Is removing a disgraced MP going to get easier?
As the parliamentary career of Eric Illsley stutters to its inglorious end, Westminster suddenly realised that it was - at least technically - possible for a convicted expenses cheat to remain in the Commons, if they were sentenced to less than a year in clink.
The idea of zombie MPs, discredited and shunned, shuffling around Westminster for years after their release from prison is an appalling prospect for those labouring to rebuild the reputation of Parliament.
The Commons does have a rarely-invoked power to expel members but the Coalition agreement also includes a promise to give the voters a power of "recall" for use against errant MPs. It promises a power to trigger a by-election where an MP is "found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing" and 10% of constituents were to sign a petition. Of course, that brief paragraph raises any number of questions - but we may soon be seeing the government's answers to some of them, in a draft bill which is expected to appear in the next couple of months.
For a start, what constitutes "serious wrongdoing"? Are we just talking about financial/criminal matters? Or could voters recall an MP for doing something with which they strongly disagreed. Certainly, a recall power could well be used on an expenses cheat who was sentenced to lees than a year of custody - removal is pretty well automatic for MPs sentenced to more than a year. But what about an MP jailed for participating in a demonstration or an act of civil disobedience, like ex-Labour MP Terry Fields' refusal to pay the poll tax? Would that constitute "serious wrongdoing"? And most important, who decides?
The lurking worry here is that recall could become a mechanism for jerking the chain of MPs who take an unpopular stand against the grain of constituency opinion - civil libertarians worried about anti-terror laws, sceptics about climate change, whoever. The spectre of hovers over this issue. He was the Conservative MP for Lancaster in the early 1960s, but made himself very unpopular by simultaneously supporting the legalisation of homosexuality and the abolition of hanging. He wasn't recalled, but an unhappy constituency association couldn't bring itself to campaign for him with any enthusiasm, and he lost in the 1964 election, and found himself unable to secure a candidacy in Lancaster or elsewhere.
He paid the price for being an outrider for many of the big social reform causes of the 1960s...but how many MPs would be prepared to champion such causes if the result might be recall before an election?
Recall may be one of a number of issues dealt with in the forthcoming bill - maybe a new code for parliamentary lobbying might be there too. But the pace at which Parliament digests the proposals may be rather more leisurely than it has been with earlier "Clegg" bills. Unlike the Fixed-Term Parliaments Bill and the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill the coalition does not think it's against the clock, so expect pre-legislative scrutiny by a committee of massively senior MPs and peers, followed by a second reading in, perhaps, the 2012-13 session.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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