And yesterday’s vote was not the first time the UK government has shown disregard for the decisions of bodies who regulate conduct in public office. The prime minister ignored the independent adviser on ministerial interests when it was found that Priti Patel had breached the ministerial code. He disregarded the House of Lords appointments commission when it recommended against conferring a peerage on Tory donor Peter Cruddas. He has failed to take action concerning a number of other allegations of misconduct relating to his cabinet.
Kangaroo court
Then on Wednesday in Parliament, the government initiated a vote to rubbish the findings of Parliament’s established and internationally respected system for regulating parliamentary conduct.
In doing so, it also overturned a rule that has been a key tenet of British democracy since 1695: that elected members of Parliament must not engage in paid advocacy. The effect of the vote seemed to be that the UK no longer banned members of Parliament from lobbying on behalf of paying clients. And it no longer had a functioning system for judging whether members of Parliament have breached the code of conduct.
The vote removed the keystone from the norm architecture of British standards – and it looked like democracy was about to crumble. My pessimism peaked afterwards as some members of the government gloried in their ‘achievement’ and continued to bash away at the system by, for example, insisting on the resignation of the embattled parliamentary commissioner on standards, a respected professional who has performed her public role with care and precision.
I was about to conclude that the UK had indeed slipped the embrace of its democratic history and was heading into the depths of state capture.
Then an alert appeared on my phone: Johnson had U-turned. The vote on Paterson’s suspension will go ahead. The proposed kangaroo court for reviewing his case and the parliamentary standards system will be scrapped.
What happened?
It seems that those long-established norms meant something after all. The country fought back. Ordinary people wrote to their MPs by the thousands. The few Tories who had voted against the motion were lauded and championed.
And this morning, the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, a former head of MI5, gave a speech in which he called the move “an extraordinary proposal…deeply at odds with the best traditions of British democracy.” Ouch. Allowing for British understatement, that is a sharp slap in the face of the Johnson administration.
On Wednesday, it seemed as if the keystone of British democracy had been removed. By Thursday morning, it had been put back. But with so many attempts to chip away at other parts of the system ongoing, the structure still looks worryingly fragile.
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