Parliament and Ethical Behaviour

The importance of ethics to Parliament can hardly be overstated. Whilst the ethics adopted by individual MPs are important, there is a danger in treating the ethics of Parliament as solely concerned with the individual ethics of its members, thus ignoring the wider issue of the ethics of the House itself. The multiplicity of objectives, roles and perceptions in the House means that it is extremely difficult to produce a set of ethical guidelines that meets the needs of Members as well as the wider voting public. General guidelines seeking some ideal of ‘public service’ are unhelpful since they ignore the infinite variety of kinds of public service imposed by different structures and different roles. The House has consistently argued that it is capable of regulating its own affairs, using the privileges committee procedure to deal with any problems concerning the conduct of its members.