I shall be brief. Let me make it quite clear that I certainly have respect for the electorate. Having been elected nine times, and crossing my fingers that there will be a 10th time, I have every reason to respect the electorate, but my respect would be the same if the electorate’s decision had been different.
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I think there is a general consensus that there should be a recall mechanism. The real debate is how we are going to have a recall mechanism that does not damage MPs or their ability to campaign on various matters if they so wish. Let me say again, I do not want any kind of cover-up. In the previous Parliament, I was in a minority of about four or five MPs—I was standing on the Government Benches and there were one or two Liberal Democrats on the Opposition Benches—arguing on a Friday that the Freedom of Information Act 2000 should be applied to Parliament. There was a good deal of opposition to that. That opposition was not expressed when we debated the matter on successive Fridays, but in other ways and we know what happened in the end. I do not want any cover-ups. I believe that what we do and what we spin should be known to the public as it is now. Moreover, I used to campaign in the 1990s and before then for the outside financial interests of MPs to be revealed. There was a great deal of opposition, but that has all changed. So whatever criticism can be made against me—I am rather critical of the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith)—it cannot be said that my point of view comes from a desire to cover things up from the electorate.
Why am I hesitant, to say the least, to support the hon. Gentleman’s amendment? I feel it could act as a kind of inhibition on MPs wishing to campaign. We are constantly told outside, “What we want are not MPs who go through the Division Lobby because the Whips tell them to do so; they should be more independent and be able to make up their own minds.” I hope that to some extent we all try to do that in our own particular way if we are not in the Government or in the official Opposition team. However, I come back to the point I made in interventions. There have been campaigns that have made Britain a better and more civilised place: the campaign to abolish capital punishment; the campaign to legalise homosexuality; and campaigns to bring about other changes, for example in the 1960s to outlaw racial discrimination. Without wishing to be too party political, that was opposed by the official Tory Opposition at the time. Those campaigns were unpopular. Some might
say that a recall mechanism would not have made any difference because the MPs involved in those campaigns would have continued regardless. It is true that they would have done so, but it would have made life that much more difficult. In addition to the normal opposition that one inevitably faces in their constituencies and in the media and so on, they would have been constantly faced with a recall mechanism being applied. If that were not successful, there would have been another and so on and so forth. I could be wrong, but there would have been more difficulties for the sort of campaigns I have mentioned.
I have already mentioned Chris Mullin this evening. Just imagine a Member of Parliament getting up in the House of Commons at the time of the undoubted atrocities committed near my constituency in Birmingham in November 1974 when 21 people were murdered to say that there had been a miscarriage of justice. We now know that people were wrongly convicted, but saying that would take great courage. It so happened that the person concerned was not a Member of Parliament at the time, but I repeat that he would have done the same if had been in the House of Commons. If an MP had campaigned against such a miscarriage of justice—the Guildford Four are another example—in the face of constant calls, encouraged by the press and others, for recurrent recall mechanisms, it would surely have made their life that much more difficult.