It's Back Again

In the UK the MP's Expenses Scandal has once again reared its ugly head. The latest development came on Friday (05/02) when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that it is going to prosecute three Labour MP's and one Conservative Peer for various offences under the 1967 Theft Act. As major criminality has never been much of a bar to sitting in the House of Lords the Conservative Peer has remained largely silent on the issue. The Labour MP's though, probably with little choice, have announced that they intend to use the defence of "Parliamentary Privilege" to fight the charges.

Unusually in law but pretty typically in British constitutional matters Parliamentary Privilege is not a clearly defined set of rules. Instead it is more of a vague principle that MP's are answerable to Parliament first and the Crown Courts second. The idea of the principle is to prevent the Crown, the Police or, in the case of libel, a private citizen from interfering with the business of Parliament. For example if a voter had been writing to their MP to complain about their local hospital doing something illegal Parliamentary Privilege would prevent the hospital getting a friendly local judge to issue a warrant forcing the MP to hand over the letters from the voter and the details of any possible action that was going to be taken against the hospital. Likewise if Parliament was voting on a law that would cut the police's pay by 90% Parliamentary Privilege would stop the police arresting MP's on false charges in order to stop them voting for the bill.

Although Parliamentary Privilege in no way exempts MP's from the law of the land and was never intended to help them escape legitimate prosecution in this case I think the MP's have a point. That is Parliament should have been allowed to vote on whether to allow the prosecutions long before any judge was able to issue an indictment.

Quite apart from dragging the reputations of Britain's MP's even further into disrepute this new twist in the expenses scandal creates a whole new set of problems for the Northern Irish Devolution/Peace process. The idea of Parliamentary Privilege was invented at the end of England's last civil war. Its purpose was to reassure the Republicans in the House of Commons that the Crown and its Loyalists in the House of Lords would no longer be able to control the activites of the House of Commons by jailing, murdering and generally harassing its members.

The amount of control that the Crown will have over Northern Ireland's devolved Parliament is a massively inflammatory issue. The Loyalists obviously want the Crown to have as much control as possible because they'd rather not have any sort of devolved Parliament. However if there is too much control by the Crown it would stop it being a devolved Parliament and just be another form of direct rule by the Crown putting the Republicans back where they were at the start of the Troubles. To make matters even worse Parliamentary Privilege is outlined in the English Bill of Rights which was introduced under the reign of King William of Orange. Apparently he's considered quite an important figure by Orange Order of Northern Irish parading fame.

In case you haven't worked it out by now the first court hearings in the expenses case are scheduled for the first week in March. That means that amid much argument a court will be ruling on Parliamentary Privilege* days before voters in Northern Ireland go to the polls in the devolution referendum.






*In itself that's insane because if a court is able to rule on Parliamentary Privilege then clearly Parliamentary Privilege doesn't exist.