Except for the great William Rees-Mogg, no commentator seems to have noticed that Gordon Brown’s Bill to ‘clean up politics’ is about to remove the liberty of Parliament. ‘Res ipsa loquitur’ is the old legal tag: ‘the thing itself speaks’. Under the new Bill, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) is created. When IPSA speaks, its word will be law. It will tell Parliament what its allowances will be and MPs will not be allowed to vote this down. As David Heathcoat-Amory said in the debate in the Commons on Monday, it is ‘the final achievement of the quango state’ to create a quango which will tell Parliament what to do. So the people we have elected to make our laws will be ruled by people no one has elected.
The Clerk of the House of Commons, Malcolm Jack, found himself last week reluctantly speaking up against the Bill’s constitutional impropriety. The Leader of the House, Harriet Harman, said that ‘the issue of parliamentary privilege is not an issue in [the] Bill’. But Mr Jack thought otherwise. He wrote to the Standards Committee on Friday to say that the Parliamentary Standards Bill would take away freedom of speech in Parliament. Mr Jack said that ‘the words of Members’ spoken in the House could, under this Bill, ‘be admitted as evidence in criminal proceedings’. So could evidence given by non-parliamentary witnesses to Commons committees, and advice given to MPs by Commons officials. This change is being introduced in the name of enforcing high standards, but its effect, said Mr Jack, will be to ‘chill’ parliamentary debate. Article IX of the Bill of Rights protects ‘proceedings’ in Parliament from legal assault. It does so because it has until now been understood that, without such privilege for Parliament, other bodies — above all, the executive — could frighten MPs into biting their lips, and punish them if they fail to do so. Yet Clause 10 of this Bill specifically overrides the Bill of Rights. IPSA loquitur, and liberty falls silent.
And all this is happening with one of the worst excuses for constitutional change — haste. Sir Christopher Kelly’s Committee on Standards in Public Life is working on a report on MPs’ expenses, and has not yet produced it. Mr Brown says he will implement it ‘in full’ before he knows what it will say. So if he thinks Sir Christopher will decide rightly, and after due thought, why is he rushing in ahead of him? For political reasons, of course — the need to be seen to be doing something and be able to boast about it when an election comes (and to excoriate any political party which does not vote for the measure as being ‘complacent’). The government wants the Bill through both chambers by 21 July, so, by the time you read this, it will have charged through the lower House. In fact, there is no good reason why any change of law on this subject need be rushed. Interim measures are in place. After the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of expenses and the long-shirked decision of Parliament to publish the details itself, there is no imminent danger of slipping back to the old corruptions. Indeed, you could argue that this present Parliament, so discredited and divided, should not introduce any statutory or permanent reform at all, but wait for its successor to do so. Then clear, non-partisan thought could be given to the matter. Another dreadful feature of the rush is that the government has framed its ideas without properly consulting the people, such as Mr Jack, whose job it is to know about parliamentary procedure. Mr New Speaker Bercow says he wants to tell the world about Parliament and his job there. Why doesn’t he come out and defend the chamber which just chose him and explain why the Clerk is right?
Other suggestions for parliamentary reform also tend to ignore this basic consideration — who is entitled to punish offending parliamentarians? For example, it might seem common sense that MPs or peers convicted of serious crimes should be thrown out. This is now being called for. But might there not be times when an overmighty executive, angry at dissent, instituted ‘crimes’ designed to catch its opponents, a trick which is commonplace in countries in the process of becoming dictatorships? MPs should sit in Parliament at the pleasure of their electors and of no one else. Peers should hold their seats for life, so that they are not beholden to the executive for what they say in their House.
As for the government’s attack on ‘second jobs’, it must be said ad nauseam that the second job which most conflicts with being a good MP is being a government minister. This is because ministers are absurdly busy, so they are bound to neglect parliamentary and constituency duties. It is also because being a minister pits you against the interest of Parliament, which is to make laws properly. Ministers just want whatever they want voted for, fast. So the only ‘second job’ ban should be, as used to happen, that no MP should be allowed to serve as a minister until the electors in his seat have had the chance of a by-election to decide whether they mind losing him to the executive. In the same debate on Monday (sorry to be an amateur Hansard, but part of the crisis of Parliament is that no one now thinks that what is said in it should be reported), Sir George Young neatly took up Mr Brown’s complaint that Parliament is a ‘gentlemen’s club’. Sir George contrasted the power of IPSA with the rules which bind ministers. Breaches of the ministerial code of conduct are ultimately adjudicated only by the Prime Minister. So Mr Brown, he said, is ‘owner, doorkeeper and bouncer’ of the ministerial gentlemen’s club.
When the BBC decided to publish the expenses of its senior executives last week, I went straight to the website to track down my lunch with the Director-General, Mark Thompson, on 6 January. There it was, described as ‘business lunch to discuss project, £58.90’. Readers might like to be reminded that the ‘project’ was my scheme to keep my television but refuse to pay my licence fee unless the BBC sacked Jonathan Ross. The renewal date for my licence is coming up shortly and, the ‘project’, modestly assisted by Mr Thompson’s ‘business lunch’, is on track. Ross’s own pay, by the way, is said to be £6 million per year, but there the BBC’s new openness finds its limit. The pay of ‘artists’ or ‘talent’, as opposed to that of senior executives, remains a para-state secret.
The comedian Ricky Gervais wants to ban bullfighting on the grounds that it is ‘cruel’. Why, then, does he not want to ban Jonathan Ross?
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