Recall of MPs Bill

Lady Hermon Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I think I have made it clear that the Bill is not the last word on recall. It will apply specifically to Members of Parliament and it will govern simply the procedures of the House. It has been difficult enough to establish a consensus in this House, let alone in the devolved Administrations and beyond. However, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), it will be open to future Parliaments to take a different view.

[Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)]

The Minister will be well aware that five Sinn Fein Members do not take their seats in the House. Will he make it absolutely clear to those absentee Northern Ireland MPs—and to the House and the general public—that the Bill will apply equally to them?

[Greg Clark]

The hon. Lady makes an important point in the context of Northern Ireland. My understanding is that the Bill would not apply to those Members because they have not taken the Oath to sit in the House, but she will no doubt wish to raise that point in Committee.

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[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is tempting me into an area that I do not think I will be tempted into. I am sure she will have opportunities to raise those issues in the House at later stages.

[Lady Hermon]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to tempt him in a related but different direction. Will he confirm to the House that the Labour party welcomes the fact that this Bill extends to absentee MPs, given that the Minister said, correcting his earlier reply to me, that it applies to all MPs on the day after polling day, not when they take their seats, and therefore does apply to Sinn Fein?

[Stephen Twigg]

Yes indeed. It is very important that this legislation applies to all elected Members of Parliament from the point at which they are elected. I thank the hon. Lady for giving me the opportunity to confirm that from the Dispatch Box.

It is important that the public are able to hold Members of Parliament to account for serious wrongdoing and misconduct—for example, taking financial reward for everyday parliamentary activity. Any system of recall needs to pass that rudimentary test. In Committee we will look at ways to strengthen that aspect of the Bill.

The length of suspension required to trigger a recall petition is currently too high, and it fails to catch some of the clear cases of misconduct that we have witnessed. There is also the question of how we can and should improve the process of suspension that would lead to recall. As the Minister confirmed, the Bill does not mention changes to that process, or, indeed, changes to the Standards and Privileges Committee. I hope that in Committee we will look at ways in which we can ensure that the process is not party-politicised and, as a number of Members have suggested in interventions, more independent. It is sensible to rebalance the Standards and Privileges Committee so that it does not reflect a Government majority, whoever is in power, and to increase the lay membership of the Committee, as the former Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), said.

The second trigger in the Bill allows for a petition if an MP receives a custodial sentence. As the Minister said, some of the people who would have been caught by these proposals received a custodial sentence for political protest. One of my predecessors in Liverpool, Terry Fields, who was the MP for Liverpool Broadgreen, would have faced a recall petition when he was sent to prison for refusing to pay the poll tax. We need to bear these issues in mind when we are debating this aspect of the Bill. At the same time, I think it would be widely felt that if a Member of Parliament committed a crime and was sent to prison, it would be appropriate that, whatever their motive, the public in their constituency had the opportunity to sack them if they wished to do so rather than moving to a general election.

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[Lady Hermon]

I must take the hon. Gentleman back a few minutes in his speech. I am sure I am not alone in feeling deeply offended at his reference to the judiciary. The judiciary, of whose independence I am enormously proud, would not be swayed by the fact that someone is an MP—quite the opposite; they might be swayed to be more severe. I am sure he would like to put on the record his confidence in the independence of the judiciary.

[Chris Bryant]

I am very fond of the hon. Lady, but I think she has deliberately misunderstood what I was saying. Judges regularly say in their summing up that they are taking into consideration the fact that because the person is a Member of Parliament they would lose their job as well if they were to be given a custodial sentence of more than a year. It is a matter of fact that these matters are taken into consideration.

There is another problem with the Bill. Having set a very high threshold—that the courts or MPs get to decide whether somebody is subject to the recall process—it then sets the very low threshold of 10% for throwing someone out. As I said, no Member has achieved election to this House by 50% of the total electorate, so the idea that it would be difficult to find 10% to force them out of their seat, notwithstanding the remarks of the hon. Gentleman, is to live in cloud cuckoo land.

If those two thresholds are wrong, what is the right one? Should we just leave it to the public, which in essence is what we heard from the hon. Member for Richmond Park? As many Members have said, there is a danger that the extremely wealthy could pervert the process; they could spend lots of money in individual constituencies—or perhaps 10, 20 or 30 at a time—and subvert the proper democratic process. Arguably, big money is already doing that in the British system. We need to look again at how people spend money and at the rules governing not just general elections, but by-elections, because the last thing I want is an American-style democracy where only the rich can ever get elected.

Of course there is a danger of timid MPs, but there is that danger today, and the honest truth is: I would trust the public. I say this for a simple reason. In 2003, I got into a bit of trouble with the electorate, The Mail on Sunday and a whole load of journalists after the paper revealed that I had been using a gay dating website called Gaydar, and there were pictures and so on. The story was not quite as it was presented in some of the newspapers, but be that as it may—

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[Mark Durkan]

People can organise petitions, and perhaps they can achieve the 5% and perhaps they can then achieve the 20%, but after that there would be the referendum. Even in Northern Ireland, where people have their own views, I have always found them to be fairly tolerant of MPs with different views if they know that those MPs are being honest and diligent.

Many years ago, I had to run the campaign in South Down against Enoch Powell, who represented a minority opinion in the constituency at the time. I remember that even nationalists in that constituency said, “Well, whatever else he is, he is certainly a hard-working and diligent MP.” They did not agree with his views, but they knew his views, and they knew that he did his job. Of course, he also raised his hat to them when he was in the constituency and greeted them, and they seemed to like that as well. Even in the context of Northern Ireland, and speaking as a Member whose seat has been heavily targeted by Sinn Fein, which is investing an awful lot of effort and resources, I do not believe that fear of the outcome described by the hon. Gentleman is sufficient reason to oppose a more meaningful recall provision.

[Lady Hermon]

Will the hon. Gentleman address a very particular situation in Northern Ireland, namely the anonymity of donations to political parties? Fears have been expressed this afternoon about the ability of the very wealthy to buy a recall. How would the hon. Gentleman deal with that? Will he also take the opportunity to correct an earlier intervention, and confirm that voters vote not just for parties but, on occasion, for candidates who present themselves as independents?

[Mark Durkan]

I entirely take the hon. Lady’s point. People do indeed vote for candidates who present themselves as independents, some of whom have a very distinguished record, as in her case. Voters can make sound judgments not only on the basis of party loyalty or traditional party affinity but on the quality of service they want. The hon. Lady is again a good example. She asked me about donations. Thanks to some rearguard efforts in the Chamber in relation to a Bill that was previously before the House, we are now considering a timeline for introducing donor anonymity, albeit with some qualifications. The proposals for recalls could be an even stronger reason to focus on clarifying issues of anonymity, so that situations could not be abused in one direction or the other.

Many Members appear to be raising concerns about how the process could be abused. Yes, there are all sorts of nefarious forces out there, and various interests that are equipped with money, with ill will and with power motives, but at the end of the day all our protection against that has to reside with the electorate. We come from the electorate and, when we leave this place, we go back to being part of the electorate. We should not try to proof ourselves or protect ourselves against the scrutiny and standards of democracy.

I do not believe that recalls will be used in anything like the number of situations that are being envisaged, but the fact of their existence will add to the standing of Members of Parliament. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras seemed to suggest that recalls could deter Members from sticking to their own views, but I believe that they could encourage them to do so. If a Member were being asked by the Whips to move from their own clear personal position and to adopt the stated party position, a proper recall mechanism would allow that Member to stand on the integrity of their position as an MP elected by their constituents, with whom their first and last loyalty lies.