Sleazy Westminster needs an HR department with the power to demand recall votes

You never know, it might just help to restore the reputation of the citadel of sleaze that is supposed to run this country

Do MPs know they’re employed by the people? As public servants – in theory, at least. Occasionally they even pay lip service to it. Will the prime minister come and visit such and such in my constituency? Have you not read my column in the local newspaper about all the village fetes I attend?

But let’s be honest. Half of you laugh at the very idea of public service when you’re getting smashed on subsidised champers in one of the Palace of Westminster’s many bars. Especially those of you in safe seats, where they weigh rather than count the votes and you can get parachuted in if you palled around with the right people at some big college, even if the only real connection you have to the place you represent is having driven through en route to your summer home in Cornwall – which you bought with your lawyer’s salary, helping to price the locals out.

That one’s partly on us for voting for the numpties the big parties like to put up. Only partly, though, and as for the turning of parliament into a perv’s pantomime? That’s on you.

It really is high time it was changed. Bad apples? They’ve made the whole pie taste rotten. So step up. Act. Create an HR department, a staff handbook, and a modern workplace – and get started now. What’s that? I hear someone dribbling about parliament being “sovereign”?

Give it a rest, already. Hoary old cliches don’t give MPs licence to feel up whomever they want, whenever they want, and get away with it. Not to mention the dirty dealings and all the financial shenanigans.

It’s no wonder the general secretaries of Prospect and the FDA have written to the speaker (again) about the “seemingly endless list of allegations of sexual misconduct by MPs, leading to the extraordinary public statement by Luke Pollard MP that Parliament is ‘not a safe place to work.’”

Will they get a response this time, Mr Speaker? Or will you just sit on your hands until such time as, I don’t know, a female MP brings their baby into the chamber. The horror of that. Have Black Rod march her off to the dungeons. Or at least the creche, which we are told is “a bright and modern facility with capacity for 40 children”. There’s even a picture of a diverse group of smiling women to illustrate it on the parliamentary web page. Presumably that was put there for the same reason that BP and Shell like to put pictures of trees on their websites.

We realise that an HR department isn’t a panacea and that they aren’t always up to snuff in the private sector. They inevitably tend to cleave to the whims of bosses while coddling big and powerful “rainmaker” employees.

But the fact that they have to be mindful of employment tribunals, which take a dim view of those that don’t follow their own procedures, does help to inculcate a degree of professionalism where they operate. Professionalism that has clearly been absent from a legislature where power imbalances abound and there is no meaningful check on them beyond the media’s interest in stories about dirty MPs.

Yes, there is now a grievance procedure. The Independent Complaints and Grievance Service, which is “the first of its kind in any parliament in the world”, according to the website. There’s no diverse group of happy parliamentary employees pictured. But the snapper’s on the way – when we can find one who doesn’t object to getting felt up on the job.

If one of us voters acts up at work, violates company policy or whatever, we’ll get called up before HR where we’ll receive a dressing down, and then maybe a hearing will be held, with a rep if we want one, and so on and so forth. If our misdeeds are sufficiently serious, we’ll get suspended and then we’ll maybe get fired. Rightly so, if we engaged in the sort of conduct that seems to be an everyday event in the “Mother of Parliaments” (a registered trademark of UK Establishment Services LLC).

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Okay, as this is a democracy it’s problematic to have an HR department doing the firing of MPs. That should really be down to the people. But where there’s a will, there’s a recall way.

Recall elections shouldn’t happen too often. California, where it only takes a relatively small number of politically motivated people to call for one, and they cost a bunch of money, and they can lead to undemocratic outcomes, shows why. But how about this: the HR department’s ultimate sanction is to recommend one when someone behaves really badly or repeatedly acts up.

You set up so it requires a minimum number of the employers (us) to click on a website to register our interest in one, and if there are enough (say 10 per cent of the turnout at the last election), we get a by-election. By which time the miscreant will probably have resigned anyway.

You never know, this might just help to restore the reputation of the citadel of sleaze that is supposed to run this country. How about it, Mr Speaker?