Meeting of the Parliament 24 February 2026 [Draft]
I congratulate the member in charge of the bill—and his staff—on getting us to this point.
It has been more than 10 years since commensurate legislation was passed in Westminster. Despite the rhetoric, it is shameful that we are doing this only now—we should have done it at around the same time. Ultimately, the people who send us to Parliament—our constituents, who give us our instructions—are our employer and our boss. Unless we pass this bill, they will not have the means of terminating our employment beyond the normal rhythm of elections. They are our boss. They decide whether we get to stay here and they cannot do so on a whim. The bill rightly builds in safeguards around the thresholds that would trigger an action to remove one of us.
In the time available to me, I will address the criminality aspect of Sue Webber’s amendments. I have had time to consider this aspect further. We should not just have criminality as a trigger for expulsion, because, in the future, we might live in less enlightened times.
I have a lot of sympathy with Lorna Slater’s remarks about peaceful protests. Sometimes, peaceful protests that cross the line of the law are a democratic necessity and imperative. We need only look across the Atlantic at the activities in Minneapolis, where some democratically elected members have tried to obstruct the inhumane activities of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the conduct of their duties. In a black-and-white analysis, those members breached the law, but they were not able to do otherwise because their consciences would not have allowed them to. We cannot be in a situation in which our consciences driving us to take steps that are outside the law would lead to a recall or, as Sue Webber’s amendments would have provided for, an immediate expulsion.
There was another flaw in Sue Webber’s amendments. She pointed out that breaking the law and receiving a custodial sentence would likely result in someone losing any other job. That may well be the case, but it would not be the court that would terminate that employment but the employer, who would do so after assessing the facts as they had them. It would have been inappropriate to include that provision in the bill, because it would have given the final say to the Parliament rather than the people who send us here.
I want to reflect on the fact that my amendment 35 was perhaps the first amendment that I have lodged in my entire parliamentary career of 10 years to have been unanimously agreed to by the Parliament. I am grateful for that and for the chorus of interventions that explored the issue that the amendment raised. I look forward to picking up on the amendment’s provisions in the next parliamentary session. When I tried to introduce them in the previous session, the amendment crashed to utter defeat—by something like 125 votes to four.
We have drawn an important line in the sand. The Parliament recognised that we are omitting to check that the people who stand for election are of the right calibre and probity to work with protected groups, whether that be vulnerable adults or children. We cannot go on like that. There is no question but that, ultimately, in the fullness of time, such an omission will lead to an exploitation of the reach, power, influence and opportunity that we, as parliamentarians, are offered through the privilege that we have in this role.
Reflecting on that in the tea room with Jeremy Balfour, I realised that we need not just ensure that parliamentarians are subject to the disclosure process; that would, in large part, be closing the barn door after the horse had bolted. Instead, we need to provide that, in the vetting process for candidates, parties are expected to ensure that disclosure regimes are applied to those who would seek high office.
As Liberal Democrats, we are happy to support this very democratic bill.