I think that, not for the first time, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is rewriting the procedures of the House of Commons. He knows perfectly well that that Bill would not have got through the House of Commons without a timetable Motion—a kind of Motion that his party vehemently opposed when in opposition. I am happy to go through the history lesson of Liberal Democrat policies but, entertaining though that would be, I shall resist the temptation.
Briefly, we also had debates about the great constitutional merits of having directly elected police and crime commissioners. Again, I think that they were supported by pretty much everyone at one stage, but again it cost £75 million to hold the elections. Not so many people now think that it was a great idea because the turnout at the vote was 15%. Then, of course, we had the constitutional innovation supported by all three parties of referenda for directly elected mayors in 10 cities where the good citizens of nine of them said what some of us hoped they would say, which was, “No, thank you very much. We don’t want this at all”. I should say that were I ever to write a book—the House will be relieved to know that I will not—on this Government’s record on constitutional reform, the title I would give it would be I Told You So.
We now come to the Recall of MPs Bill. It is a measure of constitutional significance that will, as the Constitution Committee has said, affect the United Kingdom’s representative democracy. If you are doing that, the very least you would expect from the Government is a clear case for why this important constitutional change is required and what its effects would be. It seems to me that the case simply has not been made. We all know that, in practice, if Members of Parliament have been the subject of severely inappropriate behaviour, the mechanisms of the parties come into operation. Very often, such MPs resign and by-elections follow in any case. The House of Commons research paper on the Bill asks: how many people would have been caught by this Bill had it been an Act of Parliament 25 years ago? The answer is two. It is a Bill of 60 pages with numerous clauses and addendums. Do we really need a Bill of this length and complexity to deal with just two cases? Admittedly, the numbers of who would be affected might go up because of the amendment referred to by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. He demolished the Bill quite eloquently, so there is certainly no need for me to add anything to that.
Let us be under no illusions. The Bill would inevitably affect the behaviour of the Commons, knowing the difference between a nine-day suspension and a 10-day suspension. It is not the difference between a yellow card and a red card; it is the difference between a yellow card and a ban for life. I do not believe that anyone seriously thinks that if the Commons effectively said that there should be a recall, or a recall petition, and if having a recall was advertised all around the
constituency, it is pretty much inconceivable that the MP concerned would be re-elected at that or any subsequent election. That may be a good thing, but do we really need this whole recall mechanism and this Bill to deliver that objective?
We all agree that certain behaviour is unacceptable, so let us have no bricks thrown around the debate on that. The House can expel people if it wants to, it can suspend them for as long as it likes, and in practice the parties exercise their own discipline. However, as my noble friend Lord Hughes has just said, it is a short step from unacceptable behaviour to unacceptable policies. My noble friend made that case very strongly indeed. Perhaps I may add a personal additional point. Representing, as I did the first time I came here, a constituency with an electorate of 90,000, in which I had a majority of around 360, and in which the opponent I defeated polled 32,000 votes, I think it would have taken him and his supporters about 10 minutes to get a petition together to chuck me out, had he wanted to do so and had the mechanism been in place. That is particularly the case today with electronic petitions. We simply do not need this Bill and there is a real danger of mission creep.
I have to say that the Bill has a lot of the characteristics of a fag-end Bill of a fag-end Parliament. We all know that the reason for the delay is that when the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee considered the Bill in draft, it said:
“We recommend that the Government abandon its plans to introduce a power of recall and use the Parliamentary time this would free up to better effect”.
That is terrific advice and is well worth considering now.
I would like to suggest a way of doing this, because of course we do have a system for recalling MPs—it is called a general election. I am something of an expert on the recall of MPs, having lost an awful lot of general elections. That is something which concentrates the mind. Oddly enough, this coalition Government, which want to introduce recall, have legislated to ensure that we have fewer general elections. It was an astonishing thing to do and it went through on the nod. Five-year fixed terms mean that, whereas since the war elections have taken place on average every three years and 10 months, they will now take place by law every five years. That inevitably raises the need for recall. If that pernicious Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 had been in operation since the war, there would have been 13 general elections instead of 18. This coalition Government therefore think that we have had too many general elections since the war, so no wonder they think we need recall. Why not extend the period between elections so that it is even longer?
I have a simple suggestion to make in line with the recommendations made in the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which basically says: drop this Bill and bring forward another one. Why do the House and the party leaders not get together and support a Bill to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011? Modesty prevents me mentioning the Bill’s sponsor, but at a stroke it would move us substantially towards more accountability for MPs and would be far better than this Recall of MPs Bill.
12.47 pm