Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Debate between Tim Farron and Peter Bottomley

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I start by wishing Her Majesty a very happy birthday, not just because it is the right thing for us to do, but because we reflect on a lifetime of service and the kind of leadership that we all aspire to emulate, putting duty and self-sacrifice before everything else for the country that she so obviously loves and has served so well for many decades.

It looks as though the motion will go through today, as it should. What a shame we are even having this debate; as some Members have mentioned, it feels like a waste of time. We should be talking about the cost of living and how we can help our constituents to make ends meet and to afford the rent, mortgage, bills and to put food on the table. We should be talking about the outrageous onslaught on Ukraine by the evil, murderous tyrant Putin and how we can support the Ukrainian people. So many other issues are equally important to each of our communities, yet here we are talking about this issue because we have a Prime Minister who will not take responsibility. That is deeply sad.

We have heard many offensive things over the past few months. The most offensive is, “People have moved on. Can’t you just get over it?” I had Easter Sunday off. I went to church in the morning and then a few of us went for a beer at a café at Levens Hall in my patch. It was very sunny, as it always is in the Lake district, as Members all know—that might be knowingly misleading the House, actually. Anyway, it was a lovely day and we sat outside. An elderly couple came up to me, and the gentleman said to me, “My wife’s sister died in June of 2020. She died alone, we could not visit her. Please don’t let him get away with it.” That is a reminder that what we are talking about, as much as anything else, is justice being done.

Earlier on, the Father of the House was the first of a number of people to say that we should not be talking about this as a local election issue as somehow that diminishes it.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

It may have come across like that. The Leader of the Opposition repeatedly said that it was not party political, and I was drawing attention to what his colleague had repeatedly said on the “Today” programme this morning. That is all I said.

[Tim Farron]

I am grateful to the Father of the House for that clarification. My point absolutely stands: this is only a local election issue—and it is—because the Conservative party has not delivered the justice that it was in its hands to deliver.

My patch has an interesting history. It was Conservative for 100 years until we won it in 2005. We had some great wins and some narrow wins, and there is one ward that we have never won, even in my best years—although perhaps they are ahead of me, who knows? I was knocking on doors in that ward and met a couple who had sometimes voted Conservative, had normally voted UK Independence party and had voted Brexit party but had never voted for us. They told me that they were going to vote for us in the local elections because it was the only way they could think of to deliver justice. They felt weak and powerless because of a man with whom they agreed on many issues who they felt could no longer lead the country because of that lack of integrity.

We are two years on from when many of those things took place. Our memories can play tricks on us, we move on and we do not live in the moment of those times. They were not pleasant, and we choose to forget them to a degree, don’t we? However, it is important that we do not forget what that meant, not just for the elderly couple I spoke to on Sunday, but for many others—for hundreds of people that we know. For weeks on end, I wrote letters of commiseration to people who had lost loved ones. We all did that. There were people who could not be with a dying parent or a dying child. There were people who spent Christmas alone, and for many of them it was their last Christmas. It was so hard to explain to young children why their birthday parties could not take place. We went through all sorts of privations.

Gill Haigh, the chief exec of Cumbria Tourism, and I argued to stop people visiting the Lake district, even though we knew it was ruining our economy, because we believed in the health, safety and wellbeing of the people who would have come and of those who work in the community. Sacrifices were made and the Prime Minister made laws that we agreed with and that were important. Why? To save lives, to protect the NHS, to do the right British thing and look after one another, and to love our neighbour. Yet within hours, it appears, the ink drying on his edicts, he was habitually breaking them. There is no question but that this was and is a resignation matter.