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From the office of Lord Paul
London, Nov 24 (PTI) |
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Lord Swraj Paul seeks full and public enquiry into conduct of House of Lords and its officers in dealing with Lords' expenses London, Nov 24(PTI) Leading NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul has sought a full and public inquiry into the conduct of the House of Lords and its officers in dealing with the Lords' expenses issue as he claims he was singled out for attack as he was a great supporter of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
"We need to get a proper investigation but we need a full enquiry, a public enquiry into the conduct of the House of Lords and its officers and why they acted in the way they did," Lord Paul told the Islamic Channel last night.
Lord Paul, who quit as the Deputy Speaker of the House following his suspension for four months over his allowances claims said "the authorities need to look at why different Peers, even with bigger allegations about money have been cleared with some excuse including
the Lord Speaker herself, who was chairman of the House Committee when she was cleared.
"What kind of fairness is that," he asked, adding everytime they cleared somebody they changed the rules. Describing the process adopted in dealing with the expenses issue was "absolutely disgusting, disgraceful and completely lower the privilege of the House of Lords," Lord Paul said "We are a great democracy. This must be kept up. Guilty must be punished but all guilty must be punished at the same level and not at the descrition of a small little committee consisting of people who wanted themselves and projecting themselves as great non-nonsense and great senior members of the House of Lords.
"Otherwise why on earth some newspapers were promoting them? It was self-promotion and leaking them in between." Lord Paul claimed that it was "a whole newspaper and some of the people in the Lords who joined together to try and malign me. I do not accept it." He said the Committee of Privileges which decided his case was "pressurized" and its chairman Baroness Manningham-Buller, former Mi5 Chief "was pushing them to accept all her recommendations in full." "The privileges committee which heard me said there is no dishonesty in my case, there no bad faith, it is negligence, it is irresponsible. Tell me any time in the history of the House of Lords somebody has been suspended for 4 months for negligence. It was pressurisation by Baroness Manningham-Bulleter which is absolutely undemocratic. You are allowed to go for an appeal to a senior committee of larger number of people. But in this case, it is like a High Court judge giving a judgment and then stating if you appeal against he judgment, I am going to resign. What the hell is democracy for. It is a disgrace. So that is why I felt I believed even when we were fighting for freedom in India there was a sense of fairness in Britain. There was no fairness only in the colonies. We believed that. Now right in the place where democracy is supposed to be discussed, it has been abused." He said what the Lords should have done is what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked the Commons to do "that let's look at the expenses of all the MPs. "The House of Lords should have done that and still they have not done that. All they did was 20 people, mostly Labour or almost all Labour except one Liberal, against whom there were complaints in The Sunday Times were taken to task. "What they Sunday Times wanted was attack the Labour because they decided to support Conservative leader David Cameron." He said it has been admitted by the Lords authorities that the system of deciding allowances for house outside London was flawed.
"Right from 2009 they have been trying to have various committees look into the issue and found the system flawed. In the end of July 31 they came out with the solution that the system was flawed and there was no way of checking it. The best is pay everybody the same whether they live in London or Timbaktoo.
"I never said that (flat at Oxfordshire) was my main home. I said that was a place for me to live and I had decided that I am going to live there, I was going to upgrade the place. The hotel belongs to me. I was no way going to live there for ever. I was going to live there in the week ends."
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