Ten Minute Rule Bill: Recall of MPs (Change of Party Affiliation)

Proposed by Anthony Mangnall

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to enable the recall of Members of the House of Commons who voluntarily change their political party affiliation; and for connected purposes. This Bill seeks to update the Recall of MPs Act 2015 with a fourth recall condition: any MP who voluntar… I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to enable the recall of Members of the House of Commons who voluntarily change their political party affiliation; and for connected purposes. This Bill seeks to update the Recall of MPs Act 2015 with a fourth recall condition: any MP who voluntarily leaves the political party they represented upon their election to the House of Commons becomes subject to a recall petition. Such a petition would occur by Mr Speaker giving notice to a petitions officer, who would in turn give notice to the parliamentary electors in the relevant constituency, after which a petition would be open for eight weeks. If at the end of that period at least 10% of the eligible electors had signed that petition, the seat would be declared vacant and a by-election would be held. It is important to note and understand that the petition acts as the safety mechanism to preventing a needless by-election; if our constituents view the action of crossing the Floor as principled and just, the threshold would not be met and the onerous task of holding a by-election would not be undertaken. But should the threshold be met, a by-election would be called and the Member who had been recalled would be able to stand. This is the second time this House has been faced with such a debate. In 2011, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) proposed a similar course of action. Sadly, it did not make progress, but had it done so, I fear that the 2019 parliamentary arithmetic would have been radically different. In the course of my remarks, I hope to be able to build on my right hon. Friend’s points and to respond to some of the counter-arguments made all those years ago by my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), who is now the Father of the House. If any Member has had the pleasure of visiting my constituency, they may well have caught sight of the septic tank cleaning lorry that carries the words “full of political promises” on its side. The lorry neatly encapsulates the all-too-prevalent view that political promises are not worth the paper they are written on and that politicians are not to be trusted. Every generation of politician makes this claim. It was certainly made in 2011, and I am making it nine years later, and I think that I can argue with a greater degree of certainty that it is the case. Last year, 17 Members of Parliament crossed the Floor, leaving the parties they were elected to represent. That was more than had done so in the 16 years previously, and not one of them consulted their constituents. In effect, that disenfranchised the 1.2 million electors across their 17 seats for the duration of that Parliament. Although we are not here to follow every instruction from our party’s leadership—and I should know—resigning from the party we were elected as a representative of to campaign for policies diametrically opposed to the ones we were elected to support is clearly a breach of the spirit of the contract between ourselves and our constituents. That unwritten bond between ourselves and our electors is the reason I am proposing this Bill. I do not presume to judge those who have crossed the Floor. Their actions were based on their own principles and their own values. Previous Members of great repute have done so, including Churchill. However, my ask is that, through this Bill, we can no longer take a decision that ignores our constituents and the value of their vote. In recent years, only a handful of Members have done the right thing by their constituents. Whether one feels strongly about it or not, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, who decided to join the UK Independence party in 2014, still held by-elections and at least gave their constituents a say. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood said, this “should be the rule, not the exception.” —[ Official Report , 23 November 2011; Vol. 536, c. 318.] I am all too aware of the counter-arguments to thi

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