MR. CHRISTOPHER PYM (POLICE PROSECUTION) (Hansard, 11 May 1965)

§ Mr. Eric Ogden (Liverpool, West Derby)

Throughout the whole day, the House has debated matters that concern many millions of people. Now I draw the attention of the House to a matter which is of primary importance to one man and his family. In doing so, I am conscious that for more than 700 years it has been the right of Parliament to seek redress of grievance. The fact that I can do so tonight in this Chamber seems to me to be proof that no matter what the cynics may say we are still the free Parliament of a free people.

I draw to the notice of the House the police prosecution of Mr. Christopher Pym who, on Friday, 9th April, 1965, in the magistrates' court of the Borough of Cambridge, was fined £1 for making a street collection in the City on the morning of 16th February, 1965.

Mr. Pym was born a Londoner. He is 36, and married, with one son. His father was a chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his mother is a former Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He was educated at Marlborough, where he won an open exhibition to Cambridge, Trinity. He was a National Service officer and served with the British Intelligence Services in Cambodia. He was on the organising staff of the British Trade Fair in Moscow, and he is an elected member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

He is an author, and he has written two pamphlets or booklets, one entitled "The £150 deposit in Parliamentary Elections" and the other, "Towards the Independent Member of Parliament". I suggest that the latter is the key to his character, for he has sought to serve his fellow men in Parliament and he has chosen the long hard road of an independent candidate.

453 In 1960 he was an independent candidate in the Parliamentary by-election at Blyth, and it is an interesting aside that the hon. Member for Blyth (Mr. Milne) is in the Chamber tonight. No doubt he recalls those circumstances quite well. That by-election was caused by the elevation to another place of Alfred Robens, as he was then, now Lord Robens. The candidature of Mr. Pym at that time received the support of no fewer than 3,223 of the electors of Blyth, and he used his personal savings to finance that campaign.

Continuing his independent campaign, he was a candidate in the Kent County Council election in West Wickham in 1961, and in October, 1964, he offered to contest Bristol, South-East in the General Election there.

In February 1965 he became redundant in his employment and he decided to use his redundancy pay to fight the Parliamentary by-election that was due in the constituency of Saffron Walden, caused, as hon. Members will remember, by the elevation to another place of the Right Hon. R. A. Butler.

Mr. Pym rented premises in Saffron Walden and made his usual individual approach to the electors of that constituency to seek their support for his nomination. He did in fact receive the necessary support of 10 electors, a proposer and seconder and eight assentors. His nomination papers were sent to the acting returning officer, the Town Clerk of the Borough of Saffron Walden, and it was later proved that they were completely in order.

As every hon. Member knows, contesting an election is an expensive business, and while Mr. Pym had money for his election address, which was in fact printed, he still required £150 to provide the necessary sum for his election deposit. The means that are often available to party members or party candidates were not available to an independent candidate. My Pym decided that he would try to raise £150 by collecting the money in the neighbouring towns of Colchester, Chelmsford, Bishops Stortford and Cambridge, believing that many people from the Saffron Walden constituency went into those towns. Unfortunately, as it proved, he went first to Cambridge.

454 In following this path he followed the advice that is given to many candidates, and I refer to advice that is given to members of my party: A constant appeal for money should be made throughout the election. Funds can be built up during the election fervour. Money will flow in readily if asked for, whereas pence can hardly be extracted from people after the contest … A capable and trustworthy person should be put in charge of this work. Have courage to ask voters to pay for their politics and they will do so—don't ask them, and they will keep their money in their pockets. This is good advice that we have all followed.

So on Saturday, 6th February, at 8 o'clock in the morning, Mr. Pym began his collection in Regent Street, Cambridge, at a place near the Tesco Stores and, I believe, also quite close to the police station. By 8.40 a.m. he had collected the sum of £1 7s. 6d. This is a remarkable rate of progress as that time in the morning. I suggest that at that rate he would soon have achieved his target of £150 for his deposit, but at 8.40 he was seen by a police officer who later—I quote from a Cambridge newspaper here and the hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Mr. Kirk) may be able to tell me which—in the magistrates' court, said that he saw Mr. Pym standing outside Tesco stores on 6th February. He was wearing a blue and white rosette and carrying a tin which was surrounded by blue and white ribbon. The officer alleged that Mr. Pym approached a woman and said: 'Would you contribute towards my election deposit.' When cautioned at the police station, Pym said: 'I don't deny that I have been asking people for money and there is about £1 in the tin. I fully admit what I have been doing. I don't want to break the law.' Told that a report would be made to the Chief Constable, Pym replied: 'The purpose of collection is not for my expenses but purely for the deposit, which is returnable. If I am prevented from collecting money then I am prevented from standing.' However the police were instructed to prosecute, and on 9th April Pym, of 17, George Street, Saffron Walden, pleaded not guilty to contravening a police authority regulation in that he made a collection of money—other than a collection taken at an open air meeting—without having first obtained a permit from the Cambridge Watch Committee. This prosecution was under the Street Collection Act, 1916, which derives its 455 authority from the Metropolitan Streets Act, 1903, which again derives its authority from the Metropolitan Streets Act, 1867, so that in 1965 a prosecution originated from Acts of 1867, 1903 and 1916. Under the Act of 1916, A police authority may make regulations with respect to the places where and the conditions under which persons may be permitted in any street or public place, within the police area, to collect money or sell articles for the benefit of charitable or other purposes. I emphasise the words "or other purposes".

Mr. Pym and I corresponded. He asked me to speak for him in court that day. I agreed and travelled overnight from my constituency in Liverpool to be in court in Cambridge that Friday morning. The Town Clerk of Cambridge gave evidence, as did the Town Clerk of Saffron Walden, at great inconvenience, and the Chief Inspector of Police. Mr. Pym did likewise. The report continues: In court, Pym said he had collected money for politics before in this way and no one had objected … Mr. H. Thirlway, defending, submitted that the purpose of Pym's collections did not fall under the definition of the regulations concerned. So, under Acts of 1916, 1903 and 1867, the ability of an honest and sincere man to stand for Parliament was reduced to an arid legal argument between legal experts as to the precise interpretation of "or other purposes".

Let me make it clear that I do not criticise the police for what they did. There is more than enough criticism of them. They were instructed to prosecute, and they did. I criticise, quite deliberately, those who gave them that instruction. It was a costly exercise in time and money and served no useful purpose. I submit that, no matter what legal arguments are used, it was not the intention of Parliament that this Act for the proper control of flag days should be used in this way. It is permissive legislation. This debate may persuade other authorities to be more charitable in the future. The magistrates gave careful consideration to the matter and then gave their verdict, which was "guilty". I had hoped to be able to speak in mitigation for Mr. Pym, but I was not allowed to do so, because the verdict and the penalty were announced together. The maximum penalty is 40s., and Mr. Pym was fined 456 20s. It is not the amount of the fine which matters: there is a mark, a conviction, against Mr. Pym, and I hope that there may be a way in which he may have this mark removed from his character.

I would ask whether there is a way in which the Queen's Pardon could be granted to him. I am not pressing this point too much on my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary, even though he is known to be a champion of the rights and liberties of Members of Parliament. There is to be a Select Committee to consider reform of the electoral law. Surely it is an anomaly that police and watch committee permission must be sought to obtain funds for a Parliamentary candidature. Could this matter of the control of statutory bodies over the ability of an individual to stand for Parliament be referred to this Select Committee?

I am not concerned with the political opinions of Mr. Pym: we had more than enough independence among Members of Parliament last Thursday and on other occasions. If he ever stood in West Derby I would oppose him with all my strength. The hon. Members for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) and Saffron Walden have shown great interest in this matter, for which I am grateful, and I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary for his concern. No votes are to be gained by our actions tonight. I hope that no time has been wasted, and that what has been done is in the interests of the individual and in the best traditions of Parliament.

§ The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. George Thomas)

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Mr. Ogden) has followed some of the best traditions of the House in championing the cause of Mr. Christopher Pym, who seeks to stand as an independent candidate in Parliamentary elections. It is a long tradition in the House, going back to before the time of any of us, that Adjournment debates are used to advance the causes of people who feel that they have a grievance and to establish redress of grievances where it lies within our power so to do. The rights of the individual are safeguarded by the vigilance of hon. Members, and I am sure that the House 457 will join me in thanking my hon. Friend for the manner in which he has spoken tonight.

There is no dispute about the facts in this case. Mr. Pym collected money, and did so without a permit. We are not to know what the reply would have been if he had applied for a permit, but the provision is there within the law for Mr. Pym to have applied to the watch committee for a permit to collect money for his cause. One of the difficulties is that although we all recognise that Mr. Pym is a strong-minded man of great integrity, it would be quite open for anyone to say that he was to be an independent candidate at the next election and go around with a collecting box and a rosette, and people are not to know whether he stands or not if the relevant constituency is not in that area.

This problem is full of difficulties. The Cambridge magistrates found Mr. Pym guilty of the offence, and fined him £1, when the maximum was £2. It is not for the Home Office to comment on the way in which magistrates perform their duties. We take great pains not to find ourselves in any way in conflict with them on this question.

My hon. Friend is right in saying that the 1916 Act was introduced to deal with flag days which were then starting up in a big way. People had all sorts of flag days to help Service men and people engaged in the war effort. The Act was established to restore order and to prevent too many schemes from being run at the same time. But we must deal with the effect of the law as it is now.

The chief constable is responsible for enforcing the law and deciding whether to prosecute. He must be impartial, and I know that my hon. Friend and no other hon. Member would ever want us to interfere with the police authorities in the impartial operation of their duty in deciding whether or not to prosecute. It would be a very dangerous thing if Ministers of the Crown could influence the police in this way. It might make a lot of friends, of course, but a lot of enemies, too.

My hon. Friend asked for remedies. You may well be asked, Mr. Speaker, to undertake, on behalf of the House, the setting up of a Mr. Speaker's Conference to deal with the procedure for elections. It would be open to my hon. 458 Friend to write to Mr. Speaker. I hesitate to speak for you, Mr. Speaker, though I know that you are unable to speak for yourself at the moment. I do not know and cannot say what the terms of reference of Mr. Speaker's Conference will be, if he decides to establish one. They have not yet been announced. However, I think that it would be open to any hon. Member to write to that conference. I imagine that the conference would be able to consider any matter which it wished to consider.

The question of the prerogative of mercy and of free pardon my hon. Friend is wise not to press, because this is not a case where my right hon. and learned Friend would feel that he could recommend the prerogative of mercy without seeming to comment on the way in which the court fulfilled its task.

Whether Section 5 of the Act to which we have been referring should apply to party candidates or to independents is another question. It is a matter of the interpretation of the law and I understand that one thing we never seek to do is to interpret the law. We make the law and we discuss it a great deal when we are here, but once the Statute has been established we do not seek to define the law and to interpret it. It is a matter for the courts themselves to ensure the same impartial treatment to all.

My hon. Friend has done what he can for Mr. Pym. I regret that there is nothing I can do. The normal processes of the law, allowing an appeal, were, of course, open to Mr. Pym. I know that it is an expensive business and if he had to collect to get his £150 deposit for the election he would certainly find it far more expensive to bring an appeal.

There is, unfortunately, nothing we can do in this regard without the law itself being dealt with—and, Mr. Speaker, as you will be quick to remind me, we are not able to discuss on the Adjournment a revision of the law. I wish that we could have given a better and more encouraging answer to my hon. Friend. But I am limited by what the law allows and the discretion of my right hon. and learned Friend is not such that he could intervene in this case.