Parliamentary Standards Bill

I largely agree with what the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) has just said, particularly his early remarks about the haste with which the Bill has been cobbled together. As I said a moment ago, it is a bodge. Bodged Bills tend to lead to bad law and tears before bedtime. I assure you, Sir Alan, that there will be tears before bedtime if the measure gets on to the statute book as it is drafted. I want to say something nice about the Secretary of State for Justice. I hope that it will not accelerate his return to the Back Benches—I said that with my fingers crossed. The Government's Lord Chancellors have appointed members of the judiciary, and not one can be accused of being a political creature. That applies to the current Lord Chancellor and his predecessors as Labour Lord Chancellors. They have performed their functions as party politicians who happen to be Lord Chancellor in an exemplary fashion when making appointments to the judiciary. They even managed to do that with the appointment of a former Labour Solicitor-General, who is now a member of the High Court bench. He performs his judicial functions entirely properly and utterly separately from any previous political allegiance that he may have had. That said, however, it is fair to say that it would in theory be possible for a Speaker, advised by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, to appoint somebody as the Commissioner for Parliamentary Investigations who could carry out his functions in an entirely dispassionate and disinterested way. However, my concern is not so much about the actuality, but about the appearance, because we will not get the confidence of the British public—and certainly not in the current book-burning storm that we seem to be facing—if they think that there has been a parliamentary stitch-up. I happen to think that Parliament ought to be big enough and self-confident enough to manage its own affairs and to discipline its malefactors, as we have done in the past, without feeling ashamed. However, I suspect that the political climate is rather different now and that we now have to have a Bill such as this one. However, if we are to have such a Bill, let us get it right instead of rushing it through and making mistakes that are either unforeseen or foreseeable, but which are none the less mistakes. The Justice Secretary is trying to persuade us that it is important for the independent fees office, as described by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), to be disciplined—or governed or looked after—by an independent functionary. Yet we also see, and not just in schedule 2, which we are discussing, but in other parts of the Bill, various references—[Interruption]—including 20 references to the powers of the Speaker to do things, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) reminds me. We are persuading ourselves that the machinery that the Bill creates is one of independence. However, every time one looks at a clause or a subsection, one sees that the Bill does not produce machinery that is independent of the House of Commons or Parliament, still less of the Executive; rather, it produces one that remains in their grip. I happen to think that that is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is no good for the Government to proclaim that the Bill sets up an independent machinery when we see the fingerprints of the Speaker's office and the Executive on more or less every clause.