Strengthening Standards in Public Life

Stephen Flynn Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this, because he knows a great deal about Maundy Gregory and the scandal that came about with Lloyd George, and indeed corresponded with my late father on this subject when cash for honours came up. Cash for honours is illegal and has been for the best part of 100 years. It is rightly illegal and is wholly improper. The hon. Gentleman has been right in his campaigns to ensure that that never tarnishes our way of life.

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Let me carry on at this stage.

The Government hold their position solely by virtue of their ability to command the confidence of the House of Commons, and it is primarily from the elected Chamber that Ministers are appointed. Given the spectrum of responsibilities, the Government believe it an historic strength of our system that MPs should have a wider focus than the Westminster bubble and that we should maintain connections to the world beyond, so that we may draw on the insights and expertise that this experience offers so that, rather than a Chamber replete with professional politicians with no previous career or future career other than to remain on the public payroll, we have a Parliament that benefits from MPs with a broader range of talents and professional backgrounds.

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[Pete Wishart]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, who gets right to the heart of the matter. This is nothing but a smokescreen from the Government, who have thrown this out here to try to excuse their appalling behaviour over the past couple of weeks. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend. She is right. She is a distinguished breast cancer surgeon and the way in which she was traduced, with the assistance of the Conservative party, for doing her job, helping out and doing that work for nothing was absolutely and utterly appalling. They should be ashamed of themselves for what they did.

[Stephen Flynn]

On the topic of corruption, the Leader of the House mentioned Edmund Burke earlier. We might want to reflect on another quote by Edmund Burke:

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

[Pete Wishart]

I will leave that with my hon. Friend: it is a fantastic quote and I am glad that he has presented it to the House.

Today we are debating a Labour motion and a Government amendment. We have no problem with supporting the Labour motion. We will vote in favour of it, if we get the opportunity to do so. We are happy to leave it to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We applaud it for the work that it has already put in, and the House looks forward to receiving the decision as soon as possible and to backing it in its important work.

Then we come to the Government amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) is absolutely right: this is nothing but a fig leaf, a cover up, to try to divert attention and get away from the real issues, including the Prime Minister’s private flat, his villa in wherever it is in Spain and the propriety of so many Members of Parliament. I did not even understand most of what the Leader of the House was trying to explain. If he left it just as: they would do as the Committee on Standards in Public Life suggests, that would be absolutely fine, but it seems like they want to direct the Committee on Standards in Public Life. They want to lead it into certain directions and they want to suggest to it what it should do as part of its work. I think the Chair of the Committee on Standards was absolutely right. It should be left to the Committee to determine and decide. They do not need the Government’s prompting to get these issues resolved. Let us leave it with them. It is a cross-party Committee. It is a Committee that is well chaired by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), who is very studious and diligent about his work.

Today—this, I think, gets to the heart of it—the hapless International Trade Secretary, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), was sent out. Somebody gets the short straw every morning and today it was the International Trade Secretary. She could not even make up her mind how many hours we should all get to work on our second jobs. I think it was initially 10 to 15 hours. Then she suggested, I think it was in the Radio 4 interview, that it was up to 20 hours. They cannot even decide among themselves for how many hours they should get to do their second jobs.

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[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

There is phrase that summarises the past couple of weeks quite well that was mentioned to me earlier by a colleague when we were having a conversation—these past two weeks have been a cure for optimism, because what we have seen is scandal after scandal and sleaze story after sleaze story. Frankly, I am livid. I am livid that all of us have been collectively dragged through the mud because of the corruption of individuals within this place. It is not just that, but the fact that the Leader of the House, a man who extols the virtues of Parliament, tried to cover it up—him, the Prime Minister, the Chief Whip, all complicit in trying to drag the reputation of each and every one of us through the mud. Shame on them.

I cannot explain how furious I am about this. We should all be furious about this. The notion that we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) that it is a plague on all our houses is not something that we should accept. We should highlight those individuals who have acted with impropriety and feathered their own nests, and ensure that they never sit in a democratically elected Chamber ever again, because they have no interest in trying to represent the people. They do not see this place, or any democratic institution, as important—what they see as important is their bank balance and the opportunity to influence.

This does not start or finish with the stories over the past couple of weeks: it goes much further than that. We heard earlier about the House of Lords, and rightly so—that if you donate £3 million to the Conservative party, you will get yourself a seat in our legislature. How is that possible? It amazes me. When I was growing up I did not have any trust in the Labour party. That is one of the main reasons I focused on becoming a member of the Scottish National party. I believed that Scotland could do things differently because of the trust that was broken by Tony Blair when he went into an illegal war in Iraq. We now have a situation where Labour Members, despite the scandals that are engulfing politics at the moment, will not stand up and say that they will not put Members into the House of Lords. So shame on the Government but shame on the official Opposition too.

This does not need to be in Scotland’s name. We can do things differently. We will do things differently. We will act in the interests of the people of Scotland. I see the Leader of the House is laughing. I challenge him to rise just now and defend his actions. I challenge him to resign for trying to slur the name of every single politician up and down the land. I challenge him on one more thing: to encourage his Prime Minister to show the bottle to go to the polls to let the people of Scotland decide their own future, because he knows what the outcome will be, just as I know what the outcome will be: the people of Scotland will choose to get rid of this corrupt institution.