Recall of MPs Bill

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly and the Minister knows why. This morning I was able to explain to him that in a few minutes’ time there is to be a memorial service for a former Member of the House of Commons and I have been asked to give one of the tributes there. However, I would not want my silence to be mistaken for somehow resiling on my commitment to support this amendment, to which I have added my signature. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has made a very persuasive case in your Lordships’ House today. Although I will reserve my remarks to Report because I will not be able to be present to hear the Minister’s reply, I hope that between now and then he will have time to give great consideration to the powerful points that have been made. I read the Second Reading speech of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, which was a very telling contribution to the debate, in which he argued that this is a bad Bill and is probably incapable of being made better. I rather agree with him on that. However, I do think that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is at least making a valiant effort to try to point us in the right direction. Much of the wording is of course taken from the Representation of the People Act.

I served on the Committee of Privileges in the other place and fought seven parliamentary elections, winning five of them, including a by-election. I therefore have a view about these things, which I will express at a later stage. I would never want this legislation to be used to undermine Members of the House of Commons. That should be a fundamental concern of your Lordships’ House. I served as a Member in Merseyside. I saw one of the most assiduous and respected Members, Frank Field, who continues in the House of Commons to this day, spend days, weeks and months fighting attempts to deselect him and remove him from the House of Commons. We should resist with all our might anything that can be used in a vexatious way to undermine MPs such as Frank Field. I hope that we will not therefore be frightened to send amendments back to another place so that they can give them due and proper consideration. I apologise for not being able to stay to hear the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

I begin with an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler—two apologies, to get my mea culpas out of the way: first, because I missed some of his opening remarks on these amendments, and secondly, because he was good enough to send them to me in detail a week ago or so by e-mail, and ask for a response. I have not given him that response yet—he is about to get it now. I have to say that this is a seriously bad idea. A core reason is that it brings judges into a direct role with Parliament, which judges themselves will resist very strongly. They will be right to resist it, because once we blur that line between parliamentary democracy and the judiciary we get into very murky waters, where you end up drawing lines where you do not wish to draw them. I am sure—and if there are lawyers here at the moment, they will be the first to agree—that the thing judges hate more than anything else is trying to deal with political cases. So I strongly recommend that we do not go down this road. I will go into just a little more detail—I do not want to spend long on it. The principal point here is the all-important one: judges and Parliament should be kept separate as far as possible.

On the secondary matter of misbehaviour, the misconduct issue is incredibly hard to interpret when it takes place in the context of politics. Many examples have already been given of elected Members of Parliament who might get into a situation where they clash with the law because they are either supporting a demonstration or a strike, or opposing it, or taking a stand on any number of other issues, and who may themselves fall foul of the court. In the e-mail the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, sent me he said that he was trying to address some of the points I had raised at Second Reading. However, this does not deal with them—it aggravates matters.

We need, as far as possible, to follow the Burkean principle that parliamentary representation is decided by the electorate, and that by and large you overrule that only in the most extreme cases—murder or other very serious offences of that type. Otherwise, we get into a position where the court decides. That is why I have such a strong objection to what happened in the case of Phil Woolas MP, where the court decided that he could not stand again. It is so profoundly wrong. It goes right back to the battle that Bradlaugh had with Parliament. He refused to take the oath on the Bible, so the House of Commons refused to let him become a Member. He promptly went back to the electorate, who elected him again and so on. One might say that that makes the case because he won, but there are examples where it would not.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, did not think that there was much in the slippery slope argument. One case in which it would have been a very slippery slope would have been when an MP objected to the First World War. If we consider the attitude and atmosphere around the country in the context of the First World War, an MP taking a pacifist position might well have been in very serious difficulty. As I said in my Second Reading speech, it is a mistake just to look backwards: look forwards. If people were to campaign for one of the opposition groups in Syria—not ISIL—and if the legislation here on terrorism were so tough that they got arrested when they came back, but the group they had been supporting in Syria was not one of the extreme groups, where would we be?

There are umpteen examples where this goes wrong. We should stick with Burke on this. If the electorate decide that somebody is their MP, that should remain the case until the next general election, unless there are some very special circumstances. The more we pull back from that practice, as Burke himself pointed out, the more difficulties we get into. I know how much thought the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, puts into these things, but I will add that members of the judiciary dread cases where they are pulled into a political process—and they are right to dread them. It is all-important that we keep a clear distinction between the law and Parliament.