Although I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) that there has been too much
self-flagellation as part and parcel of the process that has led towards this Bill, we cannot dispute that a lot of the concerns that underline these measures are to do with trust—I am talking specifically about trust in the political and parliamentary process. The public appetite for parliamentary recall was turbo-charged by the reputationally ruinous expenses scandal that broke in 2009. That brought to public attention the decades-long scandal of a self-regulated system in which secrecy and opaqueness by the political establishment were the watchwords. That was then compounded by the calamitous rearguard attempts by the parliamentary great and good to use the courts to prevent the publication of details of dubious expenditure claims of public money—a process that was sensationally broken open by The Daily Telegraph.
Slowly but surely this place has been dragged into playing catch-up. Ever since the expenses scandal, this House has paid lip service to the importance of restoring public confidence in the political process. A central part of that has been the public insistence for genuinely independent regulation. Yet the centrepiece of this Bill flies in the face of giving our voters, rather than political insiders, the authority to drive recall.
I regret that the coalition’s revolutionary intentions, as set out in May 2010, have been so watered down.