The six week suspension
handed to one of Plaid’s Senedd members has provoked a comparison with the
position at Westminster – in similar circumstances, a Westminster MP would be
facing a recall petition and a probable by-election, but there is no such
sanction available in the case of this list MS. It’s a valid question, but the suggestion
of instituting a similar provision for the Senedd seems to be based on the English
constitutional fiction underpinning the Westminster process, which is that
people vote for an individual, not for a party. In the case of list members,
the vote is unquestionably for the party. And whilst introducing such a
provision for members elected on a closed list is not impossible, it does
rather look like twisting the system, when there is actually a very much
simpler process available.
The recall process
is comparatively novel in the UK’s system, and to date there have only been
five instances of a petition being called. The first of those was in Northern
Ireland, where none of the UK parties operate, and in a constituency which was
not seen then as being particularly competitive – it was widely assumed that the
DUP would win anyway. That petition failed to attract the necessary support of
10% of the electorate. In all other cases, the 10% was reached, and it doesn’t
take a genius to work out why. I doubt that there is a constituency anywhere,
no matter how apparently popular the transgressing MP might be, where a
determined opposition party or parties could not find 10% of the electorate
wanting to get rid of their MP. We can probably, therefore, take it as read
that once a petition is called, it is overwhelmingly likely to be successful.
To date, only in one
instance has the transgressing member stood in the subsequent by-election
(although in another case, the member managed to arrange for his party to select
his girlfriend, a situation which led to a remarkable lack of external support
for her candidacy). The one who did stand again was defeated in the by-election.
Indeed, the idea that an MP who has either been convicted of a criminal offence
or else suspended by his or her fellow MPs for a serious breach of parliamentary rules
would be presented by his or her party as a suitable person for re-election is a
strange one, a form of political madness. Certainly not something likely to be
repeated any time soon.
So, regardless of
the objective of the recall principles (that the electors should be given the
opportunity to call for a by-election and that the individual should have the
opportunity to stand again), the electors are always likely to say yes to a
by-election, and the party is always likely to disown the previous member and
select a new candidate. It is, therefore, in practice if not in principle, a
process where a member in breach of the relevant rules ends up being expelled
from the parliament and replaced by a new member who may or may not be from the
same party. In which case, instead of trying to come up with a complex set of
rules for list members to face by-elections, why not simply cut out the
middleman, and declare that, on conviction (in the case of criminal acts) or
suspension from the parliament for more than a specified period (in the case of
a serious breach of the parliament’s rules or standards), the seat becomes
vacant and the member is replaced through the normal process which would apply
in the case of death or resignation? For a constituency member, that means an
automatic by-election, avoiding the cost, time and effort of a petition, and
for a list member, it means the appointment of the next eligible member on the
relevant party’s list. It’s both simpler and more rapid than the current
process, which seems to have been designed (with a remarkable lack of
forethought) to maximise the chance of the transgressing member being returned
to the club.
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