The hon. Gentleman must have hacked into my computer, because he has basically said what I am about to say in my next couple of paragraphs. That is not an allegation of misconduct, by the way. [Laughter.] I do not think the Standards and Privileges Committee needs to address it.
Edmund Burke has been mentioned a lot. When he campaigned against corruption in Parliament, he complained that there were too many people in the pocket of the Crown. He came to the conclusion that there were 140 Members of the Commons who, because they had a pension, a well-paid salary post in government or had been given some kind of perk or sinecure, were in the pocket of the Crown, and he complained about those 140 MPs. Today, we have 95 paid Government Ministers, 43 Conservative Parliamentary Private Secretaries, five Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Private Secretaries and seven Conservative members of the No. 10 policy board, to say nothing of those on the Government Benches or on the Opposition Benches who want to have those jobs.
My complaint is that there are now more than 150 MPs in the direct employ of the Government who have no choice in how they are going to vote. If we take all the others into account, more than half the Members in this House have their voting determined entirely for them by two people: the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Ironically, France has just 35 Ministers, none of whom are in their Parliament. Germany has just 17 Cabinet Ministers and two under-Ministers in each Department—50 in total. The UK therefore has more Government Ministers than France and Germany put together. In essence this House, which should be the cockpit of political debate expressed without any fear or favour, where the nation’s grievances are aired and solutions found in what should be a free and fair legislature, is frankly today nothing more than a gene pool for Government. Our primary role is no longer to scrutinise the Government or hold them to account; the majority of Members think that our primary role is to staff or sustain the Government. In the end, that is a problem. It is why we have all the planted questions and obsequious speeches and why votes we pass—on Magnitsky or Palestine—with massive majorities are completely and utterly ignored by the Government. It is why we still have a completely and utterly unreformed House of Lords where patronage remains vital.
It would be all right if the edifice of our present government system was built on a strong foundation of mass-membership parties, but it is not. If we put all the political parties’ members together into one great big rowing lump, we would not get to 500,000 people. It is sometimes compared with the membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds or the National Trust. The numbers are feeble, yet that is what it all depends on. There are constituency associations on both sides of the House that have fewer than 200 or even 100 members. I do not like the term “safe seats”; there are seats that have been reliably electing the same kind of MP for decades and where the new MP will be selected by perhaps 50, 60, 70 or 100 people. People introduced the Reform Act in the 1830s complaining
about constituencies where only 100 people could elect the MP, and it is no different today, which is why constituency parties are finding it difficult to get more candidates to present themselves, even in safe seats. On both sides of the House, constituency parties are selecting safe-seat candidates from a short list of two or even one.
Therefore, I would of course argue that the parliamentary system is bust. In 1951, 1955 and 1959, the two main political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, received more than 90% of the vote, but now they get barely 65%, and in the European elections this year they got 49.3%. Yet we have a “winner takes all” parliamentary system in which the winner gets to appoint as many peers as they want and decide the whole Government and all business; only the Government get to table motions laying a charge on the taxpayer or to advance legislation as a priority at the beginning of the day, and so on.
For a long time, we had a system that allowed a chink of democracy: we had ministerial by-elections. For centuries, if someone was appointed a Minister, they had to face a by-election in their constituency, because they had to go back to their voters and say, “Is it all right for me to join the Government?” I would argue that that is a perfectly legitimate system, but of course people did not like it. In 1908, when he lost his ministerial by-election, Winston Churchill, who had a terrible habit of losing elections, said:
“It is an awful hindrance to anyone in my position to be always forced to fight for his life and always having to make his opinions on national politics to conform to local exigencies”.
Some of our objections to recall are basically that self-same arrogant attitude towards the electorate. It is an awful hindrance, isn’t it, to let the voters get in our way?
The key issue in the Bill is the threshold. In essence, it places the initial decision in the hands of MPs or the courts. The danger is that the courts would decide not to imprison an MP because it would of necessity start the recall process, so MPs would not be treated the same as others before the law. Furthermore, if we put the decision in the hands of a Committee of MPs, regardless of how many members of the public—it does not matter whether they are genuine or non-genuine members of the public—also sit on it, it just will not wash with the public.
There was an extraordinary moment in 1911 when Asquith was Prime Minister. There had been a big battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords over the “people’s Budget”, which introduced national insurance and the rest of it. Asquith was at the Dispatch Box and blind drunk. He was the Prime Minister; it was the most important piece of legislation in his life; and he was blind drunk, and we only know about it because Winston Churchill and Lloyd George both wrote home to their wives to tell them that he was blind drunk and had to be carried out of the debate—you cannot tell from Hansard. Churchill made the interesting point that it was only thanks to the freemasonry of the House of Commons that the public would never know about it. That is the danger. The public think we are engaged in a freemasonic activity by protecting one another. They think we protected one another in the expenses scandal and that we look after one another even across the party divide, and that is why I do not think the initial threshold—of allowing the decision to be made by Members—will be good enough.