Labour peer should face suspension for bullying security guard – watchdog
The Lords’ Conduct Committee has urged peers to suspend Lord Pendry for a week.
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Your support makes all the difference.Veteran Labour peer Lord Pendry should be suspended for a week for angrily berating a member of security staff in behaviour that amounted to bullying, a standards watchdog has recommended.
Former junior minister Tom Pendry was found by an investigation to have been “verbally aggressive” and exhibited “intimidating behaviour” to the security guard who had challenged an unescorted guest in Parliament.
The guard, who served in the Army, described being left “physically shaken and unnerved” after the “angry” peer challenged them and allegedly grabbed their radio during “a little bit of a tussle”.
The 87-year-old conceded he had “ticked off forcibly” the staff member but criticised security for “flexing their muscles” against politicians in a manner he has not seen in his half-a-century in Parliament.
“I think that normally, you know, it’s like you going to the headmaster and getting the cane,” he told investigators as he hit out at the “bureaucratic” process.
“That would be the end of it. You might feel sore for a while but you would forget it because you have had your punishment. But it has gone beyond that now.”
Lord Pendry urged colleagues to read the whole report before voting on whether to approve the suspension from the House, as recommended by the Lords’ Conduct Committee, when they return from recess later this month.
The security guard, identified in the report published on Thursday as EF, approached one of the peer’s guests on July 6 last year as they were walking unattended near the Lords chamber, having gone to use the toilet.
Lord Pendry said the guest, a university student attending with his mother, was “visibly shaken” after being “frog marched” by the guard, according to the report.
The peer acknowledged EF was “clearly shaken by my having castigated” them, but denied having touched the guard’s radio after demanding their name, describing the charge as “absolute nonsense”. This however was confirmed by a doorkeeper said to have witnessed part of the incident.
“In my mind of the thing, that is assault. You have touched (their) body without (their) consent,” the doorkeeper told investigators.
The report conducted by barrister Akbar Khan, one of the Lords’ standards commissioners, concluded Lord Pendry’s behaviour “amounted to bullying” and broke the code of conduct.
Mr Khan wrote: “It is never acceptable to approach a member of staff in a threatening manner or to touch them without their consent.
“Lord Pendry’s comments about staff ‘flexing their muscles’ against MPs and peers exhibit an attitude which is out of step with the expectation that all members of the parliamentary community are entitled to be treated professionally and respectfully in the workplace, and to seek a remedy when they are not, in accordance with the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme.”
The guard told Mr Khan they have suffered anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their time in the Army, as well as depression, and the incident “had set them back a lot just as they were getting on top of managing it all”.
Lord Pendry, who was an MP for Stalybridge and Hyde in Greater Manchester for 31 years before being given a peerage in 2001, told the PA news agency: “Quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I believe that my colleagues who are very fair-minded will look at the whole report and may well see there’s another side to it.”