Council of Europe

Owen Paterson Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House adopts with immediate effect the same system for nomination of its membership of the UK Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as it has for nomination, following party elections, of membership of departmental select committees, and accordingly directs the Speaker not to send the names of its membership of the UK delegation to the President of the Parliamentary Assembly until the nomination of that membership has taken place according to that system.

After the horrors of the weekend and the statement, there will be many looking at this Chamber today and wondering why we are discussing this arcane issue. It is highly appropriate that we do so because the Council of Europe concerns itself with the conduct of 47 different countries and covers human rights, democracy and the rule of law. At the heart of this debate is the perennial tussle between the Executive and the legislature—it is about who really calls the shots.

May I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for enabling this debate to take place at very short notice? We are six months out from the election, and I am sad to report that the UK membership of the delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe lapsed on 7 November because we did not provide a delegation within six months of our general election. The next chance occurs when the Assembly’s Standing Committee meets in Sofia on 27 November, so there is real urgency in having this debate and in ensuring that we come up with a delegation that is selected by appropriate methods.

If, as I hope, this motion is accepted by the House today, it will enable the necessary elections to take place so that that timetable can be kept. I say “necessary” because most parties in this House with representation in the Assembly already choose their members democratically on a basis similar to that for choosing members of departmental Select Committees.

This motion has attracted widespread support across the House. Those who have signed it include five Chairmen of Select Committees and the Chairman of the 1922 committee of Conservative Backbenchers, as well as a former Conservative Deputy Chief Whip.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

On that very point, I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) has removed his name from the first motion and instead tabled in his name and the names of other hon. Members amendment (b), which has been selected. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the amendment reflects a good old-fashioned British compromise that should be widely welcomed on both sides of the Chamber?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Paterson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comment, and I am happy to stand corrected. I got off a plane from France only a couple of hours ago and learned about that amendment, which has interesting merits. I shall wait until my hon. Friend moves his amendment to hear how it will work in practice.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Do I take it from my right hon. Friend’s earlier remarks that, although previously serving members have been told they will not be put back on this committee, no substitute names have yet been put forward? If that is true, it would suggest that it is more about removing certain people than there not being room for them to serve again.

[Mr Paterson]

My right hon. Friend makes a pertinent point. There is room, because a larger number stood down than were taken off. If I could just make progress, I might explain that point a little later.

The motion should also be helpful to the Government because it will establish beyond doubt that all new members of the new UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will have been chosen by Parliament and not by the Government. The Government are already represented at the Council of Europe in the Committee of Ministers, which is the intergovernmental decision-making body of the 47 member countries. The role of the Parliamentary Assembly by contrast is like that of a departmental Select Committee of this House: it holds the 47 Governments to account for their decisions in relation to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. As I said at the start of my speech, those are the three core competences of the Council of Europe.

The House has only relatively recently begun to elect members of Select Committees. The need to do so evolved over time; and in my view, one of the main catalysts of the current system of election were the attempts by Governments of both persuasions to use the previous system of appointment to exclude those who had criticised their own party. That happened to the late Gwyneth Dunwoody at the hands of a Labour Government, and there was an earlier occasion involving Sir Nicholas Winterton at the hands of a Conservative Government. All Government involvement in appointing members of departmental Select Committees has now ended, and the same should apply to membership of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

It is fair to say that hitherto the Labour party has elected its members while the Conservative party has operated on an informal basis whereby those who wish to be on the Assembly are accommodated, and, without exception, those who are already on the Assembly and wish to be reappointed are so reappointed.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

Is that not the unfortunate aspect of this whole affair? Those hon. Members who have been replaced testify that they have been told that they are being replaced because they voted against the Government when it came to such matters as purdah. That must be wrong, and that is the central issue that we must address. That is what they themselves have been told by Front Benchers.

[Mr Paterson]

Sadly, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall come on to that point in a few moments.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I respect my right hon. Friend terribly and have read the motion with a great deal of interest, but after the events of the weekend does he not think that people outside this place will see this debate as somewhat self-indulgent?

[Mr Paterson]

That is an interesting point, which I touched on in my opening remarks. We had a lengthy statement lasting 90 minutes or so and I have just come back from France myself. People will wonder what we are doing discussing this arcane issue, but the Home Secretary was absolutely spot-on. The mood I experienced in France at the weekend was one of complete determination to carry on with normal business and not to be knocked off course. The Home Secretary was quite right to say that the football international should go ahead, and I think that we are quite right to go ahead with this debate on a Back-Bench motion, discussed by the Backbench Business Committee only last Thursday, arcane though it might be. We have had a good crack at discussing the horrors of the weekend and now we are discussing something fundamental that the people who launched the attacks do not even believe in. Who calls the shots? Is it the legislature or the Executive? There is a constant battle between the two and this tiny vignette continues that tussle.

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

Further to his reply to the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), does the right hon. Gentleman not concede that a Parliament that can stand up to Front Benchers and in which Back Benchers can exercise their rights is a Parliament that will answer some of the important questions that have arisen from the events of the weekend far better than one composed of yes-men and women?

[Mr Paterson]

That was well put and I will not attempt to improve on it.

Of the 12 Conservative members of the PACE from the House of Commons in the last Parliament, four retired at the general election and two others said that they did not wish to continue as members. The remaining six said that they wished to be reappointed, and, in accordance with the precedent, had no reason to believe that that would not happen. As we now have 13 members, that would still have left room for seven additions. At the end of October, however, the Government said that they would not reappoint three of the six who wished to be reappointed because they had voted in September in support of retaining purdah for the EU referendum. That was confirmed in a report in The Daily Telegraph on 4 November that quoted “Downing Street sources” saying that

“the trio had paid the price for rebelling against the Government”.

Such direct interference by the Government in the process of reappointment is at odds with the previous convention in the UK and is also against the statute of the Council of Europe. Article 25a of the statute of the Council of Europe emphasises that appointments or elections should be by Parliament and not by Government. As the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) rightly and accurately said during the urgent question on 3 November, correctly quoting article 25a:

“The Consultative Assembly shall consist of Representatives of each Member, elected by its Parliament from among the members thereof, or appointed from among the members of that Parliament, in such a manner as it shall decide”.—[Official Report, 3 November 2015; Vol. 601, c. 888.]

The Prime Minister’s role in announcing to Parliament the members of the UK delegation is purely formal, and before so doing he should consult the parties. This time, there was full consultation with the official Opposition and with other parties but none with the Conservative parliamentary party outside the Government. Why, for example, was there no consultation with the chairman of the 1922 committee of Back Benchers?

The three Members who are being punished for supporting the retention of referendum purdah were backed by the opinion of the independent Electoral Commission, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, and a majority of this House in a vote on 7 September. By penalising the three, the Government seem to be showing that, far from respecting the decision of the House, they resent it. It is peculiarly inappropriate to choose this issue to do so, as the Council of Europe set up the Venice Commission, otherwise known by its full name of the European Commission for Democracy through Law. It is the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters. It has ruled on the conduct of referendums in guidelines and elsewhere. An analysis of its considerable output indicates that the Government’s stance on purdah in the EU referendum is clearly in breach of the European Commission’s guidelines. Specifically, the Venice Commission’s “Guidelines for Constitutional Referendums at National Level”, published in 2001 at its 47th plenary meeting, clearly states:

“However, the national, regional and local authorities must not influence the outcome of the vote by excessive, one-sided campaigning. The use of public funds by the authorities for campaigning purposes during the referendum campaign proper (ie in the month preceding the vote) must be prohibited.”

As recently as 2005, the Venice Commission built on those guidelines in “Referendums in Europe—an Analysis of the Legal Rules in European States”, which notes that Ireland makes provision for electoral neutrality; that in Portugal, all authorities are required to ensure the strictest impartiality; that Latvia must provide citizens with neutral information; and that the Russian Federation—that well known democracy—has neutrality rules. The UK Government were very much out of line in trying to abandon the purdah rules.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that given that the Council of Europe stands for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, it is a bit strange that the Government should punish people for exercising their right to freedom of expression? They are saying, “As you say what you think, and vote as you do, you can no longer go to an institution that champions those principles.”

[Mr Paterson]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is even more perverse than that, as for a couple of decades the Venice Commission has promoted the issue of Government neutrality in referendums.

Judges in the European Court of Human Rights are appointed for a seven-year term, which is non-renewable to protect their independence. How can members of PACE from the UK’s governing party express independent opinions in Strasbourg if there is a covert threat that their appointment will not be renewed if they step out of line with the Government’s wishes? Right at the heart of this issue is the question of the separation of powers; that is at the root of the whole debate. What could the Government possibly have to fear in trusting Conservative Back Benchers to elect Conservative representatives to the Parliamentary Assembly, as they do for departmental Select Committees?

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I was tempted to raise this as a point of order. My right hon. Friend does not have to go to Europe to get the guidelines on this; he can look at “Erskine May”. On page 265, under the heading “Improper influence”, it says:

“Conduct not amounting to a direct attempt improperly to influence Members in the discharge of their duties but having a tendency to impair their independence in the future performance of their duty may be treated as a contempt.”

In other words, what the Government have done to Members of the House would be treated as contempt of Parliament if it had been done by anybody else in the country.

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his assiduous research. That is a most pertinent point. It is also particularly relevant when one considers the three characters in question, all of whom are established, respected, assiduous Members of this House.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), if I may embarrass him first, has been on PACE for 10 years. He is the leader of the European Conservatives Group—a group with members from 17 countries. He sits on the Presidential Committee, which is made up of the President and the five group leaders. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) was Secretary of State for Wales, she guided a referendum so skilfully that none of us even noticed it. She is also Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Political Affairs and Democracy. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who sits on the Council’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, has done splendid work highlighting the horrific persecution of centuries-old Christian communities in the middle east.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

May we take it that, given the eminence and integrity of all three right hon. and hon. Members, there has been no question of any of them having been informed by the Government that their previous service on that body was in any way deficient?

[Mr Paterson]

No, indeed. They seem to be completely incorruptible and their behaviour impeccable, and they have represented this House well on that parliamentary body, whose job is to hold the 47 Governments to account.

By supporting the motion this evening, the House will be able to tell the Government that the way forward is not for the Government to seek to exercise ever more control through patronage, but to win political arguments through persuasion. We have a great ally in this. The House will be endorsing the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) who, as Leader of the Opposition in 2009, gave a speech called “Fixing Broken Politics”, in which he correctly said:

“If we’re serious about redistributing power from the powerful to the powerless, it’s time to strengthen Parliament so it can properly hold the government to account on behalf of voters.”

He specifically said:

“MPs should be more independent - so Select Committee Chairmen and members should be elected by backbenchers, not appointed by Whips.”

Very pertinent to today’s debate, he called for

“Parliament to be a real engine of accountability . . . not just the creature of the executive.”

If it is good enough for the Prime Minister, it is good enough for the rest of us.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

When my right hon. Friend introduced the motion, he mentioned all the eminent people who had signed it. He forgot to mention a former Secretary of State who is proposing the motion. Will he confirm that the Conservative party manifesto that we all stood on said that we would increase parliamentary reform in this Session?

[Mr Paterson]

Indeed. We all stood on that platform, so we are at one with the Prime Minister in his 2009 speech.

This is unfinished business. It is right that the Executive do not appoint members or Chairmen of Select Committees. It is right that we vote today that this House should appoint its representatives to the body that represents 47 Parliaments, holding 47 Governments to account.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Paterson]

We have had a most interesting debate. I endorse those last comments: Members from six parties, I think, signed the original motion.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) made some very interesting comments. I do not entirely accept his gloomy view that it is impossible to organise a swift election at short notice—given the competence of my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), I think an election could be put forward very rapidly—but he made sensible and practical points about all the important work being undertaken down the road at the Council of Europe. It is not good that the UK is currently not represented.

As the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said, we have clearly won the point. It is appropriate for Governments to appoint Ministers to a body representing 47 Governments, but Parliaments should elect the delegates to a parliamentary body that exists to scrutinise and hold to account 47 Governments.

I learnt about amendment (b), tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West, only as I got off an aeroplane at lunchtime. I sense it has some support across the House. We are not clear on what the Government are going to do. I will wait and see whether my hon. Friend is prepared to press his amendment to a Division. It is probably our best chance for a sensible compromise to keep the delegation doing the important work that my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet requests and to give us a proper election system down the road.

Question put, That the amendment be made.