Sorry - I meant to say that privilege doesn’t give you *blanket *immunity. And it is something to be very careful with - my gut feel is that in this country we’re more likely to give our MPs too much privilege than we are to bully them out of doing their jobs.
As far as the DPP goes, I’m in two minds about that. Generallly, they’re not meant to get involved until the police feel they’ve got enough evidence to prosecute - but if the police are at that stage investigating an MP, they don’t need to search his office. So why involve them for MPs when you wouldn’t for an ordinary citizen? On the other hand, this is a sensitive issue and I can see that even the police at this stage would be particularly glad of the reassurance that an independent authorisation would give.
For me, PP is given to help MPs hold the government to account. But that shouldn’t go as far as conspiring to breach the law*. So if the police have good reason to believe that an MP has done that, it’s absolutely fair enough that they be able to pursue that inquiry. There may need to be safeguards regarding legitimately confidential information that they may come across during the search, but that shouldn’t stop the search happening in the first place.
*Let’s not forget, MPs wrote the law, and can re-write it. If they truly find that it hampers their ability to their job, they are in a unique position to do something about it.
Well, I think holding the government to account is only part of the motivation for PP (the principle of freedom of speech in the Commons is rather more broadly purposed), but anyway: if you’re saying that it’s fine to receive leaks but not fine to conspire to receive leaks, this seems like a rather glaring weakness in the principle of accountability. It’s rather like copyright laws assigning fair use rights, but then a separate law making it illegal to circumvent a protection method even to gain fair use. How does one define “grooming” (to use the ludicrous term chosen by the Police)? Have leaks previously just fallen from the sky? Of course not. People in Westminster know people in Westminster, pretty unavoidably, and people will leak to people they trust, and know will be interested in the information being leaked. So where does the line get drawn for incitement?
The question of consistent application also arises. Is what Green has done really any different from what MPs have done since time immemorial? From the chorus of cross-bench dismay, it would seem that he has not, unless some rush of information not currently in evidence is released. So if you’re not uniformly enforcing the law, why not? Why start now, and in such dramatic fashion?
I’m not saying the answers to any of these questions are clear-cut, but unless this case turns out to be very unusual (which it doesn’t appear to be at present), then you’ve got to say there’s been a rather large shift in policy, which requires explanation. Like I say, this is all extremely muddy, and will almost certainly precipitate a large report from the Privilege Committee.
When you’ve got David Blunkett (who never saw a civil liberty he didn’t hate*) describing the arrest as “overkill”, something has to be a bit whiffy.
The politicisation of the police happened when they became Thatcher’s willing and able Storm Troopers during the miners strike and continued all through the 80’s.
One of the big problems I have is that speech in the House of Commons is privileged. But to make such speech, the MP needs to do their research, which, of course, requires documentation. Therefore such documentation needs to be similarly privileged within the House. Otherwise we’d have the idiocy of an MP being charged or sued for having the draft of a speech.
Well, in the last couple of days we’ve had revelations that a) the Police didn’t have a warrant for searching Green’s Parliamentary office, b) they didn’t mention this fact to the Parliamentary authorities (in breach of the law), and c) said Parliamentary authorities completely failed to even ask about the minor matter of a warrant. So that aspect of the story looks pretty cack-handed. Michael Martin comes out of this looking pathetic, and will be on his way out soon, I’ll bet money on it (he was hardly popular to start with). And I think we’ll end up with a much clearer set of Parliamentary Privileges, after a year or two of wrangling.
You forgot the bit about him blaming the whole thing on the Sergeant-at-Arms. Who may well be culpable, but it’s rather churlish to publicly upbraid one of your immediate subordinates.
The police seem to have released the full textof the letter they sent to the Home Secretary regarding the search.
The two key points seem to be that
a) you only need a warrant if you believe that consent to search will not be given
b) the police visited the Serjeant At Arms the day before the search, explained the right to withhold consent and recieved written consent on the day of the search
The letter quotes the law regarding searches and warrants at length, and so a) seems pretty clear cut. B) looks like it might devolve into a case of “he said, she said” but the police certainly seem to be confident about their position.
Interesting - that directly contradicts what Martin said (albeit at second hand), and makes both him and the Serjeant at Arms look even more ineffectual if true. The decision by the Police to actually arrest Green is looking more and more interesting, too. Sounds like they barrelled ahead with little or no input from the CPS, having been knocked back by them during the cash for honours affair.
It goes without saying that the Conservatives still believe this all traces back to the Government in some manner, and given Jacqui Smith’s neither-here-nor-there response to the whole thing I’m starting to wonder whether they’re not right. I can’t imagine Gordon being the sort of person to take leaks equably.
All in all it’s exactly the right sort of silliness to take everyone’s minds off financial meltdown for a week or two.