Recall of MPs Bill

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, but it can be legal up to a point; there could be some matters on which a clear-cut judgment could be made. I have chosen to offer the route through the court simply because it seemed to me that there was a will or a mood in Committee saying, “Well, if we’re going to allow any element of public petition to recall, then going to an election court could be the way that could be done.” I have simply taken that point and offered this new clause to try to test Members on whether they will follow through on the logic of the argument they made in Committee.

I do not commend the model in new clause 5 above all others. I still prefer the open rolling petition around a clear issue, but, again, I think that the open rolling petition should be on the basis of a pledge. I think the pledge as the basis for those petitions would create a much clearer standard for the public. It would also create a clearer standard for MPs, who would know, if they had committed to the pledge, whether they had abided by the code of conduct and could show whether they had upheld the standards of public life. That should not be too much to ask. MPs should not feel, “Oh, it’s hard to prove that we have upheld the standards of public life or lived up to the code of conduct.” It would send a very dangerous signal if Members felt that a pledge about the MPs code of conduct and the standards of public life would be difficult to uphold or could be abused in some untoward way. Then we would be seen to be trying to find ourselves some highly privileged protection where we decide that we always know best, even about the worst that we have done.

That is the simple point of new clause 5, which I do not intend to press to a Division. Its purpose is to ensure that if we are to improve the Bill, we take into account the absence from the Bill of a clear tool available to the public. Also, we need to make good the serious omission that we have all acknowledged—in circumstances where there is no serious job description for MPs, where is the bottom line? The new clause offers a bottom line.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

It is worth taking stock of where we are. The Government’s Bill still has no friends in its current form. It still proposes a system of recall that is possible only in the narrowest of circumstances and, in most cases, still only by permission of MPs. It will do nothing to empower voters. For that reason it has been savagely criticised by every pressure group campaigning for improved democracy—everyone from 38 Degrees and Unlock Democracy all the way to the TaxPayers Alliance. It has been trashed by everyone from the Morning Star to The Daily Telegraph, which described it a few weeks ago as an “insult to voters”.

As a consequence, the Prime Minister felt obliged to describe the Bill as “the minimum acceptable”. Labour’s shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), said that

“the Bill needs to be strengthened considerably from its current state in order for it to have meaning.”

[Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the fundamental flaw in the Recall of MPs Bill is that it does not contain a recall mechanism?

[Zac Goldsmith]

Exactly right. This is not recall as it is understood anywhere in the world.

The shadow Minister went on to say that the Bill

“is simply not good enough. The public will, rightly, expect more.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 787.]

Even the Deputy Prime Minister, who wrote the Bill, has had to express difficulties with it.

But after all that huffing and puffing, here we are today with more or less exactly the same Bill—a Bill that no one likes. Yes, a few amendments have been proposed, but they are red herrings. They add nothing useful to the Bill. Labour’s main proposal, amendment 14, merely lowers the threshold so that hon. Members who are suspended from the House for 10 days or more automatically qualify for recall. The original proposal was 21 days. The only effect that will have is in the judgments made by a committee of parliamentarians. They will simply rejig the way they sentence MPs accordingly. The 10-day rule would have spelled the end for any number of hon. Members who have been sanctioned for engaging in protest.

[Thomas Docherty]

May I clarify the amendment? It specifically excludes those Members who have been named by the Speaker for parliamentary protest in the Chamber. It does not capture Members who have engaged in parliamentary protest.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that clarification. It changes nothing at all. I am reassured by the point he makes, but all this does is create a different dynamic—a different impetus for the committee of parliamentarians. They will simply pass different judgments accordingly.

The main Lib Dem amendment, new clause 2, introduces a new trigger—misconduct in public office. It sounds great and some people might be reassured by it, but it adds nothing material to the Bill. I have looked into the matter and sought advice. I quote some of the advice that has been issued. The Crown Prosecution Service says that this should apply

“only where … the facts are so serious that the court’s sentencing powers would otherwise be inadequate”.

The House of Commons Library says:

“There are few prosecutions, suggesting that action is taken only when misconduct is particularly gross.”

The courts have said:

“The threshold is a high one requiring conduct so far below acceptable standards as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder. A mistake, even a serious one, will not suffice.”

If we are honest about it, the only reason why this amendment has been tabled is so that the mainstream parties can pretend that they have addressed one of the main concerns with the Bill, which is that it leaves MPs in charge.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman said that a mistake, even an honest one, will not suffice. Does he actually think that MPs should be subject to recall just because they have made an honest mistake?

[Zac Goldsmith]

The hon. Gentleman knows my arguments concerning recall. I am deliberately trying not to rehearse the arguments that were made in Committee because I lost them by a ratio of 2:1, but I fundamentally disagree with his view on how recall should be used. I was elected largely on the basis that I would put up a fight against Heathrow expansion. Had I, immediately after the election, taken a non-executive role within BAA—even an unpaid role of some sort—and flipped my position entirely, that would have amounted to a fraud on my voters. Had I performed such a U-turn, I believe they should have had the right at that point to recall me. The hon. Gentleman disagrees and that is a fundamental philosophical difference, but I will not rehearse the arguments because, as I said, I accept that I lost them a few weeks ago, sadly.

So, we have the same Bill, more or less, with a few synthetic changes if they are passed later today, and we are supposed to believe that the three main parties are all of a sudden happy with it. Perhaps they are, but if so it is only because they were not really, genuinely, authentically unhappy with the old version that we debated. Either way, it is an embarrassing, insulting nonsense. They have tied themselves up in knots to avoid letting voters hold them to account, all the time pretending that they are doing the opposite.

As if to prove how seedy this affair has become, the most extraordinary letters have been sent by MPs to their constituents, explaining why they blocked real recall. I will not rattle them all off, but let me give one example. The hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) told his constituents that he opposed real recall because

“I could have faced…recall…for voting in favour of an in out referendum”.

He added:

“I could have faced a recall campaign for having voted to close corporation tax loopholes.”

Does he honestly, truly believe that his constituents would have wanted to recall him for doing either of those things? Is it possible to have greater contempt for one’s voters than he expresses in that article in his local newspaper? I have seen countless letters explaining that pure recall would undermine the independence of MPs—letters, incidentally, sent by MPs so dependent that they have never once strayed from the party Whip, never once been disobedient to the parties they serve.

And then we have the Deputy Prime Minister, who robustly opposed real recall six times in this Chamber that I am aware of. Six times he was on the record opposing California-style recall—

[The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Tom Brake)]

Did the hon. Gentleman notify my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) that he would mention his name in this debate?

--- Later in debate ---

[Zac Goldsmith]

No, I did not. I was not aware that I was supposed to. Perhaps I will be recalled under the new mechanism that the right hon. Gentleman is proposing.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

The point has been made. Normally, it is good practice to let people know if you are going to name them. I am sure that it was not done intentionally.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I do apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker; it is not a convention that I was aware of, and it certainly was not intentional.

The Deputy Prime Minister has formally opposed, on the record, real recall six times in this House. Then, as the pressure for proper recall began to rise earlier this year, he clearly felt it. He told his LBC listeners:

“Zac and I are completely at one. I actually have no objection at all to the kind of radical California style recall that he likes.”

The real problem, he added, is that

“It has absolutely no hope…of being passed into law because of profound objections from conservative colleagues.”

Of course, when it came to a vote—a free vote for the coalition, if not for the Labour party—his party trooped as one through the No Lobby, against real recall.

In the last debate on recall, Members were asked to trust voters to hold them to account, and a majority declined, sadly. I genuinely believe that the establishment’s refusal to share power means that ultimately, it will lose that power. However, the result was clear and for that reason I have not tabled any new amendments. It was clear that the House as it is today is not ready for proper recall, and I would be wasting the House’s time if I rehearsed all those arguments and re-tabled those amendments.

However, there is some good news. In an impassioned speech, a Scottish National party MP—the name of his constituency is so complicated that it is a disincentive to quote him, so I will not. [Hon. Members: “Western Isles.”] Is that right? So that is what we call it in English. I was not aware of that. I was going to attempt the native version, and I am afraid that I would have got it wrong. Nevertheless, in an impassioned speech, the hon. Gentleman said that even if reform were rejected by the House, it was inevitable, and he was right. Prospective parliamentary candidates up and down the country from all the parties—Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative and the rest—are positioning themselves against the incumbents on the basis of where they stand on recall.

[Richard Fuller]

Does my hon. Friend agree that recent news has highlighted the public’s distaste for a political elite keeping themselves to themselves and ruling over the people? Is not that another reason for the public being frustrated that the Bill does not include the real recall provisions that he proposed on Second Reading?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I could not agree more strongly, and I welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention.

Change is inevitable, and we are moving in the right direction. I also believe that, with the new composition of the House after the election, we will be in a better position to bring in a genuine form of recall. I certainly hope that that will happen. In the meantime, however, let us not insult voters with this placebo that is being offered today. People who are interested in politics already know that this Bill is a sham and a stitch-up. The rest—those who are perhaps not paying attention today—will discover that fact for themselves at the very first scandal. Let us walk away from this disgraceful piece of legislation and wait until the House grows some collective proverbials and does the right thing.

[Thomas Docherty]

rose—

[Zac Goldsmith]

I was about to finish, but I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Thomas Docherty]

Notwithstanding the hon. Gentleman’s acceptance of the vote last time, will he clarify whether it is his intention to oppose amendment 24, which deals with MPs who fiddle their expenses, if there is a Division on it?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I am happy to answer that question. I do not want to sound self-important, but it is my intention not to vote one way or the other on the amendments or the Bill, because I do not want to give the Bill any credibility at all. It is a sham, a shambles, a farce, an insult and a disgrace and I do not want to have anything to do with it. When we come back to the House with a proper proposal, I will engage again, but for now I would advise all those Members who believe in democracy, in reform and in genuine recall to walk away and wait for another time.

[Thomas Docherty]

I want to set out Labour’s position on the principle of recall and the reasoning behind the amendments that have been tabled by me, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and others. I will then set out Labour’s views on the new clauses and amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). Finally, I will deal with the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan).

I want to begin by again placing on record Labour’s support for the principle of recall when an elected representative’s conduct falls well below the standards that Parliament and their constituents expect. That is why our 2010 manifesto promised to introduce recall legislation and why we supported the Bill on Second Reading. We will support it again on Third Reading.

However, we continue to believe that the Bill could be strengthened. We have tabled a number of amendments to that end, and I am grateful that they have attracted cross-party support. We discussed the principles behind each of them in Committee, and the hon. Member for Cambridge has already mentioned them briefly, so I will not detain the House by rehearsing all the arguments or going into unnecessary detail.

Amendment 14 seeks significantly to lower the threshold for the period of suspension relating to the point at which a Member of Parliament may be subject to a recall petition. As it stands, the Bill states that the second recall condition is that a Member must be suspended from the House for 21 sitting days to reach the threshold. We believe that that sets the bar too high. For example, neither of the MPs who were suspended during the cash-for-questions scandal would have been subject to potential recall using that threshold. By reducing it to 10 days, as we propose, Members such as those and many others who have been suspended over the years would be captured by the revised mechanism.

However, we recognise the genuine concern that Ministers flagged up during the Bill’s previous stages, which has been echoed by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), that a Member who had twice been named by the Speaker for unparliamentary activity or protest could fall foul of the lower threshold. That is why we have inserted the provision that the suspension must be the result of a report into an MP’s behaviour by the Standards Committee, although it is for the House as a whole to determine the length of a suspension.

Our amendment 24 deals with Members who have been convicted of fiddling their Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority-funded parliamentary allowances. Some may be curious as to why we are proposing that the recall process should apply even where a non-custodial sentence is handed out. We believe that a flagrant misuse of public funds by MPs is simply unacceptable. Those of us who were not MPs in the previous Parliament fully understand the public’s anger at that whole sorry saga. As the Leader of the Opposition has highlighted, the public’s confidence in our political system has been severely strained by the events of the past few years. We hope that this amendment signals to the public that Parliament is listening and changing.