Committee on Standards: Decision of the House

Stephen Flynn Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

As always, it is a privilege and a pleasure to follow the Father of the House. I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) on securing this important debate. She introduced it in a means and a manner significantly different from what we had last week, and I welcome her comments.

What a few days this has been. What a week we have had to endure as politicians who serve in this House. Our politics has been taken to a very dark place indeed, with the sense that rules have been torn up and the feeling that we have returned to the worst days of Tory sleaze—sleaze that we thought had been buried and was gone, never to return. There is a sense of outrage among the public that I have never seen in the 20 years that I have been in this place. That is palpable and tangible in our bulging email boxes, with angry constituents demanding to know what an earth is going on, and demanding that we put it right and sort this mess out.

One has to ask, what on earth were the Government thinking of? What were they trying to achieve? What did they want to do? What did they think was going to happen, introducing that motion the way they did? I almost feel sorry for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. If there was a short straw for turning up to try to defend this Government’s action, he most certainly picked it today. It should be his right hon. Friend the Leader of the House leading this debate. It was him that brought that grubby motion to the House last Wednesday, it was him that defended it to the hilt, and it was him that took up nearly half the time that we were allowed to have that debate. He should be standing at the Dispatch Box today defending the Government’s action and telling us what he is going to do. He always likes to remind me of battles past; today, he is like the brave Sir Robin from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, bravely running away from doing his duty at the Dispatch Box.

We know that this was a plot hatched between the Leader of the House and his right hon. Friend the Government Chief Whip, designed, approved and orchestrated through No. 10, with the weight of the whipping operation that we saw last Wednesday. This goes all the way to the very top. What the two of them did was open the Tory Pandora’s box marked “sleaze”—and what a grubby, rotten receptacle it has turned out to be. They are a Government prepared to reinvent the rules if they do not like them—a Government so arrogant and entitled that they believe they can get away with whatever they want.

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend mentions the Pandora’s box of sleaze. He will be familiar with the corruption allegations that appeared in The Sunday Times yesterday following an investigation by openDemocracy. Does he not believe, as I do, that that is a matter not just for this House and for Parliament but for the police?

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because I want to get round to that particular case. I did note that yesterday. I was here for cash for honours mark 1; this is cash for honours mark 2.0, and I will refer to that specifically.