Ports and Shipping Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said it is important to get a Speaker who is not obliged to respond to the whims and fancies of a particular political group or political party, but someone who is truly objective in his approach to issues.
“It may be a fault of our system where the Speaker is elected from a political party. When he sits there, he obviously tilts towards the political party he represents. Although, we expect the Speaker in the British tradition to be impartial, it never happens. That has been our history,” the Minister told the Sunday Observer yesterday.
Minister Samarasinghe said the present Speaker is partisan to the UNP and it was very obvious by the way he has acted so far. “But let bygones be bygones. We have to work with the Speaker as the Parliament is important.” “I don’t blame the current Speaker because he is an elected Member of Parliament from the UNP. He has to some extent to tilt towards the UNP. But he went overboard. That was the problem,” he said.
Hopefully, with the formation of the Government that commands the majority in Parliament, we will go back to how Parliament functioned earlier, the Minister said.