The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. Later I shall refer to a distinction that others have made in interventions and which the Minister himself made between our conduct as Members of Parliament and the issues that we vote on, and how we are held to account for our voting. The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point that although recall is, in my opinion, a correct mechanism for dealing with misconduct, it is a more questionable mechanism for dealing with issues to do with voting. One consequence of a particular model of recall could be to undermine the independence of MPs, for the reason that he gave.
In 2010 each of the main parties made proposals to change the system in response to the tide of distrust that I described. As the Minister said, each of us had a commitment to some form of recall in our manifesto. The Minister said that the Government have not rushed into this. That is an understatement: it is a shame that it has taken more than four years to have a Bill before the House. At one point both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister promised to pursue a new politics of democracy and transparency. Well, it has taken them quite a while to get round to it, and now that they have, neither of them seems very pleased with the Bill before the House.
The Deputy Prime Minister, who led on the Bill that was published earlier in this Parliament, said this summer that he agreed with the critics of that Bill, and just yesterday he said he wished that the latest attempt—the Bill before us today—had gone further. The Prime Minister, at Prime Minister’s questions last Wednesday, four and a half years after declaring his intent to pursue a new politics, said that the current Bill is the minimum acceptable. Surely after four and a half years they could have come up with something better than this.