would not work, and in the two and a half years since it was set up, it has not worked. I will explain more about that later. It is interesting to note that there was agreement on this issue among those in the industry. It is important to remember that it is an important, multi-billion pound industry.

Lobbying is a healthy part of our democracy. We have already heard some examples of the roles that it can play, and no one has criticised them. We have heard about local businesses or religious organisations being involved, as well as companies being employed by individuals. In a parliamentary democracy such as ours, it is every citizen’s right to lobby their Member of Parliament, and I believe that it is their right either to lobby their MP themselves or, if they feel that they do not have the time or the skills to do that, to employ someone else either individually or collectively to do it for them. That is not to say that those who are so employed and who make a financial gain from lobbying should be allowed to do so unchecked, without any rules whatever. Registration is an important step in the right direction.

A journalist from a relatively august newspaper—not quite The Times; it was an almost august newspaper— phoned me yesterday to ask me how many people worked in lobbying and public affairs. I have taken a close interest in this issue, both before I entered the House and since, but I did not know how many people were working in that field. I think it was the Library briefing note that estimated that only 1% of those working in public affairs were third-party lobbyists—that is, consultants—and that 99% worked in-house. It is therefore vital that registration should cover not only third-party lobbyists but all those who undertake commercial, paid lobbying. Both PASC reports have acknowledged that, as have the industry players and Unlock Democracy—not, perhaps, a natural ally of the lobbying industry. Indeed, everyone—bar one important group of people—believes that any register or code of conduct should cover all those who undertake commercial lobbying.

To use a made-up example, it would be ridiculous if “Landmines R Us” were not required to register its multi-million pound public affairs operation because that operation was in-house, while those whom it employed as third-party consultants were required to be registered even though they accounted for only a tiny proportion of the time and money the company spent in that area.

A Member asked me a question this morning in the Tea Room. I am always loth to give away Tea Room secrets—[Interruption.] To be fair, as I recall it, he was heading out of the door, so I take that into account. He asked me why the Bill did not deal only with third-party lobbyists, and the answer is that they are such a small percentage. It would be strange if it dealt only with the third-party lobbyists and not those who work in-house. We need a level playing field. That was the conclusion of PASC and Unlock Democracy, and it was the conclusion reached by the industry itself. I am not sure that the Cabinet Office is there yet, but I know the Minister is considering the matter carefully. Perhaps she will be in a position to comment either today or in the near future.

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[Thomas Docherty]

That’s the hon. Gentleman’s career over, then.

I am going no further than the Government in this regard. I am arguing—and I suspect that the Minister agrees, although I must wait to hear what she says—that introducing a statutory register that simply replicates the voluntary register that already exists will involve no cost to the taxpayer other than the initial costs of the Bill’s publication and a small amount of Cabinet Office time. Now that the House of Lords proposal has been defeated, the Cabinet Office has a lot more time on its hands. There will be no cost to the taxpayer, because all the fees associated with the running and maintaining of the register and the council will be met by those who work in the industry, as happens at present.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think that there is always a cost to the taxpayer in these cases, one way or another, but may I return the hon. Gentleman to the issue of the definition? He has talked about industry standards, the way in which lobbying is defined by existing lobbying groups and so forth, but we are talking about the definition in clause 4, which is the definition that will go into the black letter of the law. It seems to me that the black letter of the law is very wide in this context, and that it would include the finance director and the chief executive. I believe that the definition needs to be tightened up in legislative terms, although it may be more appropriate to deal with that in Committee.

[Thomas Docherty]

I know that the hon. Gentleman has always been a passionate supporter of debates on the clause 4s of this land. As he suggested, the issue that he has raised could be considered in Committee—and I think that I am seeing a volunteer for the Committee, if he can fit us in with his various other important roles in the House.

Even if we accept that there will be a marginal cost to the taxpayer in connection with the work of the Cabinet Office, surely the benefits of a transparent and cleaned-up lobbying industry will far outweigh it.

Let me now say a little about the composition of the lobbying registration council.

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[Thomas Docherty]

As ever, the hon. Gentleman has anticipated what I am about to say. The question of the code of conduct goes to the heart of the issue. At present there is, dare I say, some divergence between my starting point and that of the Minister, but she is an entirely reasonable Minister, and I know that she is reflecting on the matter.

The code of conduct is crucial, because without a code of conduct a council registration is entirely pointless. If we do not define an acceptable activity, what is the point of spending time on maintaining a register? Let me say a little about what the code of conduct should include and what it may include, and, perhaps, give the House an example of appalling behaviour on the part of someone who has repeatedly failed to sign up to such a code.

For the same reasons that I articulated about the composition of the council, I have tried today to avoid prescribing the full terms of the code of conduct. Some of it will be self-evident; we all know what is and is not acceptable behaviour. I have referred, however, to the specific example of parliamentary passes, which the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend East touched on earlier. I believe it is entirely legitimate for an individual to own shares in a company. I am glad we have a free market, as I believe in the capitalist system—I am probably doing my cause with my party no good at all by saying such things.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

But the hon. Gentleman is making himself much more popular with the voters of Somerset by doing so.

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[Thomas Docherty]

Oh good; I have always thought that the residents of Somerset are sound people, and their cream is pretty good as well.

I have no problem at all with an individual making a comfortable living by any reasonable means, and the fact that someone holds public office should not prevent them from holding shares in companies. At present there are specific rules about how Ministers must conduct their financial affairs. I recall a meeting I had with a Conservative Minister—regrettably, he has now left the Government. I had not heard of him before, so before meeting him I looked up his register of interests. He was appointed by the current Prime Minister to the House of Lords, and he had a vast number of interests, some of which were fascinating. For example, he was director of “Wisden”, which is a very sound organisation. Although he had a long list of interests, however, we all had confidence that he had placed his shares into a trust. It is entirely appropriate that Members of either House should be able to own shares in any company, provided they have no direct influence on it.

However, I do not think it is acceptable—and I think the public agree on this—for serving Members of either House, in addition to their remuneration for their work at Parliament, to be paid by outside organisations to lobby. There were some very regrettable incidents in the last Parliament and in previous Parliaments. A very small number of Members—I will not say hon. Members, because they clearly were not that—undertook activities of which the House and the country greatly disapproved.

There is currently a significant loophole in the other place, as Members there can receive significant remuneration from outside organisations for lobbying—under the definition of that term as set out, and which is accepted by everyone. I will not name the individuals concerned, but I have given the Minister a couple of examples that have caused some controversy. Under the Bill, serving peers—indeed, any passholder—would not be able to receive remuneration from outside organisations for seeking, for financial gain and in addition to their parliamentary activities, to influence public policy.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but I am concerned that there may be a pedantic loophole in clause 3. A Member of Parliament who is married to another Member of either House might be exempt from the requirement set down. Is that the case, or is there to be a hierarchy of passes?

[Thomas Docherty]

I think we all agree that the hon. Gentleman comes at the top of any hierarchy in this House, and I bow to no one in my admiration for his ability to find pedantic loopholes, but I do not think he has done so on this occasion. I am happy to talk again to the Clerks who drafted the Bill, however—and it is again clear that the hon. Gentleman wants to serve on the Committee. To answer his question, the other person will not have received their pass because they are a spouse; they will have their pass because they are a Member in their own right. I hope that satisfies the hon. Gentleman.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It does. It is clear that there is a hierarchy of passes. Someone might be entitled to a pass as a spouse, but having a pass as a Member of Parliament trumps that. I am grateful for the clarification.

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[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. Let me segue slightly into that. For the benefit of hon. Members, “segway” is a type of transport that is currently fashionable with many younger people who work outside the House. More and more planning companies are setting up public affairs arms to lobby on planning applications. That is particularly true in Scotland under the new Scottish planning policy, where for a development over a certain size—say, 50 houses—a public consultation must be undertaken.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that if a planning consultancy is directly undertaking the lobbying to influence and shape the policy of the councillors, it should be covered, but if a planner attends a meeting to provide technical answers, that is factual, in the same way as architects and transport consultants would provide technical answers. To return to my example of retailers, if Sainsbury’s brings its head of sourcing along to answer technical questions, nobody outside the House believes that they should be captured by the legislation. I hope that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.

Let me return to the example of Mr Cummings. There is an assumption that a person who is going to meet someone should be transparent about their status and the purpose of the meeting. So the hon. Member for Carlisle has agreed to meet someone because they purport to be an employee of a company that he would trust. Trust is an important factor. I know that many hon. Members have a principled view that they will not meet third-party lobbyists. I respect that viewpoint; they are entitled to it. It is vital that both in-house and third-party lobbyists are registered, so that others can go on to the company’s website, type in such-and-such a name and see if they work for Taylor Wimpey, in this example, or if they work for a third party. The hon. Gentleman may not have agreed to the meeting if the person was a third-party lobbyist.

Once the hon. Gentleman has agreed to a meeting about a particular planning application—he might serve on a Select Committee and be approached in that role, or he might be a Front Bencher with a particular policy responsibility and a company might approach him and say, “That is within our bivouac. I am keen to meet to make our points to you,”—it is crucial that the hon. Gentleman is comfortable that he knows who that individual actually works for. What should not happen is for the first 45 minutes of the meeting to be spent on the subject matter on which he has agreed to meet, but then he is ambushed for the last 15 minutes because the person says, “By the way, I also happen to represent another completely different company—“Landmines R Us” in my made-up example—and while I’ve got you here, I just want to say a few words about it.”

That is inappropriate behaviour. Under the APPC code, which to an extent is motherhood and apple pie, but none the less is a step in the right direction, that is not allowed. When a meeting is requested, it must be clear whether a consultant works for the company that they purport to represent or is employed as a third party on its behalf, and the meeting should be on the agreed subject matter only. If an hon. Member wishes to raise a further matter, that is for them, but Members should not be ambushed.

When Mr. Cummings is pitching to clients or has a client, he will often play off his contacts. To use a legal analogy, we would expect that in advocating a case the success of those who are fortunate enough to be lawyers—I use my brief loosely—would be based on the strength of the argument, not on whether they know the judge. If a lawyer told a constituent that he should hire him because he knows the judge and has another case in front of the same judge and so can have a bit of a word with him, I think the Minister would probably agree that that would not be acceptable. It is unethical and immoral to both clients falsely to purport to have a level of influence or access to a Member of Parliament or councillor on one case and to use it for another case. Having spoken to colleagues on both sides of the House, it is probably fair to say that if they were aware that people such as Mr Cummings were using their access to raise other issues, they would be horrified.

Some colleagues will recall that the Cabinet Office introduced a Bill earlier in this Session to reform the House of Lords. For a reason that I never fully understood the Government dropped that, regrettably. I spoke in the debate and said that I thought that the Lords Temporal should be removed in a reformed House of Lords.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Lords Spiritual.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful, as ever. Lords Spiritual. The following day, on the chair in my office was a brochure from the National Secular Society. I thought it had come in the post and did not think much about it. It went into the round filing cabinet shortly afterwards. Later my researcher asked if I had seen it and told me that it had been on the desk when he came into work. I should probably confess to the Serjeant at Arms that I had not locked my door overnight. A lobbyist employed by the NSS had been given a pass to the House of Lords by a peer, whom I shall not name. It turns out that he was using his pass to walk up and down the corridors of the House of Commons, dropping off materials to Members. He knocked on my office door two or three times, just dropped by, without any invitation at all, looking to have a word with me because I had spoken in the debate. I think you would probably agree, Mr Speaker, that that is unacceptable. Here was somebody with privileged access to the House in a way that other individuals did not have, and used it to obtain undue influence. I hope that you will look carefully at this issue of peers providing passes to lobbyists outside. I know that you have established a commission of inquiry under my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), and you will be aware that APPG passes are being considered by the Administration Committee.

There is a broader issue here about Members of the House of Lords handing out passes, ostensibly for research purposes, to outside organisations who then use that access to come down to the House of Commons to hand out materials and try to catch Members of Parliament without appointments.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I felt slightly guilty when the hon. Gentleman used that example, because it occurred to me that many of us may have done something similar when canvassing, trying to get into blocks of flats that were locked. Perhaps people in glass houses should not throw too many stones.

[Thomas Docherty]

My house is made of bricks and mortar. Perhaps it is not as fancy as those of other hon. Members. I am not sure how many tenements there are in North East Somerset; probably slightly fewer than there are in central Fife, where the hon. Gentleman was not quite so successful when he stood for election. However, there is an important difference in that any member of the public can buzz on the tenement trade services door—I suspect that the hon. Gentleman does not often do so, although he might for canvassing purposes—but any member of the public cannot simply have access to the corridors of Portcullis House, Star Chamber Court or the Upper Committee Corridor.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

indicated assent.

[Thomas Docherty]

I think the hon. Gentleman agrees. The House authorities should discuss that matter with the House of Lords. I hope that satisfies the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend East on why passholders should not undertake paid lobbying.

To return to the example I was describing, it is not just a matter of the unethical behaviour of purporting to represent one client and seeking a meeting with another. We would frown on that and it needs to be stamped out, but in itself it is not Mr Cummings’s worst offence. The House will be aware that particularly in local government there are rules about what councillors can say publicly and privately during a planning application. That is true throughout the United Kingdom and there are good reasons for it, but there are also reasons why a Member on a Select Committee or considering a matter before the House may wish to keep their counsel on a particular matter. From time to time, we receive phone calls from journalists seeking our views—some more than others, I suspect. It is not unnatural to be happy to provide some background briefing to journalists on a non-attributable basis in order to be helpful, and I know that all hon. Members are always helpful to the media.

Mr Cummings employs someone to phone up politicians or councillors, including Members of the Scottish Parliament, because he operates largely in Scotland, and that person claims to be a freelance journalist interested in retail development in Fife. The caller asks for 10 minutes, off the record, to get people’s thoughts on the provision available and whether there are too many Tescos in the area. The politicians do not know that that is a complete pile of cobblers. This is an employee of a lobbying firm who is trying to establish the views of politicians, either during or before the lodging of planning applications for a major supermarket, for some housing developers. The problem is that it is not a crime to impersonate a journalist. I am not sure why someone would want to impersonate a journalist in particular, but that is the kind of behaviour that the House would regard as completely unacceptable. Many developers are not aware that Mr Cummings is using that tactic, but it needs to be brought to the public’s attention. I hope that the Minister will accept that that is why a code of conduct is so important.

Mr Cummings also seems to revel in bullying. He likes to intimidate people who disagree with his clients’ views. He believes that it is perfectly acceptable to plant employees in public meetings, to support his projects. He does the same if there is a rival project. If two supermarkets or house builders are going for the same development in a town, for example, and the council has only a limited allocation to grant, he will put plants into meetings to heckle those who oppose his clients’ schemes or to whip up opposition to other people’s schemes, often on unfounded grounds.

Mr Cummings also has the interesting habit of putting up candidates for community council elections. For the benefit of those who do not have the privilege of living in Scotland, I should say that a community council is a body of statutory consultation that, unlike town and parish councils, has no levying powers, although it will often get small amounts of money from local authorities to spend on flower beds and clean-up-the-village campaigns. It is a statutory consultee on any planning application. Mr Cummings will find supporters early in the planning process and at the next community council election, which is often uncontested, will stand four or five people to get them the jobs of chair, secretary and planning secretary, to make sure that his clients receive favour.

Such behaviour is utterly unacceptable; no one in the House would regard it as appropriate. It needs to be stamped out, which is why a code of conduct to underpin the register is so important. Without that, Mr Cummings would simply register and then carry on with his utterly reprehensible behaviour.

[Thomas Docherty]

That is helpful. I might well take that opportunity and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for suggesting it. One or two members of the Press Gallery might look at the Official Report as well. I keep my website updated with copies of speeches, and after today I hope to place at least a couple of Second Reading speeches on it. The hon. Gentleman has been helpful, and I will take up his suggestion.

I have detained the House for quite a while.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

No!

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman is, as ever, courteous and kind, although perhaps mischievous on this occasion.

There has been a genuine discussion about the principles of lobbying—what we think is acceptable and unacceptable. Let me close with an anecdote about something that affected me personally. As a parliamentary candidate, I opposed one of Mr Cummings’s planning applications for 2,000 new houses in my constituency, in the north of Dunfermline. I supported the local residents near that wonderful greenfield site, which was open for recreation and well used. I should say that Mr Cummings’s client had every right to bring forward an application, and I will not mention their name; I think they were innocent in this matter.

Two things happened that the Minister might want to reflect on. Mr Cummings was organising workshops for the local residents. He portrayed them as an opportunity for an independent mediator to listen to the residents’ concerns. He said that that would allow him and his client to listen constructively to those concerns and to go away and adjust the plans. He did not tell the residents who turned up for the meeting that the so-called independent facilitator was his live-in girlfriend, who was being paid by Invicta to conduct the so-called independent facilitating meetings that were supposed to allow proper feedback.

Any reasonable person would think that a live-in lover who was being paid to hold the meeting would be unlikely to be entirely independent. That is why a register of every employee involved in lobbying is important.

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[Thomas Docherty]

I am most grateful, Mr Speaker. You are, of course, one of the most charitable people one has the privilege of serving with. My apologies for having forgotten to wish you a very happy 50th birthday a couple of weeks ago. Last time I was here on a Friday with a private Member’s Bill, it was your birthday, and it was remiss of me not to take the opportunity to place that on the record—I apologise.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman thinks that Mr Speaker, like Her Majesty, should have two birthdays so that it can be doubly celebrated.

Finance Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 2nd July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

I suspect the best and fastest way to answer my hon. Friend’s question would be to attend the next Conservative party fundraising drinks event, where I am sure many of those millionaires will be buying the Minister a rather hearty round.

Much has been made of the quad’s all-night drinking session. I am sure they were drinking fine Scotch malts—indeed, no fine malts are made outside Scotland—but they should have spent more time looking at the detail of those two decisions. In direct contrast to the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), I would argue that pensioners on an income of £10,000 a year are not among the wealthiest pensioners in the country. If Conservative Members believe pensioner households struggling to get by on £10,000 are wealthy, it goes to show how staggeringly out of touch they are.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and am enjoying his wanderings through the drinking habits of certain Members of the House, which I am not sure are directly relevant. Why is it fair that pensioners should have this benefit but not families who have a £10,000 allowance who are struggling with children? Why is it fair that the benefit should be age-related?

[Thomas Docherty]

I always give way to the hon. Gentleman, who knows more about age than anyone in the House. He needs no history lesson, but the measure goes back to the end of the second world war, and the concept of the greatest generations—those who have given a lifetime of sacrifice. It is worth noting that, just last week, we unveiled a long-overdue memorial to some of that greatest generation. I am sure he would recognise their sacrifice.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The measure was introduced earlier, I believe by Winston Churchill; indeed, an hon. Member asked earlier how we could overturn what the great man had done. The wartime generation are having the benefit frozen; they are not losing it. The people who are not getting it were not born when the war was going on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty]

I cannot believe the hon. Gentleman’s hearing is going. I began by saying that a cash freeze is a real-terms cut. I am sure he would agree with that.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The Government’s wonderful policies are very successfully bringing down inflation; there has been a substantial fall. In addition, oil prices are coming down and there is a cut in fuel duty. That amazing combination means everything is working very well.

[Thomas Docherty]

With an intervention like that, it will not be long before the hon. Gentleman is sitting on the Front Bench speaking for the Government on Treasury matters. Perhaps I can help him on another matter, though, because several references were made to Take That. For his benefit, let me say that they are a popular beat combo who can often be found on the wireless. He might enjoy listening to them.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The pensioners are not being robbed. The pensioners have been extraordinarily well looked after by this Government, and rightly so. I agree in many respects with the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), who talked earlier about how important the elderly were to our society. He called them the golden generation. I thought that, out of respect to Her Majesty, we ought to call them the diamond generation, as they are all over 60.

Of course we owe a great deal to the elderly. That is why it is right that they have kept their bus passes—which they are pleased to have, although there are not many buses in North East Somerset—and their winter fuel allowances. If they are over 75, they will also retain their free television licences so they can watch the BBC free of charge. I think that many of them prefer Sky nowadays, but that is a separate issue. The Conservative party, in alliance with our Liberal Democrat friends, has looked after the pensioners.

As for the thresholds, it is absolutely right that they should be evened out. Let us consider the people who are paying tax across the country. How is it fair for those who have retired to be given an automatic tax break, rather than those who are working hard and perhaps bringing up children? They need the income just as much as the pensioners, and in some cases more. That, I think, was bold and brave of the Government, and right.

I want to begin, however, by discussing the easiest step to defend—the one that was so startlingly obvious that it is surprising that the Government did not take it earlier and go further. I am talking about the reduction in the 50p tax rate to 45p. We know well that high taxes drive out enterprise and people, and drive down tax revenues. That is not because of evil schemes of tax avoidance; it is because people simply decide that if they are not going to get paid, they will not work. They remove their labour. Our socialist friends—

[Thomas Docherty]

rose—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I give way to my socialist friend.

[Thomas Docherty]

Does the hon. Gentleman really believe our society is enhanced by these pop stars and premiership footballers?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It has to be said that I am not the world’s greatest expert on pop stars and footballers, but none the less I think they bring a richness to our national life that enlivens many people in my constituency, and even in Scotland. They want to watch the highest quality football being played.

This is relevant, Mr Deputy Speaker, in case you think I am going off on a tangent. I have thought that it would be a good idea to remove the limit on overseas players in cricket, because that limit has been removed in association football and it has led to our having in this country the highest quality league football, and in English cricket—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, but the reduction of tax is what encourages them to be here and why they do not decide to work in other countries instead.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am pretty sure, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the England cricket team is very good and the England football team is not very good.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

But my concern was about Somerset county cricket club. Football teams such as Manchester United do very well through having more foreign players. Somerset, however, has yet to win the county championship, but this lower level of tax and greater freedom in employing overseas players may lead to its achieving that.

Returning to the question of the 45p tax rate, we have had a discussion about avoidance in that context, and I want to defend tax avoidance. I know this is not the most popular cause to espouse, but I do so because I believe in the rule of law, and I do not believe the rule of law is best maintained by Parliament being arbitrary in its taxation.

We have the power, through our votes this evening, to set rates of tax as we choose—to set schemes that allow people to be charged tax, or not to be charged tax, as we choose. If we in this House are too incompetent to draw up the tax law properly, is it reasonable to say to the taxpayer, “You must work out what Parliament may have wanted. This is not what is said, but Parliament may have wanted you to pay this extra amount on top”? Should we then also say that to people who put money into their individual savings accounts? Should we retrospectively say that they ought to have paid more tax on their ISA sums, or on their pension funds?

Daylight Saving Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think that that wanders slightly beyond the parameters of this rather narrow amendment, although I do accept that there could be an unlimited number of people to try to represent all shades of opinion, but I think that it would be a good idea if the one person to represent Scotland represented the majority party in Scotland, which would clearly be sensible, and perhaps one or two hon. Members present would be able to volunteer to do that.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Of course I will—I have been waiting for the hon. Gentleman to ask.

[Thomas Docherty]

Does the hon. Gentleman mean the majority party in the Scottish Parliament, where the Scottish National party is the majority party, or here in Westminster, where Scottish Labour is clearly the majority party?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

On that occasion I meant the majority party in the Scottish Parliament, but I see the hon. Gentleman’s point, so perhaps we should have two representatives from Scotland, which means we must also have two from Somerset, because Somerset would feel let down if the numbers were not maintained with the rest of the Union. [Interruption.] I did not quite catch the comment the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) made from a sedentary position but will happily give way if he wishes to intervene.

I want to move on to my amendment 3, which proposes a cost-cutting measure, and I know that some hon. Members think that taxpayers’ money should be spent willy-nilly and that part of our job here is to take money out of people’s pockets and waste it, but I thought that we would get rid of the whole of clause 2, which sets out the independent oversight group. The relevant Secretary of State and President of the Board of Trade, the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable), is known to be one of the wisest men in Parliament. Lenin’s brain after his untimely death was kept for scientific research to see how such a great brain could operate and why it was different from other brains, and I am sure that this will happen in the sad event of the death of the President of the Board of Trade—may that day long be put off.

UK Extradition Arrangements

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

There are, indeed, but that is of a completely different order of magnitude: one gets a little off one’s sentence if one pleads guilty early—rather than being threatened with hundreds of years against a week in a golf club. That does not happen under the British system, but we know that it happened to the man who turned the equivalent of Queen’s evidence against Conrad Black. We know that it happens in the United States system, but we are willing to risk British subjects going over there.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is always worth listening to, even if his arguments are not the strongest of cases. He began by espousing the benefits of English—I must add—history, but surely we share that system with our colonial cousins, so having made great merit of the English judicial system he cannot then criticise our American friends.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. It is up to the hon. Gentleman who takes the intervention, but the Member had only just come in.

Ministerial Statements

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is a model in opposition of how people ought to approach this matter. As I understand it, he was a model in government, although not as invariably successful as a model ought to be.

The hon. Gentleman raises the issue of the indivisibility of the Government, who are both political and impartial. In a sense, it is much easier to be a judge or to be the Speaker, because people in those positions are always impartial. The Government are always seeking re-election, but at the same time, they must make decisions in the interest of the nation impartially and fairly—one hears Ministers talk about being in a quasi-judicial position in certain circumstances. Parliament seeks to divide those indivisible roles and to say, “That bit is political. Therefore we are holding you to account for political reasons, not necessarily because we disagree on the benefit to the nation.”

The Procedure Committee debated with a great deal of amusement whether impeachment could be reintroduced. I would love to see the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) introduce articles of impeachment against a Minister whom he thought had misbehaved. If that did not work, perhaps he could go further and attaint a Minister, which would be the final sanction.

However, the Committee decided, cautiously and prudently —to some extent this answers the point of my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms)—that, as the conclusion of part 1 of the report states,

“We do not believe that it is practical or desirable to produce a detailed protocol that would cover all possible situations”.

That is clearly right, because there will be circumstances in which Ministers must answer questions urgently—perhaps they would be pressed to do so or the financial markets demand it. However, there will also be occasions on which the Minister knows perfectly well that he has a jolly good, fat, juicy news story that he would like to put out to his chums and he does so. That is what we ought to be trying to stop.

I have great confidence in this Government when I think of what they have done so far to restore the standing of Parliament. We can see how much better debates are attended than they were under the previous Government.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I suspect that that is more because of the quality of the hon. Gentleman’s speeches than those of any Minister.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am deeply grateful to, and flattered by, the hon. Gentleman.

Drugs (Roadside Testing) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Friday 10th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think that my hon. Friend’s point is slightly disconnected, because belonging to a voluntary body, the rules of which state that one must subject oneself to a test, is very different from Her Majesty’s Government and Parliament, through legislation, taking away one’s right not to self-incriminate. One does not have to be an athlete—I never could be anyway. It is not compulsory to be a runner or a jumper. It ought to be compulsory to be a cricketer, but sadly it is not. However, if the Government get involved, one may commit an offence by going about one’s ordinary daily life and that is a higher degree of intrusion. The same point applies to the earlier intervention about the Home Office testing the people who work for it with these machines.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

Where the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) is slightly wrong is that a sportsman who does not take a drug test does not commit a criminal offence, although he may be banned by his sport. However, I understand that it is a criminal offence for airline pilots and crew not to give samples when required by the aviation authorities. Is not the bar set so much higher for airline pilots and drivers because they are responsible for other people’s lives?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman. I was merely making the point that this is something that we should be concerned about, and that we should be aware of what we are doing. The fifth amendment in the United States gives a clear protection. Our constitutional system does not have such clear protections. It is therefore quite easy for Parliament to eat into them and gnaw away at them slowly, sometimes without really thinking. Once we have done it for drink-driving, we say, “Well, why don’t we do it for driving on drugs?” We then say, “Well, drugs are illegal anyway, so why not just test the whole population and see whether they are committing a criminal offence?” That might not be hugely popular in all our constituencies.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thomas Docherty

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

May I begin by thanking the Minister for the enormous courtesy, good manners and good temper with which he has responded to the many criticisms of the Bill? I, among others, do not think it the best Bill ever to have come before Parliament, but he has invariably answered questions kindly. I also thank the Clerks for warning me that I was, in their terminology, to “open the batting” in this debate, which I might not otherwise have known. As far as cricketing metaphors go, I am probably more of a night watchman than a Geoffrey Boycott, or Somerset’s own Trescothick, but I shall bat on with regard to the Parliament Act 1911 and my new clause in relation to it.

The 1911 Act, as the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) reminded us earlier today, was introduced, broadly, as a temporary measure. The preamble to the Act says:

“whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation”,

but “immediately” has now extended to 100 years of failure to introduce a popular rather than an hereditary form, although not all elements of heredity remain in the upper House. The 1911 Act still allows the House of Commons to get through major constitutional reforms that the House of Lords may oppose.

The reason for introducing my new clause to exempt purely the first section of the Bill—the bit that limits the life of a Parliament specifically to five years, rather than continuing with the flexibility that we have previously had—is that this is a crucial constitutional development that we should be careful about changing, willy-nilly, as coalitions come and go. Our constitution should be safeguarded and preserved; it is not something that should be treated lightly or in an airy-fairy fashion—and one thing that the House of Lords can do, and does extraordinarily well, is prevent that from happening.

By the way, it is notable that their lordships sat throughout last night, fulfilling their proper constitutional role of ensuring that a serious constitutional change is properly debated and reviewed. We in this House find that guillotines come crashing down upon our necks to prevent the detailed deliberation that some of us might like over a rapid raft of changes to the constitution, but their lordships—some of whom are not in their first youth—have stayed up overnight, battling for the great British constitution, which has served us extraordinarily well for hundreds of years. Looking upon their lordships as the guardians of the constitution is a good reason for ensuring that the measure cannot be changed without their consent and approval.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I have listened quite attentively to the hon. Gentleman’s quite interesting opening remarks. Will he clarify something for me? If a party’s manifesto—I appreciate that this is a bizarre concept for Liberal Democrats—contained a plan to reduce the length of a Parliament, should the House of Lords have the opportunity effectively to veto the will of the people?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is a very helpful intervention, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for it. I think the House of Lords would almost certainly follow the Salisbury convention in that respect, and it would be wrong of it to go against the clearly expressed will, in a manifesto, of the lower House. The point of this measure is as a protection and a safeguard, not as a die-in-the-ditch stalling method to prevent any reform in future. It may be that, had I been around in 1911, I would have been all in favour of dying in a ditch to prevent reform, but I was not, and that is not the purpose of the new clause.

It is worth noting that the Bill is not subject to the Parliament Act 1911. The reason for that is that it extends the life of Parliament, potentially. It gives the Prime Minister the discretion—the ability—to extend the life of a Parliament from five years to a maximum of five years and two months. As we all know, the Parliament Act requires that that can be done only with the consent of the House of Lords, and cannot be pushed through if that consent were refused.

That leads me on to the reason why that was in the Parliament Act. Why was it thought sensible in 1911, when the Liberals were last in independent government—although they had some Irish help—to put in a clause that safeguarded the length of time that a Parliament could sit? It was done to prevent a tyranny of the lower House—to prevent a lower House from extending its life or changing its ability to serve for a particular time whenever it felt like it.

The relevant section is section 2, which states:

“If any Public Bill (other than a Money Bill or a Bill containing any provision to extend the maximum duration of Parliament beyond five years) is passed by the House of Commons…”

So any Bill which extends the life of Parliament beyond five years is excluded from the functioning of the Parliament Act. That is relevant to this Bill, because it changes the basis on which the lifetime of a Parliament is calculated. It would therefore be logical to say that the safeguard in the 1911 Act should be extended to it too, so that it is clear that a new Government cannot come in and play fast and loose with the new Act. It would also give clarity to the Government’s purpose.

Many of us want to know whether the Act—or Bill, as it currently is—is about coalition and about two parties which, over a weekend in early May, were deeply distrustful of each other, or whether it is about major constitutional reform that it is thought will improve the settlement and the democracy of our nation.

The reason why I mention the weekend in May when the parties may have distrusted each other is that I have a feeling that that distrust has broadly evaporated. I think there is now great fellow feeling, at least in the hierarchies of the two parties, between the two sides that they work well together and are committed to some major reforms. The Liberal Democrats have made some admirable and brave decisions, particularly in relation to tuition fees, that have shown that their heart is in the right place in terms of the coalition, and how they have been willing to sacrifice part of their manifesto for it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am enormously grateful to my hon. Friend for putting pithily in one intervention what it has taken me, I fear, 20 minutes to say. He is absolutely right that Her Majesty’s Government cannot have it both ways. Either the Bill is serious and important, in which case it should be exempt from the Parliament Act 1911, or it is simply the contract for a marriage of convenience and so should fall at the next general election.

[Thomas Docherty]

I will keep my remarks suitably brief. I was fascinated by the introductory remarks of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I do not think that he had the pleasure, Mr Speaker, of hearing your October lecture to the Hansard Society on the Parliament Act 1911. Had he heard it—I believe that it is repeated continually at weekends on the BBC Parliament channel—he would have a much better understanding of the purpose of the 1911 Act. I do not propose to give a blow-by-blow account of that lecture.

I was interested by a recent interview that the hon. Gentleman gave to The House magazine—a fine tome that I am sure all hon. Members read. He described himself as a Peelite:

“I believe in free-trade, sound money and the state being less onerous upon the subject than it has been in recent years.”

Having listened to him with interest, I suggest, to extend the coalition metaphor, that he is more of a Palmerstonite, because Palmerston was a great fan of the Great Reform Act of 1832, as I am sure you know, Mr Speaker. He believed that the 1832 Act was, to use the American phrase, “a perfect union”, and that no further reform was required for the Houses of Parliament or the country. I cannot help suspecting that the hon. Gentleman would regard himself as being in the tradition that believes that the Parliament Act 1911 gave us a perfect union and that no further changes should be supported.

I was particularly concerned to hear the hon. Gentleman say that unless the whole country supported a constitutional change—I think that was the phrase he used—we should not have further change. I say to him gently that, despite the immense popularity of his Prime Minister, I cannot foresee a day in which even the great Conservative party will convince the whole country to support constitutional change. I suspect that he may be setting the bar a little too high. Traditionally, if this House is given a clear mandate by the people through a general election, that is regarded as sufficient impetus for a constitutional reform.

The hon. Gentleman rightly pointed to the exceptions in the Parliament Act 1911 for money Bills—it is interesting that his forebears in the House were keen to exempt the ability of Governments to push through the raising of revenue from the people—and for the lengthening of Parliaments. It is juggling with logic to equate the lengthening of Parliaments with the shortening of Parliaments. By its nature, that would lead to more frequent elections—which would probably be a good thing, as we saw today with the introduction of my hon. Friend our new Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams). When the people are given an opportunity to speak, they tend to speak loud and clear. If the hon. Gentleman’s new clause were accepted by those on the Treasury Bench, I fear that it would restrict the democratic rights of the people to hold elections to this place more often. For that reason, I fear that the Opposition could not possibly support it. Without making any further remarks, I will now let the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) speak to his amendment.