Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400-419)
PROFESSOR JUSTIN
FISHER, DR
MICHAEL PINTO-DUSCHINSKY
AND DR
MEG RUSSELL
25 OCTOBER 2007
Q400 Mr Prentice: On this point,
we do not know how many complaints have been made to the Metropolitan
Police, and Mr Yates could not tell me 16 months ago or two days
ago, but have there been instances in the recent past, and I am
talking about the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, when you and your seasoned
observers of these matters thought, "Goodness me, that looks
a bit fishy. That warrants an investigation"? Have either
of you ever lodged a complaint yourself with the Metropolitan
Police?
Professor Fisher: No, I have not.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I am in touch
with a police force at the moment about a complaint which has
been made by others and the question that is being debated is:
what should trigger a police investigation? I felt that Assistant
Commissioner Yates gave a very balanced and useful statement on
this, that you do not start an investigation because there is
any old rumour, but the barrier to starting an investigation must
be lower than the barrier of prior proof because, if you only
started an investigation if you already had proof, you would never
start any investigations, so it is somewhere between. I think
that too often actually the police, with allegations of, say,
fraud to do with voting, for example, have been too reluctant
in many cases to start an investigation.
Q401 Mr Prentice: But my question
was quite specific. Have there been instances of appointments
made where you thought to yourself, "Hang on a minute, this
doesn't look right and perhaps the police ought to investigate
it"? I ask you that question because you spend your whole
lives looking at this sort of thing.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I have not
previously gone to the police on any matter because I have regarded
the press and my writings as what I do, but I think that there
has been an underlying change in situation that brings us closer
to the 1920s, namely that in the 1920s and just after the First
World War, the Liberal Party, and especially the Lloyd George
wing, found that they did not have any more constituency support
and they needed money, so they went to large donors. In recent
years, the Conservatives who were suffering from the decline of
corporate donations and Labour, for other reasons, have tended
to go more to large, individual donors than was the case until,
say, the 1987 election when it first became noticeable that large
individual donors were playing a part. I think that the point
that Assistant Commissioner Yates was making was that, if you
have a high correlation between large donations and the award
of peerages to the donors, although that is no proof of anything,
and if you also have parties relying on a smaller number of large
donors, that creates a situation which maybe is more worthy of
investigation, and that was all that he was saying. I think there
is a point in that and I think the point of public policy is:
is it desirable that we have British party politics so reliant
on relatively few donations which, by international standards,
are extremely large, and what are the implications of that? That,
I think, is a policy point which, I think Justin would agree with
me, does merit looking at.
Q402 Mr Prentice: A Conservative
Party donor, Lord Laidlaw, was ennobled in 2004, he was a tax
exile then and he is a tax exile now. He promised the House of
Lords Appointments Commission that he would become a UK resident
for tax purposes in 2004 and he broke that promise. He is still
a Member of the House of Lords, but he slithered out of this by
going on a leave of absence. My question is this: should we allow
peers a leave of absence who are not prepared to pay taxes, but
want to make our laws, or should we change the rules to exclude
people who do not participate or are not prepared to pay UK taxes,
although they serve in the UK Legislature?
Dr Russell: I think this comes
back to some points which have already been made. The Appointments
Commission has closed that loophole, so that situation will not
arise again.
Q403 Mr Prentice: He is still on
leave of absence though.
Dr Russell: He is still on leave
of absence which brings us back to the point that there is no
route out of the House of Lords, except in a wooden box unfortunately
and maybe something should be done about that.
Q404 Mr Prentice: He can still come
into the House of Lords, he can still sit on the steps of the
Throne, he can still use the dining facilities.
Dr Russell: And he can come back
from leave of absence, should he so wish. It is purely down to
his decision to comply with that recommendation. It has been a
factor in pretty much all of the reform proposals in the past,
that there should be circumstances in which somebody should be
able to lose their seat in the House of Lords, and that is another
thing on the reform agenda, so I think there are two questions
about people's ability to depart the Chamber, one being whether
they should be able to do so voluntarily and another one is whether
under certain circumstances they should be able to be forced to
do so. With respect to this issue of where people are registered
for tax, the Appointments Commission has closed that loophole
and I am not sure whether that applies to party peers as well,
but I imagine it does.
Q405 Mr Prentice: I do not know how
many current Members of the House of Lords, apart from Lord Laidlaw,
are not UK residents for tax purposes. It rather sticks in my
craw that people should be members of the UK Parliament that do
not pay UK taxes. Perhaps I can move on slightly to the House
of Lords Appointments Commission which, Dr Pinto-Duschinsky, you
said worked broadly as intended. Well, tell Dr Chai Patel that
and he would laugh. The fact is that the people who were blocked
by the House of Lords Appointments Commission do not know why
they were blocked, they do not know why they were turned down.
Do you think it would improve the system if people who were putative
Members of the Lords and were rejected could approach the House
of Lords Appointments Commission and ask for the reasons?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I think what
was unfortunate and unfair in that case was that names leaked
out while they were being considered, and that casts a cloud on
persons being considered that is unjust. My understanding of the
matter, and I read the evidence of Lord Hurd and Lord Stevenson
two weeks ago—it was very interesting—is that quite
unlike the Lloyd George cases (saying they could not become a
member of the House of Lords because they had traded with the
enemy or had been convicted of stealing, and various things that
had happened in the Lloyd George period) there was nothing positively
wrong about them (is my understanding); the implication is that
the House of Lords Appointment Committee did not feel that, at
the moment, they had a sufficient record of public service and
other things to make it—
Q406 Mr Prentice: If it is public
service—
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: That was
my impression, but I think all of those people whose names were
disapproved do so without a stain on their character, and it is
very important to mention that.
Q407 Mr Prentice: If it is public
service, why can the nominations not go via the other route rather
than the party political route? Were the nominees all members
of the Labour Party? How long had they been members of the Labour
Party? Two of the individuals who were blocked gave money to establish
city academies. If that was a public good and a policy objective
of the government to establish city academies, why were those
individuals not nominated through the other route, rather than
as a party political nominee?
Dr Russell: I think this is a
difficulty which—I am sorry to keep coming back to some
of the same points—is a product of the narrow remit which
the House of Lords Appointments Commission currently has; it has
the ability to select and put into the House people who will sit
as independent, cross-bench peers; it does not have the capacity
to pick people who may be upstanding members of the community,
who may have done all kinds of public service but who are members
of one of the political parties—any of the political parties.
It is explicitly there to choose independent members only, and
I think this is a bit of a problem. In a sense, it feeds this
distrust in the process that somehow there is a difference between
people who are members of parties and people who have outstanding
records in the community through voluntary sector organisations,
and so on, who are the sort of people who go in as independent
peers. That kind of firm dividing line does not exist. I think
we all know that, but it is sort of institutionalised in the arrangement.
So, I would say, broaden the Appointments Commission remit to
allow it to put people in, to choose people from parties as well
as independent members.
Q408 Mr Prentice: We are putting
a lot of faith in the Appointments Commission. How many people
are on the Appointments Commission? Five, six—something
like that? They are going to exercise judgment, and it must be
subjective—it must be—and who I think would be a proper
member of the public to put in the House of Lords could be very
different from someone else's assessment. My question is: can
an appointments system which must, inevitably, be subjective,
really deliver just outcomes?
Dr Russell: That is a big question
and takes us to the question of election versus appointment, which
has been long debated. I think, probably, the job here in this
inquiry is to look at the appointments process and whether the
appointments process, for so long as it exists, can be improved.
I would suggest that it can be. Furthermore, if I could make this
point, in case I do not get the opportunity to do so later, because
I think it is an important one: I imagine that your inquiry will
recommend that the Appointments Commission is put on a statutory
basis, but I would simply make the point that you can achieve
things without that statutory change. I would support the Appointments
Commission being put on a statutory basis but legislation in this
area is difficult; it is difficult to get legislative time, and
something about the Appointments Commission would be liable to
be amended to try and turn it into some bigger, kind of Lords
reform package, and so on. However, the Appointments Commission
that was created in 2000 was created by a Downing Street press
release. The Prime Minister can, tomorrow, should he wish, say
that he is no longer going to decide how many people are put in
the House and give that power to the existing Appointments Commission;
he can, tomorrow, should he wish, say that the Appointments Commission
should decide the balance between the parties, that it should
have greater power over selecting who the party members are. I
do not see why he does not, frankly. I think you should invite
him to do so.
Q409 Mr Prentice: We have got a big
Constitutional Reform Bill coming up in January, and it could
be in there, could it not?
Dr Russell: It could be in there,
but until then (that Bill will not happen until, maybe, next year)
we could do this tomorrow, by Downing Street press release.
Q410 Chairman: These are interesting,
helpful and fascinating suggestions, but we had an exchange with
Lord Stevenson about some of this a week or two ago, when he gave
us the line about: "Oh, we're just humble people doing this
narrow task". In fact, they are not, are they? They make
up the rules as they go along. They just made up the rules about
the nature of the financial declarations that they are going to
ask of people—that is pretty straightforward; that comes
out of what has been happening. They made up the rules about residency
and residency for tax purposes—they just decided that is
what they would do. They have these requirements about credibility.
What is credibility? We know that the CPS and HoLAC have taken
different views on credibility; they talk about adding "lustre"
to the House. This is huge, subjective territory. All this is
being done, as you say, on the back of a Number Ten press release.
There is something intrinsically unsatisfactory about this, is
there not?
Dr Russell: Things such you have
mentioned are very difficult to legislate for, and we have had
a conversation about, perhaps, some of the weaknesses of the legislation
on loans—you have to pick your words extremely carefully
and then they become rigid and they become contestable in courts
of law. One positive way of looking at this is that this is in
the best traditions of our flexible constitution, which relies
on conventions and allows things to develop over time. However,
I am not saying we should not have a statutory Appointments Commission;
I am just saying we could have a better Appointments Commission
immediately if the Prime Minister would decide to give up some
of his patronage powers, and that could be underpinned by statute
at a later date.
Q411 Mr Walker: I think democracy
is a pretty good thing (I hope we all do), and I think that it
is a good thing that people can support democracy by making financial
donations. I was watching a programme on Newsnight last
night; all these Americans queue up to throw vast sums of money
at the candidates for the nomination to run for President for
their particular parties. This whole thing has done a huge amount
of damage, I think, to party funding. I would hate to see party
funding thrown on to the State because I think people should have
an option as to which party they support, but I would be interested
to know from you three distinguished doctors and professors where
you see party funding going over the short to medium term.
Professor Fisher: I actually think
that you will be disappointed in the way that party funding will
go. What we have seen in this country is a decline of grass roots
members. They were never a huge source of income, it has to be
said, but there has been a decline of those. As Michael rightly
pointed out, there was a growth of large contributors; that has
diminished somewhat because of the current episode. The reality
is that political life is becoming ever more expensive, with more
and more elections, and therefore, in the interests of providing
the public with a choice of well-funded parties, and trying to
ensure as far as possible (and it is not a panacea) that difficulties
such as the one we are examining today do not occur, I think it
is probably inevitable that the State will play some role. It
would be wrong for the State to fund parties entirely, but I do
think the broad proposals made by Sir Hadyen Phillips' review
are defensible. In a sense, I would say that; I was the principal
adviser on the review, although I do not agree with all of the
conclusions that were drawn. So I do think there is a strong role
for individuals' continual involvement, but I do agree with Michael
here that there is a case, to help avoid public concern, that
there should be some sort of cap on very, very large donations.
Where that cap is set is a matter for discussion; it could be
£50,000, which is the figure that is currently being thrown
around; it could be £100,000—it could be whatever.
That is how I see it going. This is partly through realism (I
think this is the only way in which parties will be able to function
properly in the next 20 years) but it is also partly through preference
because, rightly or wrongly, the public tends to perceive that
where there are large donations from business, trade unions or
individuals, that relationship is somehow unsavoury. In answer
to your question, that is where I think things will go.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: Can I make
one or two comments? I am slightly reluctant since Justin has
said he was the principal adviser, but I do not think that he
is responsible for all that was in Hayden Phillips' report—
Professor Fisher: Not at all,
no.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: If he had
been I am sure that some of the defects of the report would not
be there. The fact is that the report is woefully inaccurate on
some of its basic facts and has not done its basic homework before
coming to conclusions, because it was based on an assumption that
it was trying to have a deal on public funding and, therefore,
had very little interest in analysing the empirical situation.
There is one assumption that the costs of politics have been going
up. Curiously enough, there has not any comprehensive research
to tell us whether they have been going up or not. There have
been some odd quotations about the costs of General Elections
at the centre, but that is not the same as all politics. There
may well have been a decline in constituency funding, an increase
in central funding—unless you look at it all you cannot
tell what the trends are, and the evidence just is not there.
The Phillips Committee muddled up central funding and overall
funding, and did not know the difference between them, which I
felt very surprising, in its main report. So we do not know about
trends yet; although the costs may be going up, they may not be,
but it is an unknown area until the research is done. We also
do not know roughly how much State funding there is. To know what
the Short Money is is just one tiny bit of the State funding that
exits; we would need to know what proportion of money that goes
to Members of Parliament is used for party political purposes;
we would need to know how much MEPs' money is used for party political
purposes; we need to know about the "Widdecombe" money
that goes to party groups on local councils. There are all sorts
of aspects of State funding that we do not know about, and Hayden
Phillips refused to go into that aspect. It was brought to his
attention but they chose not to do it, and the effect of not doing
it is to understate the dimension of public funding that already
exists. So I feel that before recommending, look at the facts
first. That has been the problem with most of the recent inquiries,
including that of the Electoral Commission in 2004, and certainly
including the Phillips inquiry.
Q412 Mr Walker: One last question:
in your considered view, why is it that you feel politicians now
are so despised? I have been here for two and a half years (I
am a very new MP) and I am actually quite amazed at the amount
of work my colleagues get through—the thousands of letters
every year they answer, the vast number of constituency appointments
they go to. My stepfather was an MP in the sixties and seventies
and he said they simply did not get through the work we get through.
Yet now, at this time, you have got MPs who spend Friday to Sunday,
most of them, rushing around their constituencies, for actually
very little political gain but out of a pure sense of duty and
obligation to their constituents. Why is it that we are held in
such low esteem?
Professor Fisher: I would agree.
I think the portrayal of MPs is a very bad one and I would wholeheartedly
agree with the picture of the overwork of MPs. I think it is partly
because there is an unfortunate tendency to target those in positions
of power and paint a very bad picture of them. I also think that
the measurements of dislike are actually not awfully accurate;
saying: "Do you trust X or do you trust Y?" does not
actually tell you a great deal and does not get under the real
meaning of "trust". Unfortunate as it is, I think it
is simply something that you have to deal with, and I do return
very much to this idea of how politics is portrayed to the wider
public. I go back to the quotation that says: "You are simply
a bunch of knaves." That sort of ill-informed and, frankly,
irresponsible approach to reporting politics, unfortunately, gives
you all a bad name. I wholly regret that and I fully support your
views that MPs across all parties, 99.9% of the time, do an exceptionally
good job.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: The trouble
is that, even though you might not like what Simon Jenkins says,
if there was not a tendency to believe that anyway then nobody
would take any notice. There is a real problem of disengagement
and lack of trust, and it is important that the cracks in trust
are not papered over by just giving more and more money for central
political education and propaganda that says: "You must vote;
we will make it easy for you to vote" without tackling that
base issue. In a way, a Member of Parliament is in an excellent
position because he or she does have contact with real, live constituents.
So, in a sense, you are in the best position to deal with that
and answer that yourself, because that is one of your core roles
in the political system. It is a very important question that
should not be brushed aside by artificial boosts to political
education and funding without looking at the core problem.
Professor Fisher: Could I come
back on this? I do not think this is a problem that is unique
to Members of Parliament. In what Michael describes you could
simply change the word "MP" for "NHS"; people
are awfully critical of the National Health Service until they
have some experience of it, and then they think the National Health
Service is wonderful. Equally, when people encounter their MPs,
working on a Friday and Saturday, turning up at school fetes,
and so on and so forth, their vision of MPs changes. I have to
say I think MPs face great difficulty because unless you work
36 hours in a 24-hour day you will not make much more progress.
I think that is to be regretted.
Q413 Chairman: You talk about the
lack of attention to these issues. The fact is, for the last 15
years in this country we have talked about nothing else but sleaze
and distrust; we have been obsessed by it, which is why we have
had endless new bits of legislation, we have had vast new regulatory
bodies. The idea that we have not been attending to this—it
is the leitmotif of this modern period! Has the effect been to
increase trust because we have attended to it in this elaborate
way? No, entirely the reverse, because, as we have been hearing,
it is just too easy to keep pumping out stuff about everybody
in public life, and knaves and fools.
Dr Russell: Can I make a point
on this? I agree with all of what all of you have said on this,
but I think it is worth pointing out that there is a danger of
over-romanticising the past here. I think Justin would agree with
me. There is constant talk about a lack of trust in politicians
but it is not clear quite when the golden age of high levels of
trust was, and it is a disputed matter in political science as
to whether trust really has declined. Furthermore, I agree with
Justin that it is not unique to politics, it applies to the NHS,
etc; it is also not unique to Britain; it is going on all over
the developed world. The greater aggressiveness of the media is
one of the reasons for it. If you want to know my detailed analysis,
I have written a pamphlet for the Fabian Society on this a couple
of years ago, and I said one of the factors is our adversarial
political system as well. As the Chairman said, the Labour Party
spent the 1990s complaining about Tory sleaze and the Conservatives
have rather picked that up and run with it once Labour got into
Government, and there are some pretty terrifying quotes in my
pamphlet, coming from people on both sides of the divide, about
how fundamentally corrupt people on the other side are. I think
you know that is not true, and I am afraid I had to say: "I
think you should stop saying it to each other".
Mr Walker: I will bring this to an end
but this is obviously a great day for Members of Parliament; this
is our favourite day of the year because it is allowances day,
when our allowances are published. So tomorrow the world will
be told that all of us—I, Paul, Gordon—have been pocketing—pocketing—(pejorative
word) £135,000. So all the money I pay to my staff I have
been "pocketing" right here!
Chairman: There we are. We feel better
now!
Q414 David Heyes: I want to go back
to a point that Gordon tentatively touched on earlier, which is
about objectivity. I wonder whether a lot of the difficulties
that we have talked about today are down to an attempt to de-politicise
and objectivise what really ought to be decisions that should
be in the political arena. So we have given Hayden Phillips the
difficult task of sorting out party funding, looking to the House
of Lords Appointments Commission, and the difficulties that we
have heard described with the timidity (to be polite about it)
of the Electoral Commission. Just a few weeks ago we had the Charity
Commission in here and they have been given some difficult political
decisions to make around the charitable status of public schools.
It is ironic because a significant proportion of the membership
of the Charity Commission are themselves the product of public
schools or send their children to public schools. I wonder whether
what we are doing here, because of this lack of trust in politics,
is attempting to de-politicise decision-making that ought to be
in the political arena.
Professor Fisher: I would disagree
with that entirely. I would be loath to move towards a more legalised
state where you did de-politicise a lot of issues, but the experiences
of the last week demonstrate very clearly to me why independent
reviews of party funding are necessary because of the antics of
both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party over the two
aspects of the Hayden Phillips review on which they disagree;
in the case of the Conservative Party on applying caps to trade
union contributions and Labour's attempt to over-regulate constituency
spending for elections. In an area like party funding, I am afraid
that if it is left to parties to legislate upon you will simply
have a game of ping-pong. That is precisely what happened when
the Conservatives drafted legislation in the 1980s which forced
trade unions to ballot on an area that was up to the trade unions
to ballot on, and that is the continuation of the political fund.
As a result of that, Labour vowed to legislate and, indeed, introduced
shareholder ballots. One of the great successes in the area of
party funding has been the recommendations that came from the
Neill Committee which brought about consensus between the parties
and did lead to radical change. I think if that had come from
a partisan basis we would have had a number of difficulties, so
that if Labour now imposes aspects of legislation that the Conservatives
do not agree with what will simply happen is if and when the Conservative
Party returns to power it will react accordingly. I cannot comment
on the Charity Commission—that is not my area of expertise—but
on party funding, I think, broadly speaking, we have got it right,
and it is better to take it out of the hands of politicians.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I agree with
both of you that in the arena of political funding there is an
area of accuracy and expertise that should be there. For example,
I would hope that we would be able to reach agreement as to whether
party expenditures have been growing or not. It is ridiculous
that you cannot have some expert look and agreement on a matter
of fact such as that. There also ought to need to be expert input
into the small print of legislation. Although I agree with Justin
that the general consensus that emerged from the Neill Committee
in 1998 led to a lot of support for the 2000 Act, the PPERA, it
is also true that PPERA has more pitfalls than just commercial
loans. Wait until we have a referendum and see what the small
print of the Act says on that, or wait about third party funding
and see what the wording of PPERA does on that. So that we do
need much more care about legislation. Having said that, there
are issues of principle that say that, whether one wants to give
priority to freedom of speech or to a form of fairness or equality,
that is a difference of principle that is going to depend on people's
political views. That kind of choice, I think, must be made by
a sovereign parliament based on good advice but on the political
views of the members. There are fundamental differences of political
choices that ought to be left to the politicians. So to that extent
I agree with you.
Dr Russell: I agree with both
of you as well. I agree with everything that Justin has said,
but I think there is something in what you are saying about de-politicising
to too large an extent the political. One of the examples which
I drew attention to in my pamphlet (which I realise, for the record,
I did not name; it is called Must Politics Disappoint?)
was about the Electoral Commission itself, which was set up not
only with a requirement that none of the Commissioners be members
of political parties, but that nobody working for the Commission
should be a member of a political party. This is the body which
is set up to regulate the political parties, which clearly has
no institutional knowledge of how political parties work. To me
that is crazy, and it actually reinforces the view that political
parties are, somehow, rather mucky, that it is a minority interest,
and that you can easily construct an institution which has never
had anything to do with them. However, I come back to the point
that I made to you, that these rules were made by politicians.
In fact, the rules on the tightening up of party membership amongst
members of staff on the Commission were put in in an amendment—I
think it was a non-government amendment—in the House of
Lords, in an attempt to make it "cleaner than clean".
So I think it certainly can go too far, and it does not help to
increase trust in the political process when you do that.
David Heyes: I will join in and agree
with everybody as well. I used to think politicians were becoming
increasingly timid-behaving politically.
Q415 Mr Prentice: Would it make any
difference if members of the House of Lords Appointments Commission
were not Lords—because they are all peers? If we had an
Appointments Commission that was just Misters and Mses would it
make a difference?
Dr Russell: I think you could
make a similar point, actually, that if you constructed an Appointments
Commission that was putting people into the House of Lords, which
included nobody who had ever been in the House of Lords, they
might make rather ill-informed decisions. I think this is a matter
of balance.
Mr Prentice: But the Chairman does not
participate—he said that to us a couple of weeks ago.
Chairman: He explained why and we heard
that explanation.
Q416 Jenny Willott: I wanted to get
right back to something you were talking about at the beginning,
which is to do with the laws in place around sales of honours
and around this whole area, which is one of the fundamental parts
of our inquiry. Given that there have not been any prosecutions
since 1933 (whenever the last one was) is that because there have
not been any cases of sales of honours since then, or is it because
the law actually is impossible to prosecute because it is out
of date or deficient in some way?
Professor Fisher: I could not
tell you whether or not there have been sales of honours. The
core fact is that there have been no prosecutions, and to the
best of my knowledge there have been no subsequent accusations
which were taken any further, other than a nod and a wink. So
it is impossible to answer that question. I do return to the point
I made at the beginning, and that is that when we look at the
laws surrounding political life—and, indeed, more broadly,
public life in general—the success or failure of a law should
not be judged against whether or not there have been any prosecutions.
One way of looking at a law is in terms of setting the boundaries
of what is acceptable. A very good example of that is one of the
finest pieces of legislation on our statute book, which debars
political parties from taking out advertisements through broadcast
media; we only have party political broadcasts and party election
broadcasts. There have been no prosecutions under that piece of
legislation, but does that make it a bad piece of legislation?
Not at all, it sets the boundaries of electoral and political
life. So, in terms of your question, I cannot answer whether or
not there have been cases that should have been tried; I am not
a lawyer and I cannot tell you whether the wording of the legislation
is sufficient to allow for prosecution, but I think it is an erroneous
assumption to assume that simply because there has not been a
prosecution the legislation is itself at fault.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: It depends
what kind of Act. Justin talked about broadcasting Acts. Well,
there are very few broadcasting authorities, so you would not
expect that there is so much of a scope and a need for prosecution
for going right against the law on that. In, say, the case of
overspending by Members of Parliament or, more than that, local
government candidates, we have not had a Member of Parliament,
I think, who has lost his or her seat since 1924, so that is 83
years, and I do not know of any prosecution, let alone conviction,
of any local government councillor, although they may well exist
without my knowing it, for overspending at local elections. It
does strain credibility as to whether that means they have all
obeyed the law, or whether the law has not been enforced. In that
case I would have thought it is a lack of enforcement. So lack
of cases can be evidence in some cases. Coming to the Maundy-Gregory
case in the early 1930s (I referred to this in my memorandum),
and the view of John Ramsden in his work on the The Age of
Balfour and Baldwin, not very much changed; he says that it
seems clear that apart from tidying up the residue of the Lloyd
George era the, in this case, Conservative Party Chairman, J C
C Davidson, did not fundamentally change his party's attitude
towards honours. In other words, they were—
Q417 Jenny Willott: Does that mean
that the law was bad then?
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: No. I slightly
disagree with the stress in John Ramsden's work because I think
there were some features of the Lloyd George system that were
there and which then changed. One is that a number of the Lloyd
George appointees were actually crooks—technically so. They
are not alive so they could not have me up for libel but I would
be fine if I could prove it. So they were crooks. The second was
that the deal was extremely specific; that you pay so much and
there is a tariff and you get a peerage. Third, there was a trader,
a middleman, who would take a cut himself and then have lunch
at his club, which was set up for the purpose, with the party
chairman or the chief whip, and they would then do the deals.
I think what we are suspecting now is that there is an uncomfortable
correlation between large donations and honours, which is not
the same as saying that we know of a trade that is as crude as
it was in the Lloyd George era.
Q418 Jenny Willott: That is not,
actually, what the police investigation was into. Everyone recognises
there is a correlation between giving large amounts of money and
becoming a peer, though it is not necessarily causation, as was
discussed earlier. Actually, the allegations were that people
were giving money in the expectation that they were going to be
getting a peerage.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: An expectation
is not enough; there must be a favour—
Q419 Jenny Willott: Absolutely, which
raises the question as to whether the law is sufficient. Given
that the allegations this time, whether true or not, are of a
different nature from the allegations in the Act that were taking
place in the 1920s and 1930s, if we are looking at our inquiry
as to whether what is in place now is enough to make sure that
it is not possible for there to be trade or a nod and a wink,
or the sort of actions that have been alleged this time, if the
law that was drafted in the 1920s does not cover the suggestions
of what took place this time then, actually, is the law deficient
and do we need to revise it?
Dr Russell: On that question,
I think your inquiry has uncovered quite well the difficulties
of legislating in this area, and if there are nods and winks going
on then it is difficult to prove a case, and so on. I do not necessarily
believe that there are nods and winks going on, actually, but
if there were that would make it difficult to prosecute. If you
are looking at revising the 1925 Act you are looking in the wrong
place, because that, in a sense, is trying to treat the symptoms
rather than the cause, and the cause is that the Prime Minister
has these patronage powers over putting people into the legislature.
If you deal with that then these problems will not arise.
Dr Pinto-Duschinsky: I think that
it was the correlation, or what was seen to be a high correlation,
which led to an inquiry to see if there was an explicit deal that
was against the 1925 Act. So it was a matter of the difficulty
of evidence. So I do not think the Act is the right place to go.
I agree with Meg about symptoms and causes, although I do not
think the symptom is only the ability of the Prime Minister to
appoint members of the House of Lords, because if one took that
away there would be all the other forms of patronage that a Prime
Minister would have, and new ones that would grow to fill the
vacuum. The cause is the reliance on a few large donors, and that
is what I see as the root problem here.
Professor Fisher: I would like
to take issue with a term that has been used both today and on
Tuesday, and that is the use of the term "correlation",
because in actual fact if you are arguing that there is a correlation
you would need to demonstrate that people of a similar standing
but who had not made contributions were somehow being denied a
seat in the Lords. To the best of my knowledge, that analysis
has not been conducted. So if there is a simple coincidence then
that is what it is; it is not a correlation.
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