Wright, Ruffley & Miller, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Back Recall

Particularly ever since the expenses scandal, the idea of recall elections (usually for the Commons) has been doing the rounds. Tory MP Zac Goldsmith has been a particularly vocal advocate and a version made it into all three 2010 manifestos. In 2008, even before expenses, my former Civitas colleague Nick Cowen published the book Total Recall (the print edition is whimsically adorned with an ornate bust of Arnie Schwarzenegger on its front cover). It’s an instinctively popular and logical idea, allowing people to hold their elected representatives to greater account. But nevertheless, I’ve remained resistant to it, or at least I’ve been more favourable to the often-derided Clegg compromise (restricting it to cases involving jail or a finding of “serious wrongdoing” by a Commons committee).

Photo courtesy of: UK Parliament (Flickr)

My basic concerns could be summed-up in a fiery piece Indie columnist John Rentoul penned in June - “This is not democracy, it's an incitement to malice and short-termism. We already have a recall power in the British constitution. It is called a general election”. The overwhelming desire of many to reform our politics has produced some creative ideas, but can also easily lead to simplistic, counterproductive ones taking hold - I’ve feared recall could be one. Though a lack of accountability has been part of the rot at the heart of our politics, so too has been the perception that politicians are self-interested, same-y careerists, unwilling to make tough decisions or be frank with the public. Some innovations are now strengthening stability and long-termism in our politics (the coalition’s fixed-term parliaments, the Armitt Review proposals). But I’ve wondered whether recall would drag us further backwards again, empowering reactionaries and demagogues and making it tougher for individual MPs – especially in marginals - to take the tough choices that governing a country will always involve. I remember raising these concerns with Zac Goldsmith and some other recall supporters in a brief exchange on Twitter in December.

I’ve also been concerned by the abuse of recall in America’s political culture. In Colorado in 2013, recall was used by the NRA to shunt three Democratic state legislators from office, simply because they dared to support post-Sandy Hook gun restrictions. Several were actually sitting in fairly liberal districts, but enthused single-issue pro-gun voters made up a disproportionate share of the small numbers who turned out (the third legislator resigned rather than even face a formal recall, seeing the writing on the wall). In 2011, Democrats themselves weren’t angels with the use of recall, launching a wasteful and ill-fated attempt to defeat Tea Party Republican governor Scott Walker - elected by Wisconsin voters only the year before – mainly due to their own dislike of Walker’s extremely conservative policies (although Walker is now facing prosecution for illegal campaign finance practices). The famous 2003 California recall campaign that replaced embattled Democrat Gray Davis with Arnie started out more as an organised right-wing effort than a spontaneous, nonpartisan citizen’s uprising.  And despite everything I’ve just written, I’ll also admit this; If I lived in a seat with a Tory/LibDem MP and a recall bid was underway, as a Labour supporter I’d still find it very hard not to vote them out for that reason alone, once someone had handed me the chance. I’d suspect the same is true of many others.

However, all the same, there have always been cases where it has been frustratingly hard to hold politicians to account for clear criminality, incompetence, ethical misconduct or dereliction of duty. In 2012, Nadine Dorries temporarily abandoned her constituents to doss off in the rainforest for a reality TV show, and there was nothing they could do. This wasn’t even without precedent – in the 2005-2010 parliament, George Galloway did exactly the same thing with Celebrity Big Brother, and then denied his Bethnal Green voters a second opinion by standing in the neighbouring constituency of Poplar in 2010 (before clawing his way back into the Commons in Bradford). While many expenses cheats stood down in May 2010, and a few resigned on the spot or were even imprisoned, a mechanism to replace more of them immediately would have been desirable. The Maria Miller scandal earlier this year rubbed yet more salt into the public’s wounds about this – though she stood down as Culture Secretary, many questioned her even remaining on as an MP.

Further, instrumental in shifting my own thinking was a July piece on Guido about Mark Ruffley, the wife-beating Tory MP who initially refused to go. Ruffley did cut a deal with his party leadership to stand down, but at the next election, not immediately. Further:

“Guido understands 15 Tory women were going to publicly and openly protest Ruffley’s candidature tomorrow, some of them high profile. They were under immense pressure not to go ahead from within the party.

"Ruffley will remain as the MP for Bury St Edmunds for ten months, earning more than £50,000 from his salary and pension contributions courtesy of the taxpayer when he should arguably be leaving parliament immediately. He cut a deal with the Tories and remains on board the gravy train. A Recall Bill that lets MPs decide whether their fellow MPs will face a vote is not going to work. David Ruffley shows more than ever why we need a proper Recall Bill to democratically boot out morally bankrupt politicians once and for all…“

Then yesterday, with the release of Professor Alexis Jay’s damning report on child sexual abuse in Rotherham, several local officials were forced to resign. However, South Yorkshire’s elected Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Wright, previously the council’s cabinet member for Children’s 0Services from 2005 to 2010 (the time when the failings occurred) is now attracting opprobrium from across the country for failing to follow suit. Yesterday, Wright was forced to resign his membership of the Labour Party under threat of suspension and today, his deputy PCC resigned, calling on Wright to do so as well. But as many are now pointing out, there is currently no further mechanism Labour, South Yorkshire voters or anyone else have at their disposal to make Wright give up his job and £85,000 salary before the next round of PCC elections in 2016. At my time of writing, Wright still hasn’t gone.

I’d also add that although today UKIP defector Douglas Carswell (a leading recall supporter) has been praised for resigning his Clacton seat and committing to fight a by-election, in past, other mid-term defectors have drawn fire for failing to live up to this expectation.  This objection seems fair to me – for all the concerns I have about natural partisan opponents or single-issue campaigners stringing-up MPs for votes or u-turns, voters should have a second say on the all-encompassing issue of what party and government their MP supports, if the person they originally elected has now directly misled them on this (e.g. “Conservative-not-Carswell” voters in Clacton right now).

So, the recall purists have mostly won the battle for my mind, including the need to remove the Commons committee stage from recall - just this year, cases like the Ruffley and Miller affairs have made clear the issues with that. Meanwhile, in the Wright case, even with the entire political establishment uniting against him, Shaun Wright has proven pretty much immovable anyway.

I still wonder what threshold should trigger recall. The current proposal is 20% of the constituency should sign a petition in two months - I wonder whether that’s too low (I’m tempted to say 50.1% so that a full majority would have to want them out, but that’s perhaps too restrictive). But still, minute details aside, citizen recall is an idea whose time has come.