Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2026 [Draft]
That was a wonderful pre-prepared line delivered tremendously well, Ms Lindsay. We look forward to much more of that.
The past few weeks have been uncomfortable, difficult and very distressing for many of us—I will not pretend otherwise. No one would believe me if I did. However, I do not think that any of us should pretend that this debate has been anything other than a particularly unedifying spectacle.
The notion of an inquiry that is authorised by Parliament into one party’s finances has now been debated, and it is now for Parliament to decide on that. I hope that Stephen Kerr is not too disappointed, but I will revert back to all the reasons that I laid out in my opening remarks. For the various reasons that I laid out, I urge Parliament to reject the proposition of a parliamentary inquiry, as set out in Mr Sarwar’s motion. I know that Mr Kerr—there are a lot of Kerrs here, so I should refer to them by their first names. Mr Stephen Kerr suggested that it was beneath me to question the motivation for lodging the motion that we are debating today. I merely say that I feel obliged to point out that my cynicism is born out of bitter experience.
I do not think that any of us should pretend that people out there are stupid. People out there will understand perfectly well why the Labour Party lodged the motion, and they will understand perfectly well why Reform UK, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats support it. Those parties want to make political capital. Let us not pretend that it is about anything other than that.
I genuinely believe that it would set a very bad precedent if Parliament established a parliamentary inquiry into the internal workings and finances of an individual political party. That would be a poor decision, and I think that, collectively, we would come to regret it. Colm Merrick was right to set out that, inevitably, we would all seek to return to that process whenever an individual party faced some form of difficulty.
However, today’s debate has demonstrated something important. It has demonstrated that, across the chamber, there is agreement that a serious breach of trust took place. That was a breach by one individual—the former chief executive of my party—of the trust of the members who placed faith in him. However, agreement on the seriousness of that and those events does not justify what is proposed in the motion. We should not establish that a parliamentary committee that is comprised of elected representatives of competing political parties is the right mechanism by which to scrutinise the internal financial operations of one of the parties.