Fisking Gerald Kaufman

A response to Sir Gerald Kaufman's article in The Guardian which you can read here.

"I am getting increasingly worried about the mental condition of the House of Commons".

A cheap shot, to which I shall resist the obvious cheap riposte. Instead I shall merely note that it is Sir Gerald who has started off his article by descending to questioning the mental stability of those who take a different view from him about the importance of an issue. A classic New Labour smear tactic once deployed by the Blairites against Gordon Brown himself.

"I do not refer to individual MPs. Most of them are sensible and hard-working. I am talking about the Commons as a collective, which seems these days to be carrying self-absorption into the realm of solipsism."

Ditto.

"This week we have had two ministerial statements about welfare reform. Attendances in the chamber were respectable, but no more. On Monday there was a debate about the rights of MPs, and the chamber was crammed. The welfare statements affect the lives of millions. The debate about the arrest of a Tory MP and the police search of his parliamentary office was of scant relevance to anyone outside Westminster."

MPs would not be human if they were not concerned about something that directly affects them, but that doesn't mean they were wrong. The rights and privileges of parliament, like the rights of equivalent bodies in every other country, were hard fought for, and need to be defended in every generation, not because MPs themselves are important, but to defend their ability to stick up for everyone else.

There was a time when Labour MPs and campaigners understood that. 29 of them still do, but Sir Gerald Kaufman clearly does not. And when a party gets so used to being in office that they forget it, they are in need of being reminded about the need to protect the rights of parliament through a spell in opposition.


"In the debate I quoted the statutory justification for what the police did. This stimulated Conservative MPs into a paroxysm of rage, which I found amusing rather than alarming, since what particularly aroused their frenzy was my citing the section of the Tories' 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act which permitted the search."

Gordon Brown was not arrested and did not have his office searched in 1985, the year after that act was passed, after openly boasting in a TV interview with Frank Bough of having done more or less what Damian Green was accused of. Nor was Robin Cook or any of the other Labour MPs who produced leaked documents while the Tories were in office. So the Conservatives can reasonably argue that they neither used the 1984 act in the way it was deployed against Damian Green, nor imagined that it would be used that way under any future government.

The one point Sir Gerald may have is that if the act can be used in that way, there may well be a need to amend it.


"An opinion poll published the next day stated that 56% of those responding said they had not followed the matter closely enough to express a strong view, while 45% thought it was a typical Westminster argument that bore no relation to the lives of ordinary people."


In the middle of dire economic circumstances the majority of the electorate can be forgiven for being more worried about where the next pound's coming from, whether their job is safe, how to keep up the payments on the mortgage etc. That does not mean that other concerns are of no long-term significance.


"People confined in closed institutions can tend, if circumstances provoke, to become self-absorbed to the point of the irrational. Such a state of mind can arise in an army camp, a prison, a boarding school, or a parliamentary building."

E.g. in the parliamentary Labour party.


"We are called the House of Commons for a very good reason. We do our best to represent our constituents but we, rightly, have no status that inflates us above our constituents. We, rightly, unlike MPs from some other countries, have no immunity from arrest. If we travel abroad on Commons business, we do not get diplomatic passports and, again rightly, go through immigration control exactly as experienced by those we represent. Though the confidentiality of our correspondence with our constituents is indispensable, it exists by convention rather than being enshrined in statute or standing orders. In theory we have the right of access to ministers, but sometimes we struggle for that access."

All the more reason not to let the Executive get above themselves.


"Our only true rights are that we cannot be sued for slander for what we say in the Commons chamber, nor for libel for the content of early day motions we table. I believe this state of affairs is right and proper. I value the letters MP after my name, but do not believe this should give me an elevated status; and this is what the Damian Green affair is about."

It's not about elevated status for MPs beyond the protection required to let them do their job and protect their consituents.


"He has been arrested and questioned. There is no doubt that the police had the right to do what they did, and to become agitated about this is to seek to place MPs above their constituents."

And if the law were generally used that way, half the journalists in the country, most opposition spokesmen, and many backbench opposition MPs, would reguarly have been arrested. Including most of the senior members of the present government when they were in opposition.

Being agitated about this is not seeking to place MPs above their consituents, it is wanting to make sure we have an effective opposition and do not become the sort of country where people who embarrass the government are subject to arrest.


"The Police and Criminal Evidence Act gives the police the right to search the property of anyone arrested on an arrestable offence and, if the police arrested Green on an arrestable offence, they had the right to do what they did. I think the Speaker of the Commons, the lack of respect to whom by some MPs I find disturbing, bent over backwards in insisting that in future a search warrant should be required. I do not believe that the self-aggrandising inquiries announced by two Commons select committees are in the slightest degree necessary."

I would wager the shirt off my back that if Gordon Brown or Robin Cook had been arrested in a similar manner when the Conservatives were in office, Sir Gerald Kaufman would have considered an equivalent inquiry to be very necessary indeed.


"The debate on Monday, in which some MPs wallowed in preening self-importance, showed the Commons at its worst."

No, with 29 honorable exceptions, it showed the Labour party at its worst.

"The Tories have failed to turn the Damian Green arrest into a resonant political issue. The people of Britain care about their jobs, their homes, their savings, their pensions, climate change, poverty and disease in the developing world. It is these matters that should have the attention of those lucky enough to have MP after their names."

Those matters should have the attention of MPs, but so should the ability of parliament to hold the executive to account. Without that power they will ultimately not be able to do anything effective about the issues Sir Gerald mentions or anything else.

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