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Mr. Alfred Morris (Manchester, Wythenshawe): I congratulate my hon. Friend on the quiet dignity with
which he is making his submission today. In doing so, as he knows, I speak as a member for quite some time of the Privileges Committee of the House. Will he accept, as I am sure he does, that if a buck has to stop, it may not necessarily stop with the particular hon. Member against whom allegations are made?
Junior Whips, Madam Speaker, as you know, are not soloists. Their work is very carefully choreographed.
Madam Speaker:
Order. If this is an intervention, it must be pertinent and to the point or a question. It must not be a speech. Will the right hon. Gentleman please come to the point?
Mr. Morris:
Their work is choreographed. I am saying that the Patronage Secretary may be involved. Others higher up may be involved. It may be that this has to be a very wide-ranging inquiry, not just about one hon. Member.
Mr. Miller:
I respect my right hon. Friend's contribution to the Privileges Committee and other aspects of the House, but I shall not be drawn on other issues of that nature. If the House approves the motion, it will be a matter for the Committee on Standards and Privileges.
I have related to the House the detailed allegations in the press. Hon. Members may well ask whether, if they are all true, it is a matter for the Whips. The point is very simple. There must be a clear distinction between the functions of the Whips in areas of legitimate party management and, separately, in their role when Parliament acts in a quasi-judicial capacity.
The investigation undertaken by the Committee on Members' Interests under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson Smith) was of a quasi-judicial nature. In Britain, it is accepted that when a body is considering matters in a judicial or quasi-judicial manner, it is fundamentally wrong to exert or seek to exert political or any other form of pressure on it. That would apply equally to a local authority planning committee or an Old Bailey jury.
The same principle applies in Parliament. Therefore, if the allegations are true, they are very serious. It seems to me that the Committee should demand to see all the papers referred to in the newspapers. I would also urge that the inquiry be totally open.
The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Tony Newton):
I rise simply--and briefly--to express the hope that the House will agree to the motion and remit the complaint to the Standards and Privileges Committee for its consideration and advice. The House will understand, however, that as Chairman of the Committee that would examine the matter if the House were to make that decision, it would not be appropriate for me to make further comment this afternoon.
Mrs. Ann Taylor (Dewsbury):
I also shall be brief, not least because I am also a member of the Standards and Privileges Committee and I would not want to prejudge any inquiry. I shall simply say a few words to welcome the opportunity for such a reference.
The Committee has already embarked on an inquiry into allegations that have been made relating to Members' interests. It has done so as a matter of urgency. However, there is still some misunderstanding of the dual role of the Committee. It exists to raise issues concerning Members' interests, but it also deals with any complaints about privilege. Therefore, without reference to a Committee that relates specifically to privilege, and not just to Members' interests, certain aspects of recent allegations would not be subject to investigation. That would be most unsatisfactory. I hope that the House will agree that it would be wrong for the Committee to be restricted in any of its investigations.
On Monday, you, Madam Speaker, said:
Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield):
The House wishes to reach a rapid conclusion on the matter and I am sure that that is right, but as we are considering the reputation of Parliament, I want to put two separate points to the House. First, was the reputation of Parliament damaged by what some of its Members did? I am not concerned with that. Secondly, has the reputation of the House been damaged by the way in which the House has handled the matter? In my view, that is the real problem that the House has absolutely failed to confront.
The matter arose more than two years ago. At the time, I was on the Privileges Committee--the Committee on which I was proudest to serve. As the House may recall, I was not prepared to sit on a secret Committee and I was duly removed on a motion of the Leader of the House. I am very glad that I was not on a Committee that was bound to secrecy because many of the problems have arisen because of that secrecy.
Why does the House not rapidly legislate to deal with the standards required of Members of Parliament? If I offered somebody £1,000 to vote for me in an election, I would be guilty of a corrupt practice. I would be taken before an election court. That court would report to the Speaker and the House would endorse the decision of the court because we have the final say. When we are elected
Members of Parliament, why are we not governed by legislation? If somebody offered me £1,000 to table a question--nobody ever has--should that not be subject to legislation on the representation of the people by an extension of the law?
We should be discussing the rights of the electors, not the reputation of Parliament as if somehow we were preserving an old monument. When people elect a Member of Parliament, they should know that Members of Parliament can be relied upon to defend their constituents and present their own opinions honestly to the House. If people think that, when an hon. Member is elected, he has a marketable product at his disposal--his influence--we will enter an area that has been dealt with in the past in respect of corrupt elections.
When elections were contested in the old days--I am talking about the 19th century--the House used to deal with the matter in Committees like the Privileges Committee. The result was that the Government majority on the Committee always upheld their own candidates, so the House decided to transfer the responsibility to an election court.
I had a funny experience when I was once taken to an election court and disqualified by it--not for a criminal offence, but for the fact that there had been a biological change in my blood supply, which two judges contended disqualified me from sitting in the House of Commons, where I had been a Member for 10 years. There was not a jury, just two judges. The election court heard the evidence for two weeks and reached the marvellous conclusion that removed me from this House. That is how the matters before us should be dealt with. Parliament has abandoned the responsibility to make clear in law which rules govern it.
A code of practice and so on in the House is perfectly proper, but gets us into another difficulty. Whatever hon. Members may or may not have done--I am not a muck-raker and never have been--it is not at all certain that it was illegal. Perhaps some of the practices, which we would all regard as very undesirable, are perfectly legal. Why are they legal? That is the problem that the House has dodged.
There should of course also be full disclosure. When people vote for a parliamentary candidate, the candidate's interests should be on the polling card issued by electoral registration officers so that people know exactly what they are. Disclosure is a safeguard.
My final point also arises from my own unhappy experiences. I do not believe that the House has the right to remove elected Members of Parliament because it does not like what they have done, even if it is not illegal. The House has no right to remove its own Members. They can be removed only by law. The law has to be clear. If a Government contractor is disqualified, which he can be under the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, why should other people who are engaged in the business of promoting some private interest for money not also be disqualified?
It is not in doubt that the matter will go before the Standards and Privileges Committee, but how long it will take to deal with it I do not know. It is always possible that the Government might not survive the Queen's Speech, in which case it is possible that the business of this Committee, like that of many other Committees, will drift into another Parliament when it is long forgotten.
I am not absolutely sure that the election will be after the Committee has reported. If the report is likely to be published before the election, I can imagine other Whips asking whether they really want it all to come out on the eve of polling day, and a similar type of influence may be brought to bear.
5.35 pm
"the reputation of the House as a whole has been called into question."--[Official Report, 14 October 1996; Vol. 282, c. 463.]
I agree, and I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House share your strong concern. It is essential, therefore, that all the matters should be investigated as quickly as possible. However, it is also vital that the investigations are thorough and complete. I know that my colleagues on the Committee are as keenly aware as I am of their responsibilities in the matter.
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