Westminster emulates Tammany Hall

Without waiting to see what Peter Black has blogged, I usually avoid duplicating his subject for the day. I have my own special interests and he has his. But I imagine that yesterday's shameful proceedings in the House of Commons will be in the forefront of his mind as they were of mine. 

In a situation where the ability of a constituency to recall an erring Member of Parliament has been made more difficult than the original proposers of the Recall of MPs Bill intended, it is all the more important that there is a robust mechanism at Westminster to ensure that honourable members remain honourable. To that end, an independent parliamentary commissioner for standards has been instituted (current office-holder Kathryn Stone OBE) to investigate, among other things, breaches of the Code of Conduct for MPs. The Commissioner advises a Committee on Standards whose reports to the House are routinely accepted.

This changed yesterday. The Commissioner had, on her own initiative, responding to media reports, looked into the conduct of Owen Paterson MP. She found that Paterson had repeatedly broken the Code by lobbying for companies by which he was paid. The Committee agreed with her and recommended that the MP be suspended for 30 sitting days. It was this that came before the Commons yesterday, but rather than going through  "on the nod", the government promoted an amendment to the Committee report which in the first place stopped any suspension and in the longer term had a committee, on which the governing party would have a majority, look at changes to the procedure to allow appeals against rulings by the Committee on Standards. This would apply to the Paterson case. The inference drawn was that a Tory-majority appeals committee would exonerate Paterson and many MPs found guilty of paid lobbying in the future. Tempers ran high as Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted to defend the amendment and practically ignored the main report.

Some points stood out for me from yesterday's debate. SNP's Martin Docherty-Hughes observed that six of the members who had signed the amendment had form, in that they had allegations upheld against them in the previous twelve months. Labour's Thangam Debbonaire reminded the House that, since 1695, there have been rules on paid advocacy. A motion passed on 2 May 1695 said that “the offer of money or other advantage to any Member of Parliament for the promoting of any matter whatsoever…in Parliament, is a high crime and misdemeanour”. Since then, the only changes to the rules had been to strengthen them. She went on: "the Leader of the House stands up in front of us every week. If he wanted a debate on changing the rules and changing the system, he has had that opportunity every single week, but I have yet to hear him mention it until today, when we are considering a live case." (Lib Dems' Alistair Carmichael had previously objected to bringing forward such an amendment to procedure without having achieved consensus between the parties beforehand.) She hated "to remind the Leader of the House, but just last month Government Members said that they could not possibly support retrospective rule change; and yet, here we are. In the middle of a case, Tory MPs—yes, I am going to state that, because it is only Tory MPs who have signed this amendment—are trying to change the rules".  

The official spokesman for the SNP, Pete Wishart, after condemning the Tories for wanting to take us back to the days of the worst excesses of sleaze in the 1990s, thought that there might be some nationalist advantage. "I do not care if this place seems as sleaze-ridden and crony-ridden as it wants to be. In fact, it does me good if people from Scotland are watching and observing this place descending into the midden that we know it can become. It serves my purpose to see it do that." It has to be said, however, that his own party and parliament in Edinburgh are not exactly free of the taint of political corruption at present.

A telling contribution was made by the Father of the House, Sir Peter Bottomley, a Conservative "grandee" as the current parlance has it. He felt that Paterson should have conceded the points made by the Commissioner and accepted the ruling of the Committee. There would be some justification in reviewing the workings of the Committee, but the amendment under discussion was the wrong way to go about it. "I do recognise that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, the 2003 recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life is worth looking at. But that was 18 years ago, and this is a serious problem. It should have been brought back for consideration by the House or by senior Members of this House during the past 18 years. I am happy to bring it forward now as a way of changing what should be the normal process of upholding the Standards Committee’s endorsement of the standards commissioner’s advice to the Committee. I refer to the debate in 2010 when Jack Straw was the Justice Secretary and Sir George Young, as he then was, contributed for my party, as did I. We chose the system we are now using. If we want to consider changing it, we should do it in a proper way. I do not regard this as appropriate now." He would have been one of the thirteen Conservative members who voted against the amendment, as did his party colleague, Aaron Bell, who also intervened in the debate. It is a sad reflection of the current state of the Conservative party that more did not join them in the No lobby.

Summing up for the Committee, its Chairman, Chris Bryant, exposed the speciousness of the government's main arguments. The gist was:

The Member [Owen Paterson] promoted what he called “Randox’s superior technology”. He wanted the Government to use Randox’s calibration system. He repeatedly used his taxpayer-funded parliamentary office for commercial meetings. That is paid lobbying. In some shape or form, it has been banned since 1695 and expressly so since "cash for questions", which brought this House into terrible disrepute in the 1990s. One Conservative Member described it to me as a “catalogue of bad behaviour”. I have yet to meet a Conservative MP who has not said to me, “He clearly broke the rules.” I think that includes the Leader of the House. 

 The Member says that he was raising serious wrongs, but he did not say so at the time. If they were truly serious, one might have expected him to write articles or do media interviews, as he was perfectly entitled to do. He did not. He did the one thing that he was banned from doing: lobby Ministers time and again in a way that conferred a direct benefit on his paying clients. That is expressly forbidden. It is a corrupt practice.

On the process, the Member has had a fair hearing. We had legal advice from Speaker’s Counsel throughout. As one former High Court judge said to me yesterday, “the procedure is consistent with natural justice and similar or identical to workplaces up and down the country.” 

 We on the Committee spent many hours reviewing the evidence in this case without fear or favour. The Member had prior notice of the charges and the evidence against him at every stage. He had his legal advisers with him. The Committee invited him to make his appeal against the commissioner’s findings in writing and in person, and I hope he would confirm that we gave him every opportunity to make his case to us and that the session was conducted respectfully and fairly. I think he is nodding. 

 The Member has said that his witnesses should have been interviewed. Natural justice requires that witnesses be heard, but that does not necessarily mean that they must be heard orally or cross-examined. We did what many courts and tribunals do every day of the week: we reviewed all the witness statements, took them into consideration and published them in full.

The Member claims that the commissioner had made up her mind before she sent her memorandum. That is completely to misunderstand the process. As the commissioner has done in every other case, she started an investigation and invited the Member to meet her and/or to submit evidence. Once she had completed her investigation and, by definition, found on a preliminary basis that there had been a breach of the rules, she submitted a memorandum to him for his comments, and then to the Committee. That is when we heard his appeal, in writing and in person. 

[...]

 It is the very definition of injustice that one should change the rules or the process at the very last moment, and to do so for a named individual. That is what the amendment does. Retrospective legislation to favour or damage an individual because they are a friend or a foe is immoral and the polar opposite of the rule of law. That is why, as the Leader of the House knows, I spoke and voted with Conservative Members when we were considering a retrospective motion to subject the hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts) to a recall petition. The amendment should fail on that basis alone—it is the opposite of due process. 

 The amendment purports to set up an appeal process, but an appellate body must be independent and every single member of the body will be parti pris, by definition. They will have been whipped and taken a view today. They will almost certainly have voted. The proposed Chair, by agreeing to have his name put forward, is already not independent. I point out gently to the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire [Andrea Leadsom, who moved the amendment] that it was her motion as Leader of the House on 7 January 2019 that set up the Standards Committee in its present form. At that time, she said that “a greater element of independence was required, and that having seven lay members and seven parliamentary Members on the Standards Committee…provides the right balance—having the memory and the corporate understanding of being in this place, while at the same time ensuring that we can benefit from the experience and knowledge of independent lay members.”—[Official Report, 7 January 2019; Vol. 652, c. 128.] The body she proposes today will have no independent members—no independence.[...]

I agree with the Leader of the House: I hate investigations that take a long time, but I will point this out gently. The commissioner was, I think, right to suspend her investigation on the right hon. Member for North Shropshire after his wife’s death. It was only once his lawyers said it was okay to restart that she initiated it again. All the delays in the process have been down to his seeking further extensions of deadlines, and we have always sought to meet those.

[...]

 Let me end with this. I hope all Members know that I care passionately about Parliament. The vast majority of Members are here to do good. [...] But if the public believe that we are marking our own homework, our reputation, individually and collectively, will be tarnished. Independence is essential to protect us. A Conservative MP said to me yesterday: “There have been times when I have been ashamed of being a Member of this House, I don’t want to go back to that.”

2021-11-04: BBC News reports that, stung by the opposition to its behaviour yesterday, government ministers will no longer defer the decision on Owen Paterson's culpability and sanctions. One trusts that when the original motion is brought back to the House, government MPs will not be whipped and the House will accept the recommendations of the Committee on Standards without a vote. 

However, that does not address the government's unprecedented weakening of the system of enforcing the behaviour expected of members of parliament. Unless the proposal to set up a committee to design a government-dominated appeals body is abandoned, a signal will be sent that it will be all right in future to lobby for pay - or commit other breaches of standards - if you are on the government side.