Recall of MPs Bill

Lord Lennie Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lennie (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by offering my congratulations, too, as one relatively new Member of the House to another, to the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, on his insightful and persuasive speech. He revealed some personal insights, one of which was that the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, who was sitting next to him, had introduced him to the delights of Diet Coke during his time at the LSE. If he wants to further his interest in Diet Coke, he may have heard in my maiden speech that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, an expert in this area, is producing a book, now retitled The Ring-Pull Diet. Signed copies are available at a very reasonable cost and Christmas is coming, so see me afterwards and I will do what I can for you.

I support the Bill. There has been some extraordinarily persuasive and experienced commentary on the Bill in this debate, and I am not going to amplify or repeat what has been said. Rather, I shall concentrate my remarks on an area that I have some experience of in past life, which is organisation, campaigning and so on, in political arenas. The three areas that need attention are to do with money, as noble Lords have mentioned, with scrutiny of what goes on and with the preparation that is under way—or perhaps not under way—in the Bill that is likely to be upon us soon.

In preparation for this debate I had some discussions and correspondence with the Electoral Commission, among others, to seek its view, as the country’s guardian of electoral behaviour, on what it thinks its role should be and what the role should be of returning officers, or petition officers as they will become when the Bill is upon us. It takes the overall view that the Bill will lead to little, local matters. That is slightly worrying, because of course these will be local affairs. They will be locally organised petitions, subject to whether local constituents decide to sign them, but they will not be little, local difficulties; they are going to be hugely intense, under the scrutiny of all, and the media of the country will play a major part in determining the direction of travel for a decision on whether to recall.

To think that this is just a local matter and therefore that much of the responsibility for the organisation and delivery of these recall petitions can simply be left in the hands of an unsuspecting, unprepared local petition officer, is wrong. It would be unfair for the Bill to place public servants of that sort in that position without giving them the right level of support, guidance and training. Indeed, we should perhaps take the responsibility from them—I do not mean this to offend any current returning officers or future petition officers—because they really will not know what has hit them when one of these petitions is upon them.

I also take the view that these petitions will be very infrequent. I did a little research and the best that I can establish is that in 100 years or so of recall facility in the United States, only two national recall enactments have taken place. There have been lots of others at local and under-federal level, but not many at national level. So we are not going to have a whole body of experience to draw upon in refining this law as time goes on as we do at other elections—local, European, national and so on. Petitions will be rare and intense and it will therefore be even more important that we get the terms of the Bill and the rules of the game right, in detail and known before we hit the petition trail.

Money matters in campaigns—perhaps not as much, but almost as much, as people on the ground matter, in terms of organisation. It is hugely influential and important. If we did not understand that before, the Government have just passed, through statutory instrument, a significant increase in candidates’ expenditures. They slipped it through in preparation for the forthcoming general election—without, so far as I can see, any discussion at all.

I spent quite a lot of my working life, a couple of years or more, with others, including my noble friend Lord Kennedy, who is on the Front Bench, trying to find to find a way, between the parties, to restrict money as a factor in the way that campaigns are run, and trying to limit campaign spending way down to a level that means money is not seen as the evil that it can become in the process of campaigning. Discussions went on between all the major parties over a number of years. Everyone was in favour of it, but in the end every party found a reason why the particular proposal at that particular point did not suit their circumstances or need, or the time in the electoral cycle, or whatever other position they may have taken, and it all came to naught.

The Bill concerns me. I raised with the Electoral Commission the issue of spending limits and how they may be applied on the for and anti sides of petition campaigns. It is quite right, as my noble friend Lord Grocott said, that the MP who is the subject of such a recall is going to be an unloved, lonely and very vulnerable figure. His or her ability to raise significant sums of money to mount a defence against recall will be very limited indeed. The pro-recall campaign in any area will have far greater opportunity, capacity and resource to draw upon, and unless we find some way of limiting the total amount of money that each side can spend, it will not be an open, robust and fair process but will be extremely tilted against the MP. I suggest that we need to look, in Committee, at some means of setting an absolute cap on what can be spent by both sides. That implies that there will need to be a responsible person on each side—presumably the MP on one side and someone akin to an election agent, that sort of figure, on the other side—through whom, and only through whom, expenditure can be committed to the campaign.

The issue of scrutiny was raised, in part, in earlier contributions. This will be about the conduct—and should be about only the specific conduct—in response to which the petition has been drawn up in a constituency. How we can find a means to control other factors—and many noble Lords have indicated that that is a concern—should the Bill become law, is important. We raised this again with the Electoral Commission, which did not really have any advice to give. It referred to the recent Scottish referendum and so on, and how it was impossible to control the angles from which people came to that decision. But recall is a one-question issue and a specific matter about which nothing else should count except for the specific conduct, whatever it may have been, at that point in time. So if there is to be literature, or if there are to be websites or campaigning groups set up on other issues to do with MPs’ voting records, or other records, or other experiences during his or her time, we would need to find a way of ensuring that they cannot affect the outcome of the case.

Finally, it will involve a significant amount of skill and training to prepare people in the various roles established by the proposed legislation. My personal view is that the body that should be responsible for the preparation in detail of these matters—not just as an adviser offering guidance and a code of conduct but as one with an active, participative, hands-on role—must be the Electoral Commission. That is a further matter that we should explore in Committee.