Committee on Standards: Decision of the House — House of Commons, 2021-11-08
Topic: Government Operations
Alexander Morrison Carmichael (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I thank you, Mr Speaker, for accepting the application for today’s debate from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain). It is, unfortunately, very timely and necessary, and I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing it, and on the manner in which she introduced it I listened to your statement before the debate, Mr Speaker, when you spoke about the best traditions of the House, and my mind went back to a conversation that I had with a colleague not long after I was elected to this House. It was basically to the effect that the day anybody found me standing here making a speech about the best traditions of the House, they could take me out and shoot me because my useful life would be over at that point. The House will therefore appreciate, I hope, that I have picked my words and what I am about to say with extreme caution I do not think that the convention of not whipping House business is the best tradition of the House, but it is certainly a very important one. I do not know whose decision it was to whip the motion and amendment last week, but it was a seriously colossal error of judgment. They have damaged the authority of the Prime Minister, they have damaged the credibility of the Leader of the House, and they have seriously undermined the ability of the Government Whips Office to do the job with which it is charged. Some might say that that is a silver lining, but the cloud, which is the damage to Parliament as a whole, is otherwise impenetrably dark As others have said, we now need to move on and look at what we do to go ahead. I take the point of the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) that we need to consider questions of process. I remain to be convinced about the need for an appeal, but given that this is a committee and not a court, and the process is not informed by legal practitioners, I see the argument for there being a fresh pair of eyes on such matters. If, however, all we do in the process about which the Leader of the House was speaking last week is tinker around with a few procedural matters, we might as well not bother. That is simply not equal to the task before us of restoring public confidence in the House’s ability to deal with its own standards and discipline On those right hon. and hon. Members who have outside interests or second incomes, I do not favour an outright ban on second jobs, as that would have the unintended consequence of making more people see this as an occupation from which there would never be any departure. The idea that people can come here for a term or two and then return to whatever profession or occupation they had beforehand is good and sensible, but this weekend I saw reports about the time given by some right hon. and hon. Members, and the money they received in return, which I think is simple indefensible. As we look to what we do in future, we must consider that, and at very least we must have a cap on such matters Let me return to the point that I made in my intervention on the Leader of the Opposition. If the Government are approaching this as a good faith exercise, we should hear a commitment from the Treasury Bench that not only will there be no repetition of whipping House business, but that when any proposals are brought forward they will give us a cast-iron guarantee that Members will not be whipped. When you are in a hole, stop digging. The Government look as if they have stopped digging, but I still get the sense that somehow they cast rather envious and wistful glances in the direction of the shovel.