Whitsun Adjournment

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). He expresses the not only the desperation felt by so many right hon. and hon. Members at the state of our Parliament and our parliamentary democracy but our dismay at the extent to which this House has been trodden through the mud in recent weeks. People like me, who consider that it is an enormous privilege and honour to be a Member of Parliament and to be able to stand in this place and say what we want to say on behalf of our constituents, feel that our position—our vocation, if one wishes to call it that, and I think that it is a vocation—has been sullied by the actions of a few and by the almost irreparable damage to our reputation. That cannot be right. We should be proud to be in this place and to do the job that we do. We are not entitled to the respect of our fellow citizens, but we need to be able to earn it. As I said earlier today, we can do that by dealing with the sordid issue of our expenses and the way that some Members—although not all—have chosen to interpret the rules. However, the issue goes much wider, because we also have to look at the whole system of democratic accountability. From what she said earlier, I think that the Leader of the House has got it, as I think has the shadow Leader of the House. There is a realisation among those who think about these matters that we cannot go on like this; equally, however, I know perfectly well that there is a ballast of Members who, sadly, do not share that interest. They will obstruct proper reforms of the sort set out by the hon. Member for Nottingham, North, and they will be bullied and coerced by the Whips. The Whips have no business in this area of our work. They can butt out of our election of a Speaker—it is not their issue. They need to understand that, because too often the influence of the Whips of all parties has got in the way of realistic reform. When Robin Cook was proposing his far-reaching reforms, he was defeated by a coalition of Whips. The then Leader of the House defeated by other elements in the Government—that cannot be the right way to deal with the problems that face us.