T his is what Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England says: ‘That
individual members should not be called to account for their behaviour in Parliament, or for words there spoken, by any authority external to the house in which the offence was given, seems to be the essential safeguard of freedom of debate. It was the boon guaranteed by the king to the Speaker when he accepted him, under the general term, privilege.’ This is still the case, but people don’t understand it any more. They keep thinking that some external authority should control MPs. They do not realise that, if this happened, they would be taking away their own power, which resides in the men and women they have elected, and giving it to unelected people. You cannot have a free Parliament if you do that. But this truth, I fear, only makes the behaviour of the present Speaker, Michael Martin, even worse than the critics think. Since the Speaker is the guardian of parliamentary privilege (that is what he Speaks for), he should be unbelievably strict in insisting on its essence and repudiating its, ahem, frills — exploiting your constituency office allowances, charging up your wife’s taxis, or spreading your officially earned air miles round your warm extended family. If the Speaker won’t, who else can? But of course Mr Martin won’t, can’t. It would be wrong for him to be voted out, since that would set a precedent for war within Parliament about who presides over it; but it would be a good thing if he slipped quietly away. His successor should be the one who tells MPs honestly how near they have come to self-ruin, and promises to reclaim their true rights — to make proper laws without government guillotine, to scrutinise European legislation as fully as other laws, to choose the heads of committees without reference to whips, etc. Speaker Lenthall, faced with Charles I’s demands for the five Members in 1642, famously told him, ‘I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me.’ He did not add, ‘Nor fingers in the till.’ The House must hurry up and be pleased to direct a fit person.
Mr Speaker Martin’s failure is partly attributable to his original decision to refuse to wear the traditional wig and knee-breeches. The wig, in particular, gave the Speaker the semi-anonymity necessary to remind people that the role, not the person, matters. Perhaps Mr Martin hoped to be respected on his own merits — always a fatal error. This week, ten existing or former MI6 officers are giving evidence at the Diana inquest. The reason they have to do so is almost incredibly thin. Mohammed Fayed imagines that MI6 murdered the Princess of Wales in Paris and that the probable method was flashing lights into the eyes of her driver. According to Richard Tomlinson, the long-running renegade from the service, a plot was hatched by MI6 in the early 1990s to kill Slobodan Milosevic thus. Mr Fayed thinks this proves that he is right. On this basis, the ten officers have to come and explain, as Sir Richard Dearlove has already done, what actually happened: one officer proposed the assassination of a leading Serb (not Milosevic, in fact), possibly by such a method, and his proposal was rejected immediately, as all assassination ideas have been for many years. Possibly this waste of time and public money does not matter much, but the fact is that a secret service is being made to appear in court on a complete wild goose chase. This means that it will be cross-questioned about its methods in ways that could be unhelpful to its work. And it will also tend to make a suspicious minority think that there must be something in Mr Fayed’s allegations for the spooks to have been forced out of the shadows. I know you cannot be a litigant in an inquest, but surely Mr Fayed is a walking definition of what it means to be ‘vexatious’.
Mr H, a correspondent who, like me, has recently received yet another threat from TV Licensing (see previous Notes) for not having a television licence, draws my attention to the claim in his threatening letter that ‘last month alone we caught 32,336 evaders’. I notice that my latest nasty letter (‘Official warning’) lays claim to 24,531 evaders caught in a month. Mr H, like me, is not an evader: he lacks a licence because he lacks a television, but he asks what this huge figure can mean. Does the authority really have 4 million ‘cheats’ in ten years on its files and, if so, what has it done with them? Mr H quotes from a letter he received two years ago in which TV Licensing claimed that ‘last month alone we prosecuted 75 people’, a weirdly small proportion of the allegedly large numbers of criminals. Because Mr H has kept 43 TV Licensing letters over the past four years, he can compare the statistics quoted in different letters. Some letters give the monthly figure for evaders; others give annual ones, and here the numbers are far lower — roughly 50,000 per annum. So is TV Licensing simply making its figures up? Mr H’s latest letter also contains a refinement which mine does not. Stating that Enforcement Officers have been authorised to visit his property ‘in order to determine whether equipment such as the following is being used illegally’, it then lists not only a television, but also ‘a computer’. Presumably this is because some computers can receive television, but it raises the question — what is the TV licence for? Is it for the possession of a television, which is what most people believe, or is it for the right to watch the service which the BBC provides? If the latter, will the licence fee go on forever, whatever the technology? Does TV Licensing have the power to snoop on every computer in the land as well as every television? If so, the bureaucratic logic will be that TV Licensing will demand and be given new powers to hack into the computer of any suspected ‘evader’.
Another reader, Mr L, tells me that he recently bought a television from Peter Jones and three days later received a letter from TV Licensing telling him to go out and get a licence for it. It turns out that retailers of televisions have a legal obligation to inform TV Licensing of the address of each purchaser, though only, so far, of televisions, not of computers. Mr L thinks that this breaches article 8 (concerning privacy) of the European Convention on Human Rights. It would be good to test this.
One of the running jokes in Private Eye used to be a list of benefits from some public service or other which included, inexplicably, ‘grapefruit segments’. Last week, the Labour party emailed me ‘Our 50 top achievements since being elected in 1997’. Achievement no. 50 is ‘Free fruit for most fourto six-year-olds at school’.
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