 General Debate: Dame Laura Cox Report on the Bullying and Harassment of House of Commons Staff (Posted November 2, 2018) Tweet On Monday November 5, 2018 the House of Commons will hold a debate in the Chamber on the Dame Laura Cox Report on the Bullying and Harassment of House of Commons Staff. We await clarification on the scope of the debate with respect to allegations against sitting MP's, and whether references thereof will be considered disorderly. When the report was published, several MP's seized upon the opportunity to call for the Speaker's resignation, construing the Speaker's rebukes against them and other MP's on the floor of the Chamber as incidences of the harassment and bullying that are of grave concern in the report. This blog is opposed to such myopic, vindictive, and self-serving attempts to unseat Speaker Bercow. Any insinuation that his statements in the chair regarding MP's or parliamentary business constitute workplace harassment evinces a failure to understand the seriousness and facts of the report. There is no evidence to suggest that the Speaker abused his office or the public trust in enforcing and abiding by the heretofore institutionally, though perhaps not industrially, accepted labor policies at the Palace of Westminster. Indeed, the Speaker has declared on the record, in response to a point of order raised by Maria Miller on May 2, 2018: "Let me be clear: current and former staff are not constrained by any agreements from talking freely and confidentially to the independent inquiry into bullying and harassment, which is being conducted by Dame Laura Cox, QC, and I hope that they will do so. I also understand that the Clerk of the House has this morning provided the right hon. Lady with a note on the standard terms of compromise agreements, now called settlement agreements, between the House and staff who leave under individual arrangements -- matters in which, I should emphasise, I am not myself involved and never have been. He, that is to say the Clerk of the House, has explained that these are not non-disclosure agreements, in the sense generally used, and do not in any way seek to prevent disclosure of wrongdoing on public interest grounds -- i.e. whistleblowing. I am asking the Clerk to make this note more widely available." With all due respect to Dame Laura, who, as a QC, is no doubt a skilled logician, it is a stretch of the imagination to conclude that Bercow either engendered or encouraged a culture of bullying and/or harassment during his tenure as Speaker. Insofar as structural reforms are required, we can think of no better candidate than Bercow, who has made reform a defining characteristic of his tenure, to preside over them. He will not, however, be able to accomplish a reform of this scope on his own; more to the point, no one could. Successful redress of this issue will require the co-operation of MP's in all parts of the House and, even then, as it is now, the issue will be not whether the Speaker or the Committee on Standards will be fair in its treatment of staff who lodge bullying and harassment complaints, but whether the people, including MP's, who work closely with the aggrieved parties will treat them as fairly and compassionately as they hope the Speaker, the Committee on Standards, or the forthcoming independent claims commission would and should. |
| Tags | John Bercow | Andrea Leadsom | Maria Miller |