The Commons Speaker, John Bercow, has said MPs have the right to attempt to block Brexit using the parliamentary process, rather than feeling obliged to vote in line with the referendum result.
In a wide-ranging Q&A, Bercow also referred to the Daily Mail as “the Daily Fail” for its criticism of parliament’s new £7m education centre, though he himself has often been the target of the newspaper’s attacks.
Bercow was the target of a short-lived plot by Conservative MPs to oust him from the role, which he has held since 2009, with several alleging he had failed to be impartial having declared he voted remain in the EU referendum, among other accusations.
Speaking to the Hansard Society, Bercow said it was an “opinion, rather than a constitutional fact” that MPs were obliged to vote through Brexit because of the referendum result.
“There will be some members of parliament who say: ‘I want to be able at the end of all this if I’m not satisfied, to say no, to try to persuade other members of parliament to say no, and to hope that no might delay Brexit or prevent Brexit,’” he said, in comments reported by Politico. “Do they have a right to argue that point of view? They absolutely do.”
Bercow also said he was unconvinced by the current convention that parliament goes into recess for three weeks shortly after the summer break to allow for three weeks of party conferences.
“I have long believed there is a certain incongruity about members disappearing for three weeks a year from their primary workplace,” he said, saying the conferences could “perfectly well take place over a weekend”.
“The idea that we are justified in taking weeks off, just after we’ve come back from the summer recess, so we can go through this palava strikes me as extraordinary,” he said.
Bercow, who has stated his intention to serve another term as Speaker until 2022, was known to have a strained relationship with the former prime minister David Cameron but said things were “much better” with Theresa May, calling her “extremely courteous, decent and dignified”.
“I don’t think it’s a disclosure of state secrets to say that I’ve got better relations with May than I had with Cameron. I always got on well with David when we were tennis partners together in the House of Commons tennis team – but things seem to have regressed somewhat after that,” he said. Relations with fellow Arsenal fan Jeremy Corbyn were also very good, he said.
Bercow also said significant changes needed to be made to the way parliament was run, saying it should be possible to devise a mechanism for MPs themselves to request a recall of parliament, though with safeguards to ensure it could not be abused for narrow political advantage.
“I can see many difficulties, for example, with a procedure that allowed, for instance, 100 or 200 MPs to seek the Speaker’s agreement to a recall as this could be exploited for partisan purposes rather than responding to a genuine urgent situation,” he said. “Indeed, this could put the Speaker of the day in an extremely awkward position.”
One option would be a petition for recall that was backed by at least 163 MPs – a quarter of the total – with at least a quarter of those backing the petition made up of the governing party and at least a quarter of opposition MPs.
“This would ensure both a degree of balance and a testing threshold for a recall bid to cross,” he said. “The house at the end of the day belongs to all of its members and not the minority of it who occupy ministerial office. I think the case for at least a debate in this space is overdue and I hope that it will happen shortly.”
The Speaker said he also wanted to give private members’ bills more chance of being made law, saying there was no more than a meagre opportunity of any more than a handful being made law.
“The talking-out of bills, though done both within our rules and often with destructive skill, has not enhanced the reputation of the house,” he said.
Despite Bercow’s jibe about the Daily Mail, he said he did not see much point in complaining about the media. “Somebody once said politicians complaining about the media are like sailors complaining about the sea – it’s about as productive,” he said.
“The media are there and a very important part of a free society. I would much rather a rude and irreverent and sometimes even rather ill-informed media than a state-controlled media. I do sometimes think their own assessment of the importance of what they communicate is perhaps not quite shared by everybody else.”
