Honesty in Politics

Owen Thompson Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for opening the debate and for bringing the petitions before us, and I thank all those who signed them. They have to be commended for their foresight, given that they signed up before many of the issues touched on this afternoon even came to light.

We live in strange and turbulent times, and there is a danger that we are slipping into an era of post-truth politics. We need only look across the Atlantic at the situation in the United States, where a former President is still denying the outcome of an election years after it happened; we can see the impact that is having on society. If we do not do something—I am not saying that I have all the answers—there is a danger of sliding down the same slope.

As has been touched on, the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, lied to the public and Parliament. He was found by independent ethics advisers to have broken the ministerial code after being found guilty by a Met police investigation, yet nobody in this place could call him out for lying. Surely it is our job to come to this place to hold people and systems to account. To paraphrase an Australian politician who used a much pithier phrase, we need to keep the scoundrels honest.

The public are sick and fed up of politicians who think they can have one rule for themselves and another for everyone else. They want politicians to be honest and to have integrity, which is surely the very least that the public should be able to expect from us. It was interesting that the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) suggested that we need to throw out the “dead cat” strategy, and I entirely agree with him. Perhaps one or two Lib Dem bar charts could go with it, but that is perhaps another matter altogether.

University College London research published last year revealed that the UK public want politicians who, over and above delivering outcomes, operate within the rules. UCL’s report, entitled “What Kind of Democracy Do People Want?”, details the responses of 6,500 people who are representative of the voting-age population across the whole UK, who were surveyed in July 2021. It is the most in-depth report to date on what roles people think institutions should play. It shows that UK voters care about how those in power are held to account, and there is notably higher support for judicial intervention than is often supposed. It reveals that people do not want power concentrated in the hands of a few, but would like it shared among Parliament, judges, regulators, civil servants and the public.

When respondents were asked whether they agreed that

“healthy democracy requires that politicians always act within the rules”,

or that

“healthy democracy means getting things done, even if that sometimes requires politicians to break the rules”,

75% chose the former and just 6% the latter. Professor Alan Renwick, the deputy director of the UCL’s Constitution Unit, said:

“It’s true that few people pay much attention to the fine details of democratic institutions…But people do want a system in which politicians act with integrity and where power isn’t unduly concentrated with ministers in government. Most people, across different political affiliations, think that’s not the case at present.”

These findings show that voters care deeply about integrity and do not want power to be unduly concentrated in the hands of the Executive.

It is beyond doubt that the trust gap between public and politicians is threatening our democracy; as I say, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have accelerated the slide. Unless we halt the political disinformation, democracy will be in deep trouble. I have previously highlighted the possible need for a truth tsar or truth commissioner to fact-check MPs and hold us to account, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that idea. Clearly, we cannot have a situation where we do that ourselves. In an ideal world we would, but that is what we have got just now and it is not working.

The hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) is right that it would be entirely unfair to expect the Speaker to take on that role, but somebody has to, and we need to give that serious consideration. There could be an independent body entirely separate from the political system, which could give confidence not only to those of us in this place but to the public at large. It could have the power to investigate allegations of dishonesty against MPs and recommend sanctions, such as suspension from the House. That would be more than naming and shaming MPs who make mistakes, because mistakes happen in every workplace and every organisation. There is huge merit in the Bill that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) introduced, which I hope will progress with a lot of support. We need to do something; if we do not, the entire foundations of our democracy are in danger of falling into disrepair.

I will give a case in point. Recently, a Minister—I will not name anyone—commented in the Chamber that Scotland “does not house refugees”. If someone was being fair, they could argue that that was a throwaway line or a flippant comment, but factually it is entirely untrue. I pointed that out through a point of order, but I have not yet seen a correction to the record. That was a very simple case, where somebody could look at the facts and check the statement, and the easiest solution would be for the record to be corrected, but at the moment there is nothing to make that happen.

There are other moves afoot. In Iceland, all major political parties have agreed to a code of conduct, which includes provisions for transparency, accountability and ethical behaviour. Perhaps we could look at that existing model, at least to bring ourselves a bit further forward in terms of what actions we could take.

Public anger about dishonesty in politics runs deep; there is a deep-seated view that there is one rule for politicians and another for everyone else. A small number of people making wildly flamboyant claims undermines all of us; it impacts every single one of us. It is in all our interests to try to do everything we can to get this right.

The UCL experts showed that most people are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to use up the one vote they get every four or five years to make what they think should be the blindingly obvious point that lying in Parliament ought to be punished. They expect politicians to step up and enforce the rules. If that does not happen, they could increasingly support more stringent and perhaps problematic external constraints on Parliament. There would be nothing in that for any of us, so it is in all our interests to get this right.