Privileges Committee Special Report

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that clarification. I agree with her; she is quite right. The report also emphasises the significant personal impact that the campaign had on Members who were simply trying to perform their duties. They should not have been subject to such treatment.

It has hitherto been understood that Members should refrain from interfering in the work of the Privileges Committee, but that was ignored. Explicit protections are already in place for House of Commons standards cases involving alleged breaches of the code of conduct for MPs. When it comes to those cases, Members are prohibited from lobbying the Committee on Standards, the Independent Expert Panel or the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. It seems evident from this episode that those safeguards should also be applied to privileges cases.

The claims that the changes would restrict Members’ free speech are misguided. Members already have the right to object, to vote and to raise conflicts of interest regarding Committee appointments, as well as to vote against or amend referral motions, to provide evidence, to comment on procedure and to publicly discuss the final report after its publication.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

On the issue of being able to comment, can the hon. Lady define for me what “impugn the integrity” means for what people can say?

[Deidre Brock]

Forgive me, but the hon. Gentleman is going to have to elaborate a little further.

[Richard Fuller]

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will repeat the question. The hon. Lady was talking about the ability to comment, and one of the report’s key recommendations is that Members should not

“impugn the integrity of that Committee”.

Can she define for me what constitutes impugning integrity?

[Deidre Brock]

For goodness’ sake, that is a ridiculous question. It is clear from the annex attached to this report what impugning the integrity of the Committee means and what it does not. The comments in the report were jaw-dropping. I was shocked that anybody could make such claims when the Committee was in the process of its inquiry.

Getting on to that very point, there are appropriate channels to make our views heard during investigations, and the thing is—Members on the Government Benches do not appear to appreciate this—that this whole saga has further undermined the public’s faith and trust in not just this place, but in democracy itself. It can only fuel the existing sense of cynicism and frustration that we see across society in the UK today.

Boris Johnson was shown to have lied to the House and to the Privileges Committee, yet some of his most ardent supporters sought to interfere, undermine and attack the integrity of the Committee and its work. It seems appropriate, as I said, to consider whether such campaigns should result in disciplinary action. It is no wonder the public are scunnered with it. This whole saga has undermined people’s faith in this place and in democracy itself. The Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet were not here for the vote on the Committee’s findings on Johnson, and the Government Front Bench is sadly looking pretty empty again today. As one of my constituents put it to me in a surgery just days ago, “If those at the very top won’t bother observing or even showing their support for the rules, why should we?”. That leads us to a dangerous place indeed. We support the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris). Not for the first time, she has spoken with great integrity on an issue and opened my eyes to a slightly different point of view, and I am very grateful to her. May I echo her thanks to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the Chair of the Committee? Let me take her back to 2010, when I joined the House for the first time and she gave the new Members’ speech. She spoke of what a great privilege it is to be in this House and of its great standards. I recall those messages even now, 13 years later. I would like to disassociate myself from the comments of people here who would in any way wish to impugn her integrity, in this role or in any other while she has been in this House.

I have made it a rule not to participate in any of the somewhat introspective debates on privileges or standards to date, and I will probably wish that I had maintained that record by the end of these remarks. I am not a lawyer. I have not read, and have no desire to read, “Erskine May”. I am just a Member of Parliament and so I have to find my way along as we manage these rules. It is in that context that I hope Members of the House will listen to me.

I was inspired by the opening comments of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. In her well-chosen words, she summarised where the House as a whole—perhaps not everyone—is on this. As the shadow Leader of the House is now back in her place, may I mention that I was a bit in despair about her comments? I feel they opened her up to people having a perception, which she perhaps did not wish to convey, that there was some partisan benefit from those comments and that this was a party political issue and not in the round a matter for all MPs, regardless of their party. I will mention that again in a minute. I thank all members of the Committee. As has been said, being on it is not an easy appointment.

[Michael Fabricant]

rose—

[Richard Fuller]

No, not yet; I may come back to my hon. Friend.

As a regular MP, for me, and I think for many, the habit or custom is that we accept standards or privileges reports in this House without contention. I feel that because I do not see all the evidence. I was not in there for the discussion, so I have to rely upon the good integrity of our colleagues who were. Therefore, it is rare that I would vote against; I broke a three-line Whip on Owen Paterson and I know that some colleagues in the House today did likewise. I had to swallow a lot of disagreement with the report on our former Prime Minister and vote for the report on Boris Johnson. To take the shadow Leader of the House back to this, it concerns me—it is a suspicion; I do not know this for a fact—that, on the last vote on Boris Johnson, a vote was engineered on the report and there was not a willingness for there to be a debate. May I caution hon. Members? I think that today’s sentiment is that we are going to have a good talk about this—we will agree and disagree—but there is not much willingness for us to engineer or to have a vote. We should look poorly upon any Member of this House who seeks to engineer a vote for partisan reasons.

Let me explain the depth of my concern about that. I wish to support all of what the Privileges Committee and the Standards Committee say—it is very important that we do that. However, we have increased the level of sanction available to those Committees, given the changes that were put through this House about eight or nine years ago on voter recall. We are giving those Committees not just the ability to judge our behaviour, but the sanction to remove someone from the House. That is another concern as to why we should not allow these processes to fall into partisan issues.

I am still confused—if I am honest, because I am not a lawyer—about the difference between interfering and opining, and about the definition of “impugning the integrity”. We say, “You know it when you see it; it has that sense that you sort of know.” So we have a self-regulating observation. My concern is that decisions on whether the Committee has been impugned are made by the Committee itself. It would decide whether it felt it had been impugned and then make that recommendation to us as a House of Commons to advise whether we agreed with it or not. However, if our habit is ordinarily to agree with the report, there is really no way to work out whether someone has been impugned or not. As may have been said in this House already, if we look through some of the specific examples—I understand that there are others—we see that some may not fit everyone’s definition of “impugning integrity”. Both in the phrasing and, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said, in the fact that it does not accord in respect of the Standards Committee and the way it is interpreted, there are major issues with that part of this.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

The hon. Member is making a good point about the point at which what one person says impugns someone else. Does he agree that a good guide is often the harm principle? All of us in this place support completely, I think, the concept and the actuality of freedom of speech, but when that harms or is unfair to others, it has to be regarded as unacceptable in its effect. The freedom of speech to criticise the Committee to the point where that undermines the Committee, this House and, by its nature, democracy is unacceptable.

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point, although I have two contentions with it. First, on the specifics, the point I was making is that the determination of whether that constitutes harm is put in a report by the people concerned, which then comes back here for us to support, so there is very little review. Secondly, an interesting underlying issue is that we are living through a period when harm is being interpreted differently. The way that people who are much younger than me appreciate how harm is done is different. The amount they are prepared to take on themselves—rather than to say, “Well, that’s just the way the world is,” and not to see it as harm—is much less than it was in my day. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, but it is different for different generations. That is another aspect of how to assess what is harmful, and we are going through such a fluid period that it is difficult.

But the hon. Lady is right: ultimately, I think we would agree, the message today, at the core of this, is to use temperate language. When I came back to the House in 2019, one thing I noticed was how much more coarse political discourse had become in just the two-year period that I was away. It was not just because of the divisions over Brexit or social media; it was also because we were tolerating it. We have a responsibility in this House to oppose that. That is why it is good when we talk across the divide in this House and find agreement, and why that Committee, in cross-party agreement among individuals, was something that we could rely on. The lesson is about using temperate language.

I share the concerns of my colleagues about some of the recommendations. Not only are they difficult to see working in practice, but there will be chilling effects on free speech. We will have to see whether that is the case. I am not defending what was said; I just worry that someone like me, who does not know the law or “Erskine May”, will feel that there are certain things that I may not be able to say, but which perhaps in the past I was —although there are perhaps ways to give reassurances on that.

[Lia Nici]

Does my hon. Friend not believe that there has already been a chilling effect? When we debated the fifth Privileges Committee report, some colleagues were too scared to come here and speak, because they were put under threat by other Members of the House. I was one of only four who dared to come out and express a different opinion, and ensure that we had a rounded debate.

[Richard Fuller]

I hear what my hon. Friend has said. I do not know whether people would say that, but that should clearly not happen in this House. All Members should have the right, and the willingness, to speak without fear or favour. But when I protest about that, I should equally defend that right for members of the Committee. They should be able to look at the issues that they wish to review without fear or favour.

My concern with the motion is that it is perhaps a little too overreaching in what it seeks to do, and is not well structured in its solution and remedies. It has opened up questions that probably need further investigation by other Committees, so that we can achieve something that ultimately provides all Members of this House with clarity on how they should behave and communicate with one another.