Conduct of the Right Hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

I agree with the hon. Member. [Interruption.] Perhaps we should just calm down; there will be opportunities for people to participate in the debate. This issue of leadership and conduct is important. This saddens me, but when we are facing a new variant, and we do not know what the scale of that challenge will be, the obvious thing for everyone to do is to seek to protect themselves, but more importantly to protect others and to lead by example and show leadership. I commend colleagues across the House who are sitting here wearing masks today, but my goodness, there are far too many who still do not get it and do not accept the responsibility they have for each other, and they are even laughing about it as I say that. It comes from the Prime Minister.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Ian Blackford]

Let me just carry on for a second, because this is important. The way we conduct ourselves and interact with others is important. I commend the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), for the courtesies she always showed to Opposition parties, for how the protocols were followed and for the way we had a relationship with No. 10. It grieves me that I can tell the House that we as the third party and, I believe, the Leader of the Opposition have no relationship with No. 10. We are disrespected and disregarded by a Prime Minister who does not understand his obligations to public life, and that is yet another example.

[Drew Hendry]

Is it not telling about how complicit those on the Government Benches are that, when my right hon. Friend was reading out the list of untruths peddled by the Prime Minister, there was deathly silence? The only time they were animated was when my right hon. Friend called it for what it was.

[Ian Blackford]

I ask Government Members to reflect. Most people in this House are decent people. People come here to provide a public service, and I say to hon. and right hon. Members on the Government Benches that they are being let down, we are being let down and these islands are being let down by a Prime Minister who simply does not know how to behave. On that note, it will be interesting to see how the Scottish Tories vote tonight, and we will be watching. They are a group who never fail to see conspiracy at Holyrood, but somehow always fall deathly silent when it comes to sleaze and corruption overseen by their own Prime Minister.

In truth, this debate is not about the Scottish Tories—I will leave them to explain their own hypocrisy—but what the public expect when standards and rules are so clearly broken by their political representatives. They expect consequences, and they expect censure. Let us also be clear about this: if we fail to censure this Prime Minister today, we will have failed that public duty for accountability. Not only that, but it will reveal something very telling; it will show a Westminster system that is broken beyond repair and a Prime Minister who believes himself to be above the law of the land.

The only comfort I take is that fewer and fewer people in Scotland can possibly look at the broken, corrupt, self-serving Westminster system and conclude that it produces a secure basis for the future of Scotland. We all know that Scotland can do much better than this; we can do better than this broken Westminster system and we can do better than this Prime Minister. We will do so much better when our country chooses independence. I commend the motion in the name of myself and my hon. and right hon. colleagues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stewart Hosie]

We are here. We did not make a unilateral declaration of independence. We have not rushed into a second referendum. What we have done is win another mandate, and we will hold the referendum in line with the wishes of the people, because that is what democracy actually means.

The proposed changes to the Electoral Commission will give this Government unprecedented and unchecked power by allowing Ministers to set the commission’s agenda and purview, thereby enabling them to change which organisations and campaign activities are permitted a year before an election. That is Executive interference in the electoral process, about which we should be deeply concerned.

On a related topic, we have a boundary review that will reduce the number of MPs in Scotland and Wales and increase the number in England. If every single vote were cast the same way, it would not affect the SNP. The polls say we would still return 48 Members, but in England the Tories would go up and everyone else would go down. Looking at the failure to tackle dark money, the boundary changes, the evisceration of the Electoral Commission and the voter suppression Bill, it is no wonder that the public smell a rat.

Then there is cash for honours. When my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) asked the Prime Minister whether such practices should end, he seemed to defend it. Rather bizarrely, he said:

“Until you get rid of the system by which the trades union barons”

whoever they are—

fund other parties, we have to…we have to go ahead.”

There is a world of difference between organisations coming together to campaign for things they believe in, and selling honours for cash, which is illegal. Of course, the Tories always defend their own, trying to get Owen Paterson off the hook and conflating his issue with a general change to the standards process. That was never going to wash.

[Drew Hendry]

My right hon. Friend is talking about illegality. We should never forget that it is this Prime Minister’s Government who introduced the phrase into the lexicon—into this House of Commons—that it is okay to break the law as long as it is in a “specific and limited” way.

[Stewart Hosie]

Limited and specific lawbreaking is still lawbreaking. I was also struck by the fact that the Government almost boasted about their intention to break international law, not by way of the “little Britlander” exceptionalism we are used to, but in a way that would have made the UK an international pariah.

I could add that this Government lost a key battle in the Tory covid cronyism row when the National Audit Office ordered them to name the VIP lane firms given public contracts. I could also talk about the disgraceful but, apparently, routine use of WhatsApp and Signal messaging systems, which have options to make messages disappear and which it appears have been used to avoid scrutiny of decisions made during the covid crisis. I could talk about the fact that the High Court granted a judicial review of the rules regarding the retention of records. But my favourite was when the Supreme Court ruled that the Prime Minister’s advice to the Queen that Parliament should be prorogued for five weeks at the height of the Brexit crisis was unlawful. Defeats in the courts, judicial reviews, trying to get Owen Paterson off the hook, cash for honours, voter suppression, weakening the Electoral Commission, ignoring dark money and unlawful prorogation—that is a pattern of self-serving, self-seeking behaviour, and an approach to governance that is grubby to say the least and smacks of dishonesty.