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THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW Highlighting best practice 50 | REVIEW OF PARLIAMENT between elections. The aim was to give voters direct power to kick out MPs guilty of a crime or a major ethical violation. But no recall bill appeared until the final year of the coalition, when concerns about the reputation of Westminster politics resurfaced in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum. The government proposed a system that would open an MP up to recall if he or she were jailed or suspended from the Commons for 21 days or more by the Standards Committee. If 10% of their voters then signed a recall petition, a by-election would be held. This limited recall would apply to cases of criminal or parliamentary misconduct but would not apply, for example, where an MP changed parties or broke an election promise. Worse still, critics said, it relied on rulings by the Standards Committee – a Commons Select Committee – so MPs would be the judges on issues like expenses abuse. The critics' counter-demand was to allow voters to recall an MP by petition, for any reason that would persuade enough of them to sign. And a large cross-party group led by the Conservative Zac Goldsmith threatened to rewrite the Bill along those lines. When the constitution minister Greg Clark launched the Recall of MPs Bill, he faced MPs like the Conservative Andrew Robathan, who thought there was no need to change the law, because several MPs had gone to prison for expenses abuses while others had resigned over ethics violations. So what was the question to which recall was the answer? Labour veteran David Winnick raised the example of Sydney Silverman, who campaigned for decades against the death penalty, and of the MPs who fought to legalise homosexuality – would they have been deterred from pursuing unpopular causes or even removed by recall? And the Conservative backbencher Stewart Jackson quoted the famous dictum of Edmund Burke, who told his voters in Bristol that an MP owed them 'his judgement, and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion'. The trouble with that, Mr Clark pointed out, was that Burke was promptly ejected by those voters. Labour's Frank Field put the opposite case, noting that when he faced deselection by 'Trots' in his constituency Labour Party, his voters had been the bulwark against them. He wanted to make sure 'pernicious lobbies' could not In the wake of the expenses scandal, in 2010 the coalition promised to bring in a system to allow voters to unseat an MP between elections Conservative Zac Goldsmith led a large cross-party group demanding that voters be able to recall an MP by petition, for any reason