Recall of MPs (Change of Party Affiliation)

Steve Baker Excerpts

1st reading & 1st reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

In rising to oppose my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), I want to begin by absolutely embracing his noble intent and by saying that I am quite confident that if I were the new Member for Totnes or for South Cambridgeshire, or any other seat where Conservative voters are absolutely furious about the behaviour of their previous MP—and rightly so—I would be in their position of needing to move this Bill or a similar one.

I also say to my hon. Friend that I agree about the primacy of the voter. My goodness, why did I do all the things that I have done about leaving the EU? I believe in the primacy of voters, and it is absolutely right that I supported the noble Lord Goldsmith’s Bill—I tweeted out the links earlier. I am in favour of full recall—I prefer to avoid total recall—albeit on a threshold that must be high enough to avoid vexatious political activity. However, I would like to have full recall, by which I mean recall without conditions.

I even agree with my hon. Friend—of course I do—on the importance of party. He is right: none of us was elected to this Parliament as Independents. There are two Independents and they both have their own circumstances. An article by me in The Sun set out, in the course of 2019, the crucial importance of people knowing the programme for which they have voted, so that they get the Government that they wanted— so I agree with him about the importance of party. I am very clear that we owe a duty to our party in fulfilling our duty to our voters. Carswell and Reckless were absolutely right when they went to their electors, but they did so in circumstances slightly different from the ones that I will come to.

But what I really want to ask the whole House to consider is this: we also have a duty to consider in our deliberations what happens not just when things are going right, or perhaps when things are only going slightly wrong in narrow and foreseeable circumstances, but when things go terribly wrong in circumstances that we perhaps have not foreseen? What do we do when things go terribly, terribly wrong?

The problem with my hon. Friend’s Bill is that it establishes the principle that we are here contingent on our membership of party. I know he has said that his proposal would not apply if we lost the Whip for some other reason, but the problem is that in saying so, he has conceded that if we were to be forced to a recall petition and a by-election because we had lost the Whip through our actions, that would be an unacceptable transfer of power to the party Whips and a compromise of our ability to vote as our conscience dictated was best for our constituents and the nation.

I will not quote Burke—we all know Burke. I am going to recommend Auberon Herbert’s “A Politician in Sight of Haven”—a far better essay. This is the circumstance all of us face. We must balance our conception of what is best, our constituents’ and our party’s. That is the problem, and, of course, in conceding that we must not allow Members to be forced to a by-election because the Whips do not like how they voted, in a sense my hon. Friend begins to go down the road that I foresee.

What I want to say to the House is this: imagine a major governing party in the United Kingdom captured by a charismatic and radical leader, buttressed by ruthless and ideological advisers accomplished in the political arts. Imagine that party with the leader and those advisers hell bent on dramatic change to our institutions of the British state—[Hon. Members: “Never!”] Of course—as colleagues say, “Never!”—it is inconceivable that such a thing should happen in the Conservative party, but I want to apologise to Members opposite, because I do now need to trespass on matters that are properly for the Labour party, and in a speech in which I can take no interventions, I wish to do so lightly. I will leave many things unsaid that might strengthen my case to avoid reopening old wounds. Many Members will be able to bring to mind the things to which I refer. Many things happened last year that ought not to have happened.

I count among my friends Gavin Shuker, the former Member for Luton South from 2010 to 2019. He has given me this quote, which I will read in full:

“In effect this would be a huge shift of power—not to our constituents—but to the respective Party Leaderships. Imagine the chilling effect on debate; the incentive for a Member to be bullied out of their own party; we have to ignore our own history to become an advocate of this approach. And not ancient history—recent history. When I chose to sit as an Independent, it was on an issue of integrity; like many of my colleagues I could not advocate putting a man so universally ill-suited to leadership, into 10 Downing Street; unlike many of them, I chose to embrace the consequences. I knew full well that at the next election I would likely not be returned and in the end that’s exactly what happened. The same people who elected me chose not to return me; the system worked—and all without this Bill.

MPs in this House are not delegates”—

I will allow him that—

“we are representatives. The knowledge that, when a party changes beyond all recognition around a Member, that Member may choose to resign the Whip, is an important safety valve in our system; and a good bit of political hygiene. 

This proposed legislation is rooted in a popular argument which at first seems very clever. But it’s not very wise.”

Those are the words of my friend Gavin Shuker, who of course was the convenor of the Independent Group for Change.

As I came into the Chamber, I said to one of my colleagues that I was going to make this argument and he replied, “Well, imagine that a Conservative leader became ‘woke’ and decided that to speak of free enterprise as a hate crime; we would need a lifeboat”, and indeed we would. But what I want to say to the House is this: I am afraid that we do need to consider very serious contingencies. If one wished to replace a party of government with another because it had so changed beyond recognition, perhaps because a segment of society genuinely feared for their lives if it came to power—that is what happened—one would have to smash the party with sustained pressure and velocity, with meticulous plans and detailed knowledge of every Member of Parliament and when they would leave their party, what they would say, what they would do and with whom. One would really need to know what they were going to do, and they would need time: they would need, for example, not to be driven to European elections for which they were not ready.

I think all the people who left the Labour party were heroic in what they did. They were seeking to ensure that this country had a fit Opposition and an alternative party of government, and it was necessary for them to have the scope, the space and the freedom to still sit in this House and have this platform in the national interest to try to recreate a viable Opposition.

As it happens, those who chose to stay in the Labour party and rescue it have won. I congratulate them because we do need a good Opposition, but in conclusion I want to say that surely this House is about nothing if it is not about restraining power. Of course my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes makes a good argument, and of course if I was in his situation I might well make the same argument, but if we really want the public to be able to recall us, let us really give them the power, without conditions, on a high threshold—high enough to avoid vexatious political activity, because, goodness knows, after all we have been through, we need political stability.

My goodness, we have seen this Parliament, this place and this constitution not just working at 100% but perhaps, as the rules have been stretched and perhaps broken, we have seen our constitution operating at 110%, and what a dread thing it has been. As somebody who has been subjected to the full wrath of the state at least three times—Members will know which votes I mean—my goodness, I do not want to be the person who leaves their party on principle and then in their constituency faces the might of that state trying to procure signatures on a petition. That is among the reasons for my speaking on this.

I have spoken for long enough, and what a privilege it is to be able to put this on the record, but it is because of the dread power of the state, or the dread power of a party gone wrong, that I say to my hon. Friend and to his voters, “Please bear with us, because what we are saying here is not that you cannot get rid of your MP; all those defectors lost their seats—they all lost their seats. We are not saying you won’t be able to get rid of your MP; we are asking you to be patient, because if we have learned anything over the past year or so it is that this amazing constitution that we have, and this amazing, tiresome, wearisome, awful place that is so brilliant, is capable of protecting our freedoms in this nation.” And to Members of Parliament I say, for all that we are all elected on a party ticket and for all the duties we owe to the public via our party, it remains absolutely essential to the freedom and health of this nation that we are able to walk away from our party and seek to destroy it—although I can tell my Whip that I have no plans to do so.

Question put (Standing Order No. 23)