I am in a good deal of agreement with the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I came into this debate, most unusually, undecided as to how I was going to vote. No guidance was provided from the Whips about how I ought to vote, which I view as a great advance. It is to the great credit of my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) that he is not trying to tell people how to vote. It shows a considerable wisdom to return to the traditional practice of having free votes on constitutional matters. I hope that this will be continued by other parties and in other Parliaments. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda says that I do anyway, and he is probably broadly right, but I think this should be encouraged across the House.
I was interested in new clauses 2 and 3. There is a need and desire to widen the ability for recall and to make it easier for constituents to remove Members of Parliament who they think have behaved improperly. The main thrust of the Bill is too narrow, which is a lost opportunity but not a fatal one because it can be developed in future Parliaments. Constitutional development often happens at a slow pace, which is not something I am against.
I think we want constitutional reform to take place at a pace with which people are broadly comfortable and that carries the nation with it.
New clauses 2 and 3, however, fundamentally misfire. Instead of making this something that will be decided by the electorate, the provisions introduce a third party—the courts—to try to determine what the hon. Member for Rhondda rightly pointed out are fundamentally political issues. The restrictions to which he referred, particularly the third example where the misconduct case is “brought for party political” reasons, are a complete negation of what is being tried to be achieved. Any complaint must be brought for party political reasons, and any attempt to unseat a Member of Parliament is going to be carried out by somebody who has a party political affiliation of some kind, and it will be to the benefit of a political party to remove a Member of Parliament from another party. Even if the petition and process were started by some wonderfully high-minded figure, of which I am glad to say we have a very large number in North East Somerset, politicians would get involved in it because they would see the advantage, particularly if the Government had only a small majority, of removing a Member of Parliament or indeed of causing such inconvenience that would make it almost impossible for that Member of Parliament to continue in office.
Another issue involved is the legal costs. Are we to provide a fund to help Members of Parliament defend themselves in these circumstances, or do we find that the Member of Parliament could be bankrupted by the very process—to see whether he had committed misconduct in public office—and thus removed from Parliament anyway, even though the misconduct in public office could not, in the event, be proved?
We in this House have always sought to keep the courts out of our own proceedings. There seem to me to be two valid sets of people who can intervene in our proceedings: the general public who send us here, and who have an absolute right not to send us here but to send other people in our place; and our own systems, procedures and Committees, which are able to regulate internal goings-on in the House—a right that we declared long before we achieved it in the Bill of Rights.
5.45 pm
As I listened to the hon. Member for Rhondda, I remembered a gentleman whose name was, I believe, Ron Brown, a Labour Member of Parliament in the 1980s who, in the midst of proceedings in Parliament, picked up the Mace, waved it around, and—unlike my noble Friend Lord Heseltine—dropped it. As a result, the Mace was damaged, and it was sent off to Garrard, the then Crown jeweller, to be repaired. Ron Brown was faced with a bill and a suspension. However, he had acted because of his passionate belief about whatever the political topic of the day had been. That was a proceeding in Parliament, but it was certainly misconduct.