Honesty in Politics

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Murray.

Just one in six people in the UK—17% of the British public—who were polled last year said that they were highly satisfied with how democracy is working. I am afraid that compares very badly with some of our friends and neighbours, such as Canada and Germany, where 36% of the public say the same of their Governments. Clearly, whether we are in government or opposition, we need to take a careful look at issues of honesty and trust in Government.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day). The points he raised about partygate are absolutely central to the issue. I will extend one of those points. On 12 April 2022, the Metropolitan police served a fixed penalty notice on the then Prime Minister and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer for attending a rule-breaking event in the Cabinet Office in June 2020. Newspapers were full of that dramatic news when, just two days later, the Government announced the so-called Rwanda partnership. Whatever one thinks about the Rwanda partnership—the £120-million scheme that would see some asylum claimants having their claims processed while they were in Rwanda—it is, at the very least, newsworthy. My point is that increasingly over the last couple of decades, we have been subject to something that started out as spin but has since become something that verges on dishonesty.

Going back to 11 September 2001, we heard the phrase that it was a “good day to bury bad news”. At the time, that was symbolic of the worst aspects of the dark arts of spin. Since that time we have seen the development of that into an election campaigning technique. We now hear about the dead cat strategy. “Dead catting” is the idea that when something inconvenient is in the news headlines, the masters of spin might slap a dead cat in front of the public—a shocking announcement to divert attention away from those inconvenient headlines. Hon. and right hon. Members, it is time to end “a good day to bury bad news”, and it is time to end the dead cat strategy. It is a good day to bury the dead cat.

We need more honesty in public life, but if the public considered that MPs tell the truth only because it has become a criminal offence to lie, that could reduce trust in MPs. I pay tribute to the people who put the petition together and to the more than 100,000 people who signed it, but if we were to adopt the measures called for, we would need to be careful about a couple of things. First, if it became a criminal offence for MPs to lie in Parliament, what about when MPs are thought to have not told the truth outside Parliament? Could that, by contrast, reduce trust in MPs when they are speaking in other places, such as in the media or in meetings in their constituencies? The other thing that worries me about the idea of making lying an offence for which MPs could be prosecuted is what we see in other countries where political prisoners are made of people who are simply practising opposition politicians. Of course, that is taking the risk to the extreme, but I worry about the idea of opposition politicians getting locked up simply for telling the truth.

We should not need this. We should be able to proceed on the basis of honour, a term that goes in front of our constituencies: we are the hon. or right hon. Member of the constituency that we represent. We need more than a code of conduct or code of honour that binds us to the truth. Back in the days of Boris Johnson, we witnessed the terrible technique of a wild claim being amplified by denial: if a political opponent made a claim that we knew to be untruthful, by denying it we would repeat it, and by repeating it we would amplify it. We have to be aware of these partial truths because they are getting us into great political hot water.

For example, the 2019 Conservative manifesto claimed that 40 new hospitals would be delivered in this Parliament, but since then we have heard that they are not hospitals, there are not 40 of them and they are not new. Instead, the community hospital in Seaton in my constituency is under threat and there are suggestions that part of it might be demolished by a wrecking ball.

We need honesty and integrity to underpin our democracy. As politicians, we have a job not only to call out fake news, but to stand up and act with integrity. Over recent years, we have seen a dangerous rise in misleading statements from political parties and politicians. Clearly, the public feel there is distortion going on. Research from the organisation Full Fact showed that 71% of the public believe there is more lying and misuse of facts in politics now than 30 years ago. Yet the Constitution Unit found that the public admire politicians who are prepared to stand up and admit mistakes, rather than being dishonest about them. On top of that, a wave of sleaze and scandal has emanated from the Conservative party, and it was one such scandal that resulted in me coming to office as the Member of Parliament for Tiverton and Honiton.

In this place, we have a mechanism for correcting the record and inadvertent errors by going before Parliament, but we need a better method for MPs to correct Hansard, rather than things being distorted and going viral over social media. We have to be wary of politicians who cook up half-baked proposals, pretend that they are meaningful policies and then claim they have scrapped them. I take as a case in point the Conservative party conference earlier this year, where ideas about seven bins were magicked up. There was a time when the office of Prime Minister was that of statesman, but to stoop this low is to go to the level less of statesman and more of binman. It is deceitful and against the Nolan principles.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman says, but does he recognise that some of his proposed solutions already exist, yet we are still in the condition we find ourselves in? They do not work. Somehow or other, we need to shift the dial and, within the politics of the United Kingdom, stop rewarding those who say what they like and get away with it, and rather reward those who stick by the truth.

[Richard Foord]

The right hon. Member is exactly right. We absolutely need to put on a pedestal those people who are prepared to stand up and admit when they have made a mistake and applaud those who correct their own record.

Before I close, one other aspect that I see increasingly is neighbouring MPs claiming credit for the work and achievements of the community campaigners in my part of Devon. Flattery is clearly at play here; it is sometimes said that mimicry is a form of flattery. However, what we are seeing is against the Nolan principles of honesty and accountability.

Finally, anyone who has joined the House of Commons Chamber at the start of proceedings will remember this part of the prayer that we listen to every day. We pray that Members

“never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Oi.

We can feel phenomenally pompous when raising a point of order about some minor correction of the record and can kind of think that we are wasting the House’s time. I really hope that tomorrow afternoon we vote through the amendment that will allow for the process to correct the record—which we introduced in government in 2007—to apply not just to Ministers but to all Back Benchers. We all know times when we wish we could have been able to correct the record. The good thing about this is that it will correct the original moment in Hansard. At present, if I were to say something foul that I believed to be true about a member of your family, Mrs Murray—I would not be able to say it about you, because of the rules that you have already laid out—but I subsequently found it to be untrue, it would still stand in the original Hansard even if I corrected the record two days later. But if the motion goes through tomorrow, we will be able to correct that problem in the present system.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) spoke very eloquently at the beginning of the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. I think his heart was in it and he was not just doing it for the Petitions Committee. He referred to the term “bad apple”. Now, I dislike this term, because I think people believe it means, “Oh, there are just some bad apples, but everybody else is okay.” That has never been the meaning of the proverb, which goes all the way back to Chaucer. In “The Cook’s Tale”, one of the pilgrims refers to the one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel. That is the point—there needs to be just one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel, which I honestly think is what has happened in this Parliament.

We need to be terribly cognisant of the fact that 25 MPs in this Parliament since 2019 have been suspended for a day or more or have left Parliament before a report on their misconduct was produced to the House. That is 25 out of 650 of us, which is a record by a country mile. The Clerk of the House tells me that a country mile is as far as someone can see into the distance, to the horizon. I think that it has become normalised for some of our colleagues. I will not refer to specific individuals, but the whole idea of a meat tax theoretically being proposed by the Labour party—which has never, ever been proposed by the Labour party—is a flat-out, blatant lie.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

This is why it is so critical, because we have to challenge the advantages associated with the influence that someone can gain under lies; otherwise, the individual is being rewarded by throwing a lie out there, and in no way are they are penalised for bringing it back again. That, in the sense of it affecting all of us and polluting our whole politics, is why we need to address this, in a way that presently this House does not seem to have sufficient resources for.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I completely agree. If this Parliament does not get around to doing it, the next Parliament will have to address this issue far more seriously than we have heretofore. I will come on in a moment to some of the problems with the present system. I commend the right hon. Member for suggesting a way to deal with it. She is not the only Member to do so, as a Member from my own party has done the same. I will explain why I disagree with the precise route that she wants to go down, but I do not disagree with what she is seeking to change. Incidentally, what I said about the meat tax could be said about seven bins, and so on.

A legitimate point was made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) from the Liberal Democrat Benches, which is that the public does not draw an enormous distinction between whether an MP has lied in Parliament or out of Parliament. They just think that we all lie all of the time, and that at pretty much the moment our lips start moving, we are all lying. This is surely problematic for the whole of democracy.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk alluded to another problem. We have a rule that states that a Member cannot say that somebody else has lied, unless the motion on the Order Paper is specific on whether that is what we are debating. I remember some people got awfully excited in the Chamber when people started saying that Boris Johnson had lied, when the motion on the Order Paper was about whether Boris Johnson had lied. Of course, we have got to be able to advance that argument and prosecute that case in such a debate, but we have an assumption that we cannot say that a Member has deliberately lied. We have to say “inadvertently”, even though we all know that every time somebody says, “He has inadvertently lied,” the person who is saying “inadvertently” is actually lying themselves. What they really believe is that the other person has not “inadvertently” lied at all, but has absolutely advertently lied, and deliberately and recklessly done so. We then throw that person out of the Chamber for a day if they refuse to retract the point. I do not want us to get to a place where we spend all our time accusing each other of being a liar. That would be a very inelegant way of conducting our business, and it would not enhance political debate in this country. We are, however, going to have to review this rule at some point.

It is also a particular irony that, as has been said, two Members of Parliament were thrown out of the Chamber for calling Boris Johnson a liar when, first, Boris Johnson patently was a liar, and secondly, he was subsequently found to have misled the House on precisely the grounds that had been adduced by the two Members concerned. Yet they are the ones who ended up on the list of bad MPs—they are on my list of 25. I think we will have to review that.

My second point is that it is even more important that a Minister tells the truth, as I said earlier, in so far as they are able to know it to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The reasons for that are, first, Ministers have an army of advisers to make sure that what they are saying is true and to tell them that they must correct the record should that be necessary; secondly, decisions on spending and public policy are made on the basis of what Ministers say in the Chamber; and thirdly, it is a fundamental principle of good Government and written in the ministerial code that Ministers must always tell the truth.

I honestly think that 98% of the time Ministers do tell the truth. I know lots of Ministers who are very rigorous with themselves and their teams: “Can I really say that? Is that really true? Is that a correct interpretation of the statistics?” But there are others who are perhaps a little more casual with the use of statistics and whose approach effectively amounts to being misleading. That is why it is so important that Ministers have the opportunity to correct the record and should do so. They do it hundreds of times every year.

Ironically, Boris Johnson did it only once. Just after the second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when asked by the Leader of the Opposition whether Roman Abramovich had been sanctioned, Boris Johnson told the House that yes, he had been sanctioned. I quizzed him again, and he said yes, Abramovich had been sanctioned. The next day, however, he corrected the record to say that no, Roman Abramovich had not been sanctioned—he was subsequently, but not at that time. It seems a little odd that the only time Boris Johnson chose to correct the record was when a Russian oligarch, with very deep pockets and very expensive lawyers to hand, called on him and made him do so.

As I said earlier, this system for correcting the record should be available to all Members, and I hope that the motion is carried tomorrow; I am fairly confident that it will be. But what are we to think if a Minister, or a series of Ministers, keeps on repeating something by using a statistic that is false, and that we know to be false because the Office for National Statistics, which consists of a pretty dry set of people who are not all that interested in getting into party political argy-bargy, writes to the Minister, “Thou shalt not use this statistic because it is not true any more”? I have a simple answer: if the Office for National Statistics writes to a Minister to say that they must not mention something again, and copies in Mr Speaker, but the Minister does not correct the record within 28 days, they should automatically be considered to have breached the code of conduct. The Committee on Standards could then decide the importance and significance of the issue. If a Minister were faced with such a situation, I suspect that after the first time they were caught out and suspended from the House by the Committee on Standards, they would never do it again. That is the kind of measure that we need to introduce.

In the present system, someone has to refer the matter of whether an individual Member has lied to the Committee of Privileges. This is phenomenally cumbersome. For a start, they need to get the whole House to vote in favour of it. Therefore, in the main, it is unlikely that Government Members, who, by definition, are in the majority, will vote for one of their own Ministers—let alone a Prime Minister—to be referred to the Committee of Privileges. It has happened once, but I suspect it is unlikely to happen again. It is a very long and cumbersome procedure. It requires Mr Speaker to grant permission for the reference to the Committee of Privileges. We need to reform that.

I note yet another irony: when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Committee found, in essence, that Nadine Dorries had lied to the Committee, it decided to not seek a reference to the Committee on Privileges—I guess because it thought that it was just too cumbersome and tedious a process. We probably need to make this process simpler, and to not necessarily require a Committee of the whole House to do it.

The Government response to the e-petitions says:

“It is an important principle of the UK Parliament that Members of Parliament are accountable to those who elect them. It is absolutely right that all Members of Parliament are fully accountable to their constituents for what they say and do and this is ultimately reflected at the ballot box.”

Well, yes—sort of. I am conscious that I represent the Rhondda, the only seat in Parliament that has been Labour since 1885, although it is being redrawn at the next election. My point is that some MPs are more accountable to their electorate than others. We have a first-past-the-post system, which means that many MPs are sitting in very safe seats, and so are not as accountable. That is why it is all the more incumbent on the whole House to take these issues very seriously. We cannot just leave these issues to the ballot box.

Various ways of sorting out the issue have been suggested. One is that the Speaker should intervene and decide. I regularly see people on Twitter condemning poor old Lindsay for not having told off such-and-such a Minister for lying. That is not fair. We cannot have the Speaker decide on the accuracy or inaccuracy of comments made by any Member of the House; that way madness lies. I fully support not giving that power to the Speaker; it would be unfair.

There is an argument that there should be a criminal offence of lying, and I understand that. However, I used parliamentary privilege to make allegations about Roman Abramovich in the Chamber, which I think enabled the Government to proceed with eventually sanctioning him under the Ukraine sanctions regime. I am sure that he has very expensive lawyers and would have sought a criminal prosecution. I think I was doing the right thing, and operating under another principle: the principle that all Members should speak without fear or favour. That is of course guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, which says in article IX that no proceeding in Parliament should be questioned or impeached in any court of law, or in any other place. That guarantees that we cannot be sued in other places for the things that we say in Parliament. It is important that we maintain that; otherwise, he would have been seeking some kind of criminal prosecution of me. We MPs need to use that power judiciously and carefully, and I admit that I have sometimes got that wrong. However, we need that power in place to ensure that we have a fully functioning system.

A further point to make about a criminal offence is that it will not deal with what happens outside Parliament. It would be difficult to start having MPs brought to court for what they may or may not have said on Twitter or whatever, unless they were inciting violence or breaking another law.

We must also bear in mind that sometimes two people can, quite legitimately, read the same event completely differently. I use the Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—as an example. Matthew and Luke have completely different versions of the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain; they differ on whether Jesus is standing up or sitting down; on whether it is “Blessed are the poor” or “the poor in spirit”, and so on. That is a frivolous remark in one sense, but I am being deadly serious. I really do not want the courts—and, for that matter, the police—to spend all their time analysing whether something is proportionate, deliberate, and so on. That is why I am not in favour of a criminal offence. However, I do think that the offence of misconduct in public office is ripe for reform. It has been around for a very long time. It is rarely used. I am not aware of it ever having been applied to a Member of Parliament, but there is an argument that, if a statutory offence of misconduct in public office were introduced, then it should apply to Members of Parliament in certain circumstances.

I have two final points. First, I cannot tell you, Mrs Murray, how many times I have been told, or have heard on television or radio, during this Parliament: “The public doesn’t care about standards in public life. This is all just Westminster tittle-tattle.” I am sorry, but that is so wrong. If we do not care about it, the public certainly do. I gently suggest that the by-elections last week point to a public who genuinely care about standards in public office and lying. Let us not forget that Boris Johnson was referred to the Committee on Standards over what he said about parties in Downing Street; he was not referred to the Committee of Privileges for what he said about Chris Pincher, which was actually what brought him down—but that was another set of lies. There were dozens of different issues that could have been sent to the Committee of Privileges if necessary.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, was absolutely right: the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy, which has done a lot of work on this subject, said that by far the No. 1 thing that it sought in a Member of Parliament was honesty; that is by far the No. 1 quality it wants in a Member. Its favourite option would be to throw Members out of Parliament if they lie to Parliament. With all the caveats that I gave earlier—that we sometimes make mistakes and so on—if a Member refuses to correct the record, that is by definition a wilful misleading of Parliament.

This is my final point. Why does all this matter? In the end, if people start losing trust in democracy, it may lead to them not voting, or to believing, “Well, it is a lot more efficient just to have an autocrat decide,” as has happened in other places in Europe in recent years. We will then have lost one of our fundamental freedoms, and something that makes this country very special. Parliament is on trial. The linchpin of that is about whether MPs tell the truth or lie; whether we—the rest of the House—care when a Member lies; and whether we do anything about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I thank my friend, the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day), for bringing these e-petitions before us. It has been really interesting to hear the previous speakers. Westminster Hall has the advantage of being a place where you feel as though you are actually debating something, rather than just standing up and saying a series of words. It is disappointing that there are so few of us here, although I understand the circumstances, given the statement being made in the Chamber.

Others have touched on partygate. It is timely that “Partygate” was broadcast by Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago, though this debate is over a year later than anticipated. “Partygate” reminded people—we saw this played out in the recent by-elections—of the real, visceral shock at how many people behaved during covid. It was like a slow disaster movie. There was shock that people were behaving in a completely different way from us, at a time when we had taken the Prime Minister on his word and given up our liberties. People were not just breaking the rules, but dispensing with the truth when justifying their actions.

During the conference recess, we heard claims about a meat tax, about proposals for seven different bins in which to separate out our refuse, and about people purporting to be gay to gain asylum. We were even given what we were told were concrete spending plans for HS2, only to be told, conveniently a couple of days later, that those plans were actually illustrative. How can people believe what they are told under such circumstances? In Wales, some politicians have dubbed the 20 mph legislation a “blanket” rule, but in my county, there are 85 exceptions to it, so how can it be a monolithic imposition—unless what we have here is not a nuanced interpretation of various political standpoints, but lying for the sake of division and to stoke emotions? If it is that in action, we need to take a step back and ask where it will land us.

As a number of hon. Members mentioned, I tabled a private Member’s Bill that would make it an offence for politicians to wilfully lie to the public. Like many private Members’ Bills, it is an opportunity to talk about the gravity of the situation and the pros and cons of what we can do to address it, and I think that everyone who has spoken so far agrees that the situation needs to be addressed. The Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill would bring Parliament in line with 21st century standards, and make it an actionable offence for MPs, Members of devolved legislatures, police and crime commissioners, and elected Mayors wittingly to lie in their public statements, including in their public pronouncements on social media, in podcasts, and in broadcasts and printed election material. If found guilty, they could face an unlimited fine and be banned from standing for election for up to 10 years. Yes, those would be serious sanctions, evidently, but the question is: what sort of sanctions will bring about change? The Bill provides safeguards to ensure that only those who wilfully lie are held to account, and that police time is not wasted on frivolous tit for tat or malicious accusations, and of course national security concerns would be safeguarded.

As hon. Members have mentioned, we all make mistakes, but we do not have a culture that drives the admission of having made mistakes. We are penalised more for admitting our mistakes than we are for correcting them, and that is, to a degree, self-perpetuating. My party has been calling for such an Act for a long time. The Member of the Senedd Adam Price, who was the MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, back in 2006 presented a Bill relating to misleading the public over the illegal war in Iraq. It is astonishing that, 17 years later, nothing has changed. A 2022 survey by Compassion in Politics found that 73% of people supported my Bill, including 71% of Conservative voters and 79% of Labour supporters, and the e-petitions show that there is real public support for accountability and integrity, and that purposeful dishonesty and deception should have consequences.

That brings me to the question: why legislation, rather than a protocol? I was holding myself back earlier and not intervening, because I thought, “I will talk about this, so I’ll do it with a bit more decorum and dignity, and at a better pace.” First, let us remember that there is consumer protection legislation about the description of goods and services and, of course, advertising. What is advertising but another industry, alongside politics, that deals in influencing people? When it comes to what is true, and what is unacceptable falsehood, we should endeavour to control how we influence people. Why legislation rather than protocol? Because gentlemen’s agreements work only between gentlemen who play by the rules. When there is a culture of disapplying the rules from people who consider themselves to be, let us say, world kings, we need something more robust than codes of conduct. The ministerial code is, in essence, as strong as the political stature of the Prime Minister.

We have heard about the role of the Committee of Privileges, and I think the phrase used was that it can be cumbersome and tedious. We have seen Ministers referred to previous Prime Ministers. I must say that this also happens with the First Minister in Cardiff. In both instances, there is the same risk of party considerations and immediate political priorities overriding the common ethical good. That holds true in both places.

Recent events have shown that we need to take greater preventive steps to safeguard against polluting public discourse with blatant untruths. I believe that in a democracy, this should be a collective action enshrined in law, not a privileged act of patronage, granted or withheld on the grounds of party political interests. Why does all this matter? To me, it is because politics is ethics in action. The alternative, if we do not safeguard that, is that it becomes self-interest in action. Diolch yn fawr iawn.