Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
PROFESSOR JUSTIN
FISHER, DR
MICHAEL PINTO-DUSCHINSKY
AND DR
MEG RUSSELL
25 OCTOBER 2007
Q380 Chairman: It is my job to say
that!
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: If I may
make one response, I do not think that I would want to get into
overall judgments on the Blair era or the Blair system of government
because that would go beyond my knowledge and capacity. I do feel
on the very specific issue of the loans that the situation having
been as it was, namely that the parties had taken legal advice
and that there had been a refusal by the Electoral Commission
to give other advice, that it was unfortunate that prominent members
of both parties and their offices were left during the police
investigations in a period of a lot of tension where the parties
could not go ahead with their fund-raising and other activities
because of the suspicions about the non-disclosure aspect. I think
that aspect should have been ruled out much earlier than it was
in the absence of a satisfactory definition of "commercial
loan", so to that extent I would have sympathy with both
of the political parties. If, however, there was a clandestine
trade in peerages, that is quite a different matter and I would
not like to comment on that because I do not know.
Q381 Kelvin Hopkins: Earlier, there
was talk about corruption in government. Although corruption may
be at a lower level than people suspect, could we not say that
some of the things that are done within the law by government,
by central government, are maybe not legally corrupt, but are
actually undesirable, that is if we want to have a pluralistic
system of government with a degree of push and pull between different
forces within the sphere of government, instead of having what
we now have, which is extreme power at the centre? Should we not
actually try to change the law and change our Constitution to
an extent to make it more plural in the way that it operates?
Professor Fisher: Well, it is
almost certainly the case that there are some undesirable results,
but the worst response to that would be to create more regulation
and legislation because you end up with the dilemma of trust versus
rules. If you create more and more rules, it creates incentives
for actors to seek loopholes. It is far better, and British politics
has been served far better, by relying principally on trust and
applying rules where appropriate, and that applies to all aspects
of public life. If we are saying, "Is the loans issue desirable?
Has it brought credit to the British political system?" Absolutely
not, it was against the spirit of the law. Was it nevertheless
legal? Absolutely, and I think it would be a very bad road to
go along to respond to this episode by a raft of unwise and ill-thought-out
legislation, as is currently being proposed by both political
parties.
Q382 Kelvin Hopkins: Well, one very
simple way forward might be to take away all the Prime Minister's
powers of nomination for honours, for example, and to have much
stricter rules about the links between business and government.
Professor Fisher: I think I would
defer to Dr Russell on this.
Dr Russell: Yes, and coming back
to the question about the Appointments Commission and whether
it did its job, I think all the indications are that it did, but
its job is rather narrow. What the Appointments Commission has
said is that being a major donor to a political party is not a
bar to getting a peerage, but neither is it a qualification for
getting a peerage. The qualifications are a separate matter; you
will be judged on your merits and then, if you have made a donation,
so long as it is a clean donation and above board, that is not
a problem. I do agree with the tone of what you are saying, that
one of the things which might improve the situation would be if
the Prime Minister's patronage powers were further reduced and
the Appointments Commission was actually given more power because
it does seem to have been fairly successful. It does have fairly
limited powers; it only selects the independent Members of the
House and it has no real discretion, beyond the vetting for propriety,
over the choice of party-political members. It is clear that the
Prime Minister, in creating the Appointments Commission, gave
up significant patronage power. He gave up patronage power largely
over the appointment of independent Members of the House of Lords,
but he retains three very important patronage powers. One is to
decide how many Members are put in the House and when; the second
is to decide what the balance between the parties of those Members
are; and the third is to decide, on the Labour side, who the nominees
for Labour should be. I think there is a case to look at greater
Appointments Commission involvement in all of those three things.
I do not see that it is defensible really for the Prime Minister
of the country to be deciding how many people are appointed to
the Legislature and when. I do not see that it is defensible for
the Prime Minister to be deciding what the balance between the
parties is and in fact I think you could quite easily devise a
formula for that, if not indeed for the first one as well, so
I would give both of those powers to the Appointments Commission,
as has been suggested by various groups over the years making
proposals on Lords' reform. I also think that we could look at
giving the Appointments Commission greater power in the third
area, which is greater discretion over who the party appointees
are. Indeed, this Committee in 2001, when it issued a report on
House of Lords' reform, suggested that the parties should put
up long lists of members from whom the Appointments Commission
should be able to choose who was appointed. That was not going
as far as the Royal Commission which had suggested that the Appointments
Commission should have complete control over who the party nominees
were, which I think is rather unrealistic. I think the parties
need to have some control over who their members are in Parliament,
but I certainly think that the Appointments Commission could be
given more discretion which would help to avoid some of these
difficulties and it would also help it to carry out the duty which
it has been given by the Prime Minister to ensure that there is
diversity in the House: diversity of expertise, diversity in terms
of gender and so on. It is very hamstrung at the moment when all
it can do is control who the independent members are and it has
to take the names of the party members from the parties.
Q383 Jenny Willott: On that particular
point, in the session with the police and the CPS earlier this
week, John Yates suggested that something that would help was
that there should be more transparency in the way that the political
parties choose who their nominees are. He did not make any suggestions
about how that could be, but actually that there would be a transparent
process so that the Appointments Commission could identify better
what the criteria were for nominating that individual. Do you
think that would be enough?
Dr Russell: It is interesting
to hear a member of the police making that recommendation.
Q384 Jenny Willott: I thought so.
Dr Russell: I think most political
scientists and politicians might not dare to make that recommendation
themselves because the way the parties go about their business
is generally seen as an internal matter and they are largely seen
as voluntary organisations. But it is interesting that two of
the political parties do already have a pretty transparent process.
The Green Party had a ballot of all its members to select who
its nominee for the House of Lords should be, although that person
has not yet been appointed, but it was rumoured that they would
be, that they were due a seat and they went to the trouble of
having an internal election. The Liberal Democrats have certainly
an element of democracy, although their process is a bit more
complex. Ultimately, though, this is a matter for the parties
and the parties must defend the way that they choose their members.
I am not sure it is a matter for regulation.
Q385 Jenny Willott: No, but we are
looking at recommendations in general. It does not quite come
to, I understand, the HoLAC's recommendation that nominations
by political parties should be put forward almost with a CV of
why they are a credible nominee, obviously it does not go as far
as that, but if there was an element of transparency, would it—
Dr Russell: The Wakeham Commission
effectively recommended, if I remember correctly, that the only
route into the House of Lords should be via an application to
the Appointments Commission, so, if you are a member of a political
party and you want to sit in the House of Lords, you send your
CV to the Appointments Commission and they will choose between
you and the other members of your party, so the party bureaucracy
is cut out of it altogether and I think that is rather unrealistic.
I think we could move to a situation between that and what we
have now where the parties put up lists of names from which the
Appointments Commission can choose so that there are two levels
of vetting, if you like, where the party vets the people and then
the Appointments Commission vets the people put forward by the
parties. I think there is room for more transparency in the parties,
but a lot of this is focused on the Labour Party and, for example,
the names which are put up by the Leader of the Labour Party are
not approved by the National Executive Committee of the Party.
That would be a small element of democracy introduced which might
make it appear a little more transparent, but, as I say, I think
that is a matter for the parties themselves.
Q386 Mr Prentice: Are you surprised
that Commons' Members who retire in the immediate run-up to a
general election very often find themselves in the House of Lords?
Dr Russell: No.
Q387 Mr Prentice: You are not? They
are selling the seat, that is what I am saying. They are selling
the Commons' seat because the constituency party does not have
time to look for a successor candidate, but a candidate is imposed
by the centre.
Dr Russell: Well, I think there
are all sorts of different cases of former MPs getting into the
House of Lords. There are a lot of extremely distinguished former
Members of this House who find themselves in the other House,
not least people who have been in the Cabinet, but also chairs
of select committees from the past, for example. There is nothing
per se wrong with Members of this House finding themselves in
that House after they retire.
Q388 Mr Prentice: That is not the
point I am making. The point is that people tell their constituency
parties that they are going to stand for election and serve in
the successor Parliament and then decide in the immediate run-up
to a general election that they are not going to do that. They
invent an illness or something like that and a few months later
they find themselves in the House of Lords. Now, I am not going
to name names, but there are lots of examples where this has happened
and I am inviting you to say that this is a corrupt practice with
a small "c".
Dr Russell: I am not going to
say that this is a corrupt practice. I will not be caught in that
trap, but I would say that the kind of system which I am recommending
would avoid any such corruption, should it exist, because it would
no longer be in the gift of the party leaders to promise people
a seat in the House of Lords. If they met the criteria, the party
leaders could put Joe Bloggs MP forward to the Appointments Commission
and say, "I would like this person to have a seat",
the Appointments Commission would look at their qualifications,
look at the other names in front of them and choose whether they
were the best person for the seat, so I think that problem, if
it exists, would be dealt with.
Q389 Julie Morgan: You have more
or less answered my main question which was whether you think
there is any scope for political patronage and I think you are
saying that there is a bit of scope for political patronage. Would
that be true?
Dr Russell: Well, I think there
are bigger questions about whether you want an elected House or
an appointed House and so on, but, if you have an appointed House
or if you have an appointed element in the House which includes
Members who represent political parties, then I do not think it
is realistic to shut political parties out of choosing who those
people are completely.
Q390 Julie Morgan: I was interested
in your very commonsense comments, I thought, at the beginning,
saying that it is not surprising that there are major donors in
the House of Lords and that it is not surprising that there are
probably major donors in the Commons. I wondered if you could
tell us a bit about the survey you have done of peers and what
were the sorts of questions? Were you asking them about these
sorts of issues and what was their response?
Dr Russell: We did not ask them
a great deal about these sorts of issues, they were not the main
focus of our survey, but when I looked back through the survey,
I realised that there are a few questions which would probably
interest you. We asked a small number of questions about future
reform and what kinds of future reform they would support, for
example. We know from the way they vote what their views are on
election and our results obviously reflect that, but, for example,
we asked them whether the Appointments Commission should be made
statutory and 91% of peers believe that the Appointments Commission
should be made statutory, so there is overwhelming support for
that. We asked whether they thought it was doing a good job at
picking independent Members and they were a bit more ambivalent
about that: 44% felt it was doing a good job, but 68% amongst
the cross-benchers, who were the ones that they are actually picking.
There is a degree of ambivalence about the cross-benchers which
I think is reflected in the responses coming from across the House.
We asked whether, if any appointments continue, should party peers
be chosen by the Commission rather than party leaders, and there
was also ambivalence about that. It received majority support
from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but not from the Conservatives.
We also asked whether the peerage link should be broken, and I
think that could be part of the solution here because, if what
people want is an honour, if there is a trade in honours, and
I am not commenting on whether there is, to me that is a great
deal less problematic if that honour does not win you a seat in
the Legislature, and it has consistently been suggested by reform
groups that the peerage link should be broken. There is ambivalence
again about that, 44% across the House, but with a majority amongst
Labour and Liberal Democrat Members, believing that the peerage
link should be broken. Another question which we asked, and I
regret that I have not brought the actual figures, but we asked
Members of the House of Lords what they thought was important
to the legitimacy of the House and we offered them a range of
options which they could rank as important, very important, et
cetera, things like there being a fair party balance in the
Chamber, we included whether there were elected Members, the quality
of the scrutiny process in there, and we also asked about trust
in the appointments process as one of those options. Trust in
the appointments process was the thing that they thought was most
important for the legitimacy of the House of Lords, and I can
send you those figures if you want. This comes back to the perception
point. I think Members in the other House are very aware that
there is a problem for them, there is a problem for their ability
to do their job if there is mistrust in the way that people are
getting into the Chamber, so I think they would very much want
to see that changed.
Q391 Julie Morgan: One of the good things
that has happened in the House of Lords is that there are more
women there and more people from minority ethnic groups. Has that
played any role in thinking how the Lords should be in the future?
Dr Russell: I think this is one
of the things that people have not noticed very much. It is interesting
that, amongst life peers, there is actually a higher proportion
of women than there is amongst MPs, but the image of the House
of Lords remains very much stuck in the past and this is something
the Lord Speaker is trying to do something about. But I suspect
this is taking us out of the scope of your inquiry.
Q392 Paul Flynn: Could I declare
a lack of personal interest in a place in the Lords. Some people
were unkind enough to think I was nominating myself, but such
an impure thought never entered my head. We are in the Lloyd George
Room today and a statue to Lloyd George is being unveiled at this
moment. One of the things he said was, "It is foolish to
try to cross a chasm with two leaps". In the reform of the
House of Lords, we appear to be trying to cross a chasm with two
or three leaps. Do you think it would have been better if we had
gone for reform in one go?
Dr Russell: No, actually. I have
changed my views on this rather. I think that the history of Lords'
reform shows us that attempts at major reform throughout the last
100 years have consistently failed, whereas the reforms which
have managed to succeed are the small, incremental steps which
are relatively uncontroversial.
Q393 Paul Flynn: On the question
of the MPs entering the Lords, a neighbour of mine, now deceased,
wrote about the whole process of how "they came at me like
elephants", when he suggested that he might retire, and they
offered him a place in the Lords in exchange for virtually selling
his seat to a former Conservative MP. Now, that has happened,
it is there, he has given the record of it. We know of other undistinguished
former trade union leaders and others who have found places in
the Lords who will openly confess that they have been given their
places because of favours they have done for party leaders in
the past. On the Commission, it is suggested that HoLAC should
have some kind of discretion on this. When they get a group of
distinguished ex-parliamentarians, ex-Members of the Commons,
fine, but when there is a group of party hacks who have been rewarded
for favours they have done, should HoLAC have the discretion to
eliminate them from the list—
Dr Russell: I am saying yes to
that.
Q394 Paul Flynn:— and to add
on to the list possibly, and we think it is unlikely we are going
to see a Lord Skinner, for instance, but people who are distinguished
back-benchers who have not always toed the party line?
Dr Russell: I think that last
point is a tricky one. I think it is easy to say that the parties
should put up more names than they are going to get seats and
that the Commission should have discretion on choosing between
those names. Whether the Commission can add additional names is
more tricky because ultimately a political party can choose whom
it gives the whip to. But I think a case could be made, particularly
in the case of former parliamentarians who have surely in some
sense proved their worth, that, if the Commission feels that there
is a name of a former parliamentarian missing from a list, maybe
it should be able to put that person in even if they have not
been put up by their party. You would have to draft that very
carefully, I think, because I think the parties would resist it
if the Commission could potentially bring in anybody.
Q395 Paul Flynn: On the roles of
legislators and peers, if peers have a role, there are a number
in the Lords who are extinct volcanoes and, if you look up the
splendid website "theyworkforyou.com", and there should
be a number on a website "theydontworkforyou.com"; one
of them has not taken part in a division, he has not voted, he
has not asked any questions or made any speeches since the year
2000, yet he is still a lord. Is it reasonable for these people
to continue, and he is splendid in other ways, a remarkable man,
but to continue as a lord when he clearly has no interest in the
House itself or in taking part or doing the job for which he was
appointed as a legislator?
Dr Russell: I think that touches
on two reform issues. One is how people get in, and the Appointments
Commission has become much keener on questioning the independent
members going in as to whether they are going to play an active
part, but of course they are not able to ask any such questions
of party members going in. The other one is about whether Members
can depart the House when they no longer feel able to play an
active part and I think that would be a very sensible measure
to, at the very least, allow people to retire if they want to,
and that is part of, for example, the Bill being moved in the
House of Lords by David Steel. I think that would be a perfectly
sensible, again, minimalist move to move us a little further on
from where we are now as perhaps an interim solution.
Q396 Paul Flynn: Do you think that
there should be a divorce between the job as a member of a second
chamber, that we stop calling it "the Lords", and the
whole pantomime of going around, prancing around dressed in ermine
and all the rest of it?
Dr Russell: I think the big constitutional
issue is the peerage and I would say yes, break the link between
membership of the Legislature and the peerage.
Q397 Paul Flynn: Professor Fisher,
you talked about the corrosive role of the press in the recent
inquiry and now we are coming to the end of that inquiry. We have
seen the coverage over the last few days and I think many of us
might have the view that that was a justified political stand
by a Scottish Nationalist who took it up and reported it to the
police, but it never really had any practical chance of going
through to a prosecution, but it was handled by an ambitious policeman
who took the view, as he told us the other day, that, "You
never know what's going to turn up", and he mentioned that
twice. He was going on a fishing expedition, elongated it to 16
months and before it all came apart and came to nothing, it damaged
the reputation of people who were probably entirely blameless
in that period. A parallel investigation was started on July 30
this year and finished on October 10 and that investigation involved
Conservative donors which had no attention, no dawn raids, no
excitement whatsoever. Do you think there is a lesson to be drawn
in this, in the attention given to the Labour donors in this and
the Conservative donors, the partiality and the malign interest
of the press?
Professor Fisher: That is a big
question. I cannot comment on the career aspirations of John Yates,
but it does strike me that the case was taken up by the police
remarkably quickly. I would like to think that, if I made a complaint,
there would be a 16-month investigation into something that did
not produce any evidence, I agree with that. I do not agree that
there was a party-political aspect to it. The focus was on the
Labour donors or Labour loaners simply because Labour was in government
and it is fair to say that when the Conservative Party has been
in government, its contributors have been subject to the same
intrusive form of investigation, so I think it was unfortunate
for the Labour loaners simply because Labour was in government.
My comments about the media: in some ways of course it is an exciting
story and of course we would expect the media to cover it, but
the assumption of guilt and the implication of guilt throughout
the coverage, I think, was quite scandalous. Looking at the reports
of Mr Yates' appearance on Tuesday, again I was struck by the
same thing—that the headline, for example, in The Guardian
was that Number Ten obstructed the inquiry. Well, to the best
of my knowledge, that was not precisely what Mr Yates was saying.
I do think that, if the Committee takes something away from this
inquiry, it is that, whilst one would not want to regulate the
media on this, they share a considerable part of the blame if
there is any diminution in trust amongst the British people of
the political system. I have brought one or two quotations and
Simon Jenkins writing in The Guardian says, "Don't
give them an inch. Not one inch. They are a bunch of knaves."
Now, that, as a former editor of The Times, strikes me
to be a quite disgraceful way of writing about party finance,
and it goes on to accuse parties of having their hands in your
pockets and so on. I do think that there is an issue and, if you
were to call further witnesses, I would recommend you call the
editors of The Guardian and The Times.
Q398 Paul Flynn: I think many of us were
baffled by the press coverage of what happened, which was witnessed
by millions of people because it was broadcast widely. I was puzzled
by the stories that there had been conditions laid down by Tony
Blair on his interview and I specifically asked Yates, "Were
there any conditions that Tony Blair had laid down for you?"
to which he said, "Only his diary." He made a comment
later on which was entirely vague which did not refer to Blair,
as I understood it, it referred to his staff, but the denial that
there were any conditions laid down by Blair was not reported
even at all, so I think we have seen their partiality in there.
If we come back to the points being made, there have been analyses
done, and they are weak, as we know, of which are the corrupt
countries in the world and there are scales of corruption which
have been published by the World Trade Organisation who have one
for advising people, and certainly we are second only to the Scandinavians.
The Scandinavians are at the top, we are second, the rest of Europe
are next and then the rest of the world on that basis. I can see
that Dr Pinto-Duschinsky is shaking his head. If that is truly
the reality and that is about the position we are in, we are,
in world terms, a clean democracy with little murky corners.
Professor Fisher: Of course I
would agree absolutely with Michael's previous points, that there
have been episodes of corruption in the past, and we have mentioned
the local government scandal, and in any large organisation or
large democracy, there will be episodes when that occurs. If you
look back at British politics and at party funding, in particular,
which is my particular area of expertise, the actual episodes,
the ones supported by empirical evidence, are surprisingly few
when you compare them with other countries, so I would agree with
Michael, that creating a perfect scale, a rank order of corruption
is very, very difficult. I do not agree that perceptions are unimportant
because I think that, whenever one regulates on these things,
you have to bear in mind what the impact on public perception
is going to be and of course public perception has been at the
heart of not only the Hayden Phillips review, but also of the
CSPL review of party funding in the late 1990s. I do think you
are absolutely right, that actually one might go back further
and congratulate Michael Portillo when he made a much-derided
speech at the Conservative Party Conference which said that Britain
was actually really rather clean, and he was derided for that,
but, I have to say, he was right.
Q399 Paul Flynn: It was not a bunch
of knaves which introduced the 2000 Act. The 2000 Act was well-intentioned
and it was a major reform, but with a loophole in it about loans,
but, all being said, no attention was given to the 2000 Act. It
was not intending to do what it has done in order to make the
system more transparent, but a wholly biased picture is given
of a system which is certainly not corrupt.
Professor Fisher: Equally, I would
respond to that, that it happened to be passed under a Labour
Government, but it was not something that was subject to division
in the House and it reflected the all-party fifth report of the
Committee on Standards in Public Life, so yes, a Labour Government
brought it in, but the credit for its introduction should not
be Labour's alone.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I would actually
not wholly agree with all of that. When one says, "The fact
is we are rather clean", there are no facts. The investigation
of corruption in this country has been held back by the assumption
that we are all clean and there is nothing to investigate. It
is rather a comfortable, self-perpetuating image. If you do not
investigate because there is no need to investigate, then you
will not find out. I think that consistently over time, when there
have been some major press allegations, they have turned out to
be correct. If one looks at the late 1960s with reports of lobbying
by a Member of Parliament on behalf of the Greek colonels, well,
that was not false, and it showed something about the parliamentary
system that led to important reforms, so I am hesitant to attack
the press to quite that degree, maybe because I sometimes write
for the press, so do we all, but I do not think that they should
be condemned for bringing up this issue.
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