| Previous Section | Home Page |
Column 106
superimposed? Surely only that of No. 10, and perhaps Bernard Ingham's now that he has been relatively ennobled. That is frightening. The motion should be thrown out with contempt. 9.23 pmMr. Terence Higgins (Worthing) : I have lost count of how many guillotine motions I have voted against when in opposition and how many I have voted for when in government. I have never previously had the opportunity or occasion to speak in such a debate, although I was recently reminded that I was a member of a Government who introduced a guillotine motion before the Committee had even begun to consider the Counter- Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill.
The crucial point about that measure was that it dealt with a matter of extreme urgency. I greatly regretted the situation that gave rise to it and I am glad that the policies of the present Government, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, have not resulted in any such urgent action on economic matters. However, that was an urgent matter, and the measure was only temporary in that it carried out a proposal that was to last for 90 days. That was in marked contrast with the Bill that we are considering this evening. It is difficult to envisage a Bill less urgent than this Bill. We have been waiting and waiting for such a measure to come forward, and we have been told that the Home Secretary has spent many weeks, months and even years considering what should be in it. Yet, when the House of Commons is to consider what ought to be in the Bill, and its detailed proposals, we are told that it must be rushed through on a guillotine. The measure to which I referred a moment ago lasted merely 90 days, but in this Bill we are probably legislating for a generation or more. Therefore, not to give the House adequate time to consider the measure at this stage seems a serious mistake. As right hon. and hon. Members have pointed out, in no sense has there been a filibuster in our debates so far. Thre has been no tendency for proceedings to be prolonged unduly by either side of the House. On the contrary, we have had a major debate on major issues and on the whole everyone has made thoughtful, cogent and reasonably short speeches. So the usual argument for a guillotine, which is that a measure is being obstructed unreasonably, most certainly does not apply.
The importance of the measure is illustrated by the fact that is being debated on the Floor of the House. We have a duty to examine the detailed proposals in the Bill. I do not accept the point made by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, that we have already had a day to discuss the White Paper and a day on Second Reading. This is our chance to examine the Bill in detail. Our progress so far has made it absolutely clear that there is considerable uncertainty about the detail of the Bill.
Today, we have all referred constantly to the problem of judicial review. It was very clear that the Government and Ministers were not clear about the true position. Therefore, the House has a duty to examine in detail what is proposed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery) pointed out the real confusion which arose between Second Reading and the letter which he received. That problem should be debated on amendment or on a clause stand part debate. However, we all know that the real trouble with the guillotine is that
Column 107
it is likely that some amendments will not be debated because the chopper will fall. The same applies to clause stand part debates. We shall probably not have adequate time to discuss many points that require debate.My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary very kindly has written to me on a couple of points about which I expressed concern to my hon. Friend the Minister of State. That is all very well, but a letter from the Minister spelling something out is not the same as the scrutiny which takes place in the House and the way in which aspects of the Bill may be revealed to Ministers. I recall that, however much time my officials and I had devoted to trying to get the drafting right on a Finance Bill, if the Opposition of which ever party were doing their job, suddenly one would see a horrible flaw in the legislation which one had not observed previously--because the House of Commons was doing its duty and looking in detail at specific proposals.
Therefore I deeply regret the fact that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has proposed this motion this evening. Unlike my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit), I do not agree that it is all a ritual. I have a strong feeling that there is real and profound concern on both sides of the House that the measure is not being dealt with in the way in which the House of Commons should deal with it. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House knows that I have profound respect for him and for the way in which he carries out his duties. I believe that the task of the Leader of the House is immensely difficult in defending the interests of Back Benchers while representing to the House the views of the Government, but I have to say that the guillotine on this particular Bill is premature, and it is wrong that the House should agree to it. 9.29 pm
Mr. Roy Hattersley (Birmingham, Sparkbrook) : This is the first time during almost 25 years in the House that I have taken part in a timetable motion debate, but I have listened to a great many. Working on that experience, I do not propose to make any of the extravagant claims which often characterise these debates, but some of the facts are beyond dispute.
The first is that this guillotine has no friends except the Government and their acolytes. The Times condemned it. The Daily Telegraph condemned it. If even The Times and The Daily Telegraph in their present form cannot bring themselves to support the Government, who in heaven's name can? [ Hon. Members :-- "The Sun." ] I propose to deal later with sycophants who were wheeled in solely to support the Bill.
The second fact has been established on both sides of the House. The House accepts that nothing in the two days of Committee justifies a guillotine now. It would be wrong to say that absolutely no time was wasted. Time was wasted by the Minister of State, who could not, or would not, give answers to questions. Fearing that we should have a debate such as this, I took the precaution, two weeks ago, of writing to the Secretary of State saying that we would make speedier progress if his junior Minister was better briefed in future. Time was also wasted by the Government when, late on each of the two sitting nights, they discovered that no hon. Member had supported the Government, so they
Column 108
persuaded sycophants to come in and make brief, supportive but ill-informed speeches from the Back Benches. Apart from those two examples, time has been used as sensibly as it is possible to use it in the House.I want to say something about that to the hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), who is not here and is therefore unable to receive my apology directly. Until this evening, I believed that he was the Chairman of the Select Committee on Procedure. I realise now that I must have been wrong to make such an assumption, for he misunderstood entirely the nature of debates in Committee stages. He talked to the House as if the debate so far concluded were concerned exclusively with the early lines of clause 1.
The debate so far concluded has been concerned with fundamental principles which underlie clause after clause. That is why many of the amendments were debated but not voted on immediately after the debate was finished. The idea that the House has spent 13 hours on two lines is palpable nonsense. It has spent two days' debating time on two fundamental principles. If the hon. Member for Honiton had understood either the Bill or the principles which govern the behaviour of a Committee stage conducted on the Floor of the House, he would not have made the gross error that he made this evening. The hon. Gentleman also said that there had always been conversations and discussions between the two sides. I confess freely that I had conversations with the Home Secretary and, insofar as it is possible to have a conversation with the Government Chief Whip, a conversation with him. The message I conveyed, which I have no doubt was the right message to convey, was that the Bill was not suitable for a carve-up between the Opposition Front Bench and the Government. It is a matter on which the House takes a view. It is a matter on which Tory Back Benchers take a view. It would have been an impertinence--indeed, it would have been an impossibility--for us to say that we would carry with us, on specific dates, Members on both sides of the House who have independent positions and rightly want to express their opinions as free and independent Members of the House of Commons.
When I had conversations with the Home Secretary and what passes for conversation with the Government Chief Whip, I came, as early as the first evening of our consideration, to a clear conclusion--that the Government were determined to guillotine the Bill from the moment it was published. There has never been any intention to have full and free debate on it. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the way in which the debate has proceeded.
The debate proceeded, on the first day, on the fundamental question of lifetime secrecy. It is perfectly true that I then said to the Home Secretary that it would be intolerable for us to start late at night on the crucial question of a public interest defence. But it would have been possible to have a procedural motion to allow us to do other things at that time.
On the second day, knowing that the Home Secretary is not always quite as arcadian and palladian and superior when he is debating as when he is speaking to groups of Conservatives outside, and knowing that he would take advantage of any suggestion that we were not prepared to go on, I went out of my way to put on record in Hansard our willingness to continue to debate, so that there should be no suggestion that the Opposition wanted to bring
Column 109
discussion to a speedy conclusion. But a fortnight ago the Home Secretary insisted that the debate should be concluded at what, for the House of Commons, was a comparatively early hour, confirming my view that from the beginning the Government have intended to guillotine this Bill.I want to say to the hon. Member for Honiton that I understand--no one wants to be foolish about this--that Governments sometimes need to guillotine debates in order to get their business through. It is the Government's right--perhaps it is their duty--to get their business through. But there was no question of this Bill not passing into law. This guillotine is proposed not in order that the Bill shall proceed with good order and discipline, but in order that it shall proceed with the minimum of public debate.
If we had any doubts as to the need for public debate, and the consequences for the Government of public debate and their reasons for wanting to curtail public debate, we would need to do no more than look at the first two days. It was through debate in this House that we learned that, if a man's house is illegally burgled by the security services, or if a woman has her telephone illegally tapped by the security services, and if he or she is told about it by a member of the security services, it is a criminal offence to reveal that illegality--a criminal offence carrying a prison sentence. It is clearly not in the interests of the Home Secretary, who poses as a reformer, that such facts should be prised out during the debate. It was only through the debate in this House that we discovered that the illegality I have just described could not be spoken of to the victim's laywer without the victim being subject to prosecution and possible prison sentence. Indeed, it was only through the debate that the Minister of State learned that that was the case, for initially he gave a categorically inaccurate answer, which we are still waiting for him to correct.
Again, it is not in the Government's interests, and not in the interests of a Home Secretary who, as recently as 72 hours ago, announced that he was the natural heir to Mr. R. A. Butler, that the nature of his proposals should see the light of day in the way that the debate makes possible.
Let me give another example of how the Home Secretary's behaviour shows why he and his colleagues want this debate to be curtailed. Speaking in Cambridge on Friday evening, he announced--if The Daily Telegraph is to be believed--that if the debate last week had resulted in a public interest defence being included in the Bill, that would have provided a defence for any member of the security services who had wanted to reveal the battle plan of the British Army of the Rhine. If the Home Secretary had said that in the House of Commons, he would have been laughed out of the Chamber, because that was given in the debate as exactly the sort of episode that could not be cited in a public interest defence. The Home Secretary finds it better to discuss these matters in front of the gullible Conservatives of Cambridge than in front of the House of Commons, where they should be debated. That is the basic reason and intention of this debate.
Yet the issues we ought to be discussing here are issues that go to the heart of the freedoms which this society should enjoy and which affect a crucial parliamentary issue--the balance of power between the courts, the Government and individuals. This Bill takes to the Government power that should reside in the courts and, as a result, it reduces the liberty--I put it not higher than this
Column 110
--of a substantial part of our population. The guillotine was intended to obscure the revelation of that sort of fact, and it is because of the desire to muddy the waters, not only that the guillotine is introduced at all, but that the concluding days of the Committee stage are to be rushed through on consecutive sitting days in the wholly inadequate circumstances of a Thursday and Wednesday afternoon.There is a second reason for the introduction of the guillotine. In my view, its introduction is all the more deplorable when one considers the issues that are yet to be debated. During the next two days we are to discuss whether it is reasonable to suppress information that has already been published abroad. Many of us will want to argue that the suppression of information that is available in other countries has nothing to do with security but everything to do with Government management.
To say that the British people cannot know what is already known in the Kremlin is not something that concerns the safety of the realm. It concerns the Government's convenience. No wonder that the Government do not want the issue to be debated at length. During the next two days we shall discuss whether information from abroad is to be suppressed simply because it comes from abroad and whether the tests of harm--about which the Home Secretary speaks so eloquently, and no doubt he will do so again--are adequate tests to protect the man or woman who feels entitled to reveal trivial or unconsequential matters or matters that the Home Secretary should not himself have the power to proscribe.
Because of the nature of the debate, it is all the more important that the House of Commons should be allowed to continue the debate, as the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) said, for as long as the House of Commons wishes and for as long as it continues to debate these matters in a responsible and sensible fashion. I fear, however, that the nature of the debate was only one of the reasons that prompted the Government to introduce the guillotine.
The second reason is more alarming than the first. It is the Government's impatience with the proper processes of democracy. The Prime Minister says openly--I think that she was talking about her Cabinet colleagues, but I have no doubt that she holds the House of Commons in equal contempt--that she has no time to waste on argument. Very often, democracy depends on argument continuing unchecked. To the Prime Minister, criticism is something to be suppressed. Opposition is something to be bullied or bought off.
It is the duty of a democratic Government and of a democratic Prime Minister to facilitate discussion. Were the Home Secretary to allow it, the Bill that emerged would be a great deal more satisfactory than the one we are now debating, and his reputation would be a great deal more secure than it will be if he pushes through an instrument that, time after time, will be demonstrated to be inadequate for the purposes that he claims it will serve--those purposes being an attempt to safeguard that information which it is necessary to hold secret and, on the other hand, to allow freely the exposition of facts which, if they are published, do no harm to the national interest. The Home Secretary, however, who must know these things- -or who knew them once and who once would have resented and resisted the Prime Minister's autocracy and her determination to have measures passed by Parliament
Column 111
without adequate discussion--is now prepared to act as her lapdog. I suspect that those who sit on the Benches behind the Home Secretary will provide sufficient votes for the guillotine motion to be passed. I suspect, too, that having done so they will provide sufficient votes on Wednesday and Thursday to ensure that the Bill, in more or less its present form, becomes law.Many hon. Members--I see some of them in their places now--will be persuaded to speak at such length that the Minister of State will never be able to correct himself about the position and duties of lawyers as concern their clients, and he will never be able to get straight the issue with which he so confused the hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury). The Home Secretary will make little, darting speeches that assert his good intentions without demonstrating them with reference to the Bill.
There will be two days of debate during which the Home Secretary will play the worst trick of all. He will describe the Bill not by referring to its clauses but by referring to the Home Office handouts which, as we know, have constantly given a false impression of what the Bill contains. I suspect that the Bill will pass into law, thanks to the supine Members who sit on the Back Benches on the other side of the House, but when it is passed into law it wil be a bad day for democracy and a contemptible day for Parliament.
9.43 pm
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Douglas Hurd) : I agree with this much of what the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) said--that the Bill deals basically with the relationship between the courts, Parliament, Government and the individual.
The debate has turned, as it should, on two basic points. The first is whether there should be a timetable motion for the Bill and, and if so, whether the timetable proposed is a reasonable one. The second is whether, as the Opposition argue, this motion fits into a pattern of Government unreasonableness and arbitrariness on the subject. I shall deal with both those points.
The ground on the first point was thoroughly covered by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. The Bill is important and goes to the heart of the functioning of Government. With 16 clauses, it is a relatively short Bill. It severely reduces the present scope of the criminal law and within the information still to be protected by the criminal law, it ties down the prosecution, for the first time, with a number of specific tests of harm. That is a fair description of the Bill and we decided--and the whole House agreed--that the Committee stage should be held on the Floor of the House.
I listened carefully, as did the House, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup, (Mr. Heath) and the right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot). The right hon. Gentleman, like others, made a basically defensive speech about his own past and his ingenious attempt to distinguish between his passionate love affair with the guillotine, which I remember well, and my right hon. Friend's motion. He did not persuade any hon. Member--perhaps not even himself.
It is not my place to attack my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup for authoritarian
Column 112
tendencies, and I do not know what my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) or my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) were referring to in that respect. I would defend him on the episodes mentioned, but although I listened carefully to the case against timetabling every Bill and agree with it, I do not think that my right hon. Friend succeeded in making the case that this Bill should not be timetabled at all.The right hon. Member for Sparkbrook touched on this point just now. We have had two days of debate, yet we are not within clear sight of the end of clause 1. I am not complaining about that or making accusations of filibustering, any more than my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House did. However, after long and unrestricted debate, the Committee has come to a conclusion on two important matters. The first is whether there should be a special offence applying to members and former members of the intelligence and security services and others notified because of their close connection with that work. The second is whether, although there is no general right of prosecution on the ground of public interest, there should be such a right for the defence. Those were the matters discussed and dealt with in Committee.
The pace has been slow and, as the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook may confirm, there were no grounds for supposing that progress would have accelerated. On the first evening, we dealt with two groups of amendments only. The Government would have been ready, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, to continue into the public interest defence debate, but he made strong representations--which after a short time of reflection, we decided were reasonable--that we should not do so. I wonder what he would have said if we had started switching the order of business, which he now suggests as an alternative. He would have been in a state of outrage.
Mr. Hattersley : I would have thanked the Home Secretary for accepting my suggestion.
Mr. Hurd : The right hon. Gentleman would not have said anything of the kind, and he knows it.
As a result of the agreement mentioned, on the second day we had the debate on the public interest defence and that came to and end after a long discussion at a similar hour--after 11 pm but before midnight. At my suggestion, the House did not proceed further that night. There is no reason to suppose that we would have made any further substantial progress that night and the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook has simply confirmed what I am about to say. There is no reason--rather the reverse--to suppose that the informal arrangements that we all know about would have had any validity in the continuing debate. The right hon. Gentleman is plainly wrong in supposing that we started to discuss the matter believing in our hearts that there would have to be a guillotine. I had no such conviction. A guillotine was obviously a possibility, but I hope that the House will accept that it was not an aim or a conviction.
The case for a timetable motion at this stage is overwhelming. Of course, the timetable must be reasonable. A press report misled some of my right and hon. Friends. It stated that we were proposing that the House should be asked to deal with the Bill completely this week. That was never our intention. I believe that two further days in Committee, sitting late-- making four days
Column 113
in all--is reasonable. A provision, which will certainly be needed, for a third day on Report and Third reading is reasonable. I now refer to some specific points that have been made. My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) made a particularly telling contribution. He asked me about a debate on every clause. As he knows, the Business Committee is entrusted with the task of organising the debate in accordance with the motion. Its aim should be to ensure that every clause is debated. I confirm that paragraph 7(2) of the motion, which is normally relied upon on occasions to cope with the possibility of Standing Order 20 applications, provides for extra time should that prove to be necessary.My right hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery) raised two important points. First, he dealt with his letter to me on the authorisation of memoirs of members of the Security Service. He did not refer--his account would have been more complete if he had--to the fact that, after my hon. Friend the Minister of State used the words on Second Reading, some of which he quoted, there was a debate on new clause 6, which was moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr. Allason), to which my hon. Friend the Minister of State replied :
"It will not come as any surprise to those concerned to know that authorisation to members and former members to disclose information about their work will be rare and given only in exceptional circumstances."--[ Official Report, 25 January 1989 ; Vol. 145, c. 1103.]--
[Interruption.] That was at a later stage.
I accept the importance of what my right hon. Friend has raised. There will certainly be further opportunities in our proceedings to deal with the point. It is necessary to complete--not to contradict--my hon. Friend's account of proceedings in the House.
My right hon. Friend raised a second point concerning the privileges of this House. He rightly said that that was deep water. I do not intend to enter it tonight, except to say two things. First, the privileges of the House are not and never have been in the hands of Government. They are in the hands of the House and then in the hands of the courts. That has always been the position. The Bill contains no trenching on or addition to the privileges either way. There are already on the Order Paper amendments that would enable the Committee to deal with these matters.
Mr. Amery : I am sorry to interrupt my right hon. Friend as he is short of time. Was the statement made in the Minister of State's reply to the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) correct? Is that consistent with what my right hon. Friend has been saying?
Mr. Amery : No. As I remember it, the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook asked whether he would be in breach of the law if he revealed that he had been told by a secret agent that his telephone had been illegally tapped. The Minister said that he would be in breach of the law. That seems to throw doubt on whether our communications or our disclosures in the House are privileged.
Mr. Hurd : I do not believe that the House, which is the master of its privileges, has ever asserted that communications to an hon. Member are privileged.--
Column 114
[Interruption.] I do not think so. That is a point on which there are amendments and new clauses, and they will certainly fall to be discussed.The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), with the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson), took the lead in making the second charge, which is one of--
Mr. Gerald Bermingham (St. Helens, South) : On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As I understand it, privilege in this House's very much a matter for the Chair. Would you, Mr. Speaker, rule on whether a communication to a Member of Parliament is or is not privileged and whether the Government of the day have the right to interfere with the privilege of this House?
Mr. Speaker : I do not think that I should get involved in this debate, but as the rules stand at present a communication from someone outside the House to an hon. Member is not privileged.
Mr. Bermingham : Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not privilege for a Member of the House to repeat in this House information that he has known and is he not privileged in that respect?
Mr. Speaker : That is a different matter. Members of the House have freedom of speech.
Mr. Hurd : It is entirely a different matter, and I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker.
I take on now the second blade of the attack which, in a way, goes deeper. It is the accusation of authoritarianism in our handling of such matters. I strongly rebut that. If one looks at proceedings on this matter in the past 12 months, one realises that that attack cannot be sustained. If one considers the White Paper and remembers how it contrasted vividly with the predictions made by the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook-- [Interruption.] Well, it departed totally from ministerial certificates and left the matter to a jury. That came as a great surprise.
Let us look now at the contrast between the Bill and the White Paper and the way in which we took on board several of the criticisms expressed in the debate on the White Paper. I had been going to say that I believe that there is now a wider understanding of what is in the Bill and what is not-- that is, until I heard the speech by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras. He drew examples from the public interest that could not possibly come within the scope of the Bill.
When the hon. Gentleman realised that he was in difficulty, his hon. Friends tried to help him out of the pit by suggesting that the chief press officer concerned might have been notified because her work was connected with the security services. What nonsense. She would not have been notified and even if she had been, clause 1 makes it absolutely clear that to come within the Bill, disclosure must relate to security and intelligence. The hon. Gentleman had clearly not bothered to develop the slightest acquaintance with the Bill or the timetable motion.
Mr. Dobson rose --
Mr. Hurd : No, I shall not give way--
Column 115
Mr. Hurd : No, I have put paid to that argument, and I hope that we have put paid also to the argument that matters released from the criminal law by the Bill are trivial. There has been some reference to the safety of food. Is the safety of food trivial? We do not seem to hear very much about anything else at present. I do not condone the purloining or publishing of papers on matters such as public safety if they are confidential.
What I am saying in the context of the Bill is that such activity, however reprehensible, will not be a criminal offence. We have dealt with that point. My right hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Sir B. Braine) gave specific examples earlier, but the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras did not bother to acquaint himself with that. The Government
Mr. Dobson rose --
Mr. Hurd : No, I am answering a point made by the hon. Gentleman. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) was harsh on me. I respect his passion and conviction in such matters, but I have never asked him to defend or excuse me. He knows better than that. He was wrong to say that the Bill would make the Government the arbiter of what is and is not secret. There are noministerial certificates. What we are doing in the Bill is removing--
Mr. Hattersley rose--
Mr. Hurd : No, I am not giving way. What we are doing is removing from the prosecuting authorities the wide discretion that they now have. We are asking Parliament to lay down the detailed framework and then--
Mr. Hattersley rose--
Mr. Hurd : It will be for the jury to decide on each case. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland, whose arguments I respect, spent his whole time talking about the possible misdoings of public servants, but the safety of the citizen must surely be our chief concern. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we sometimes have to strike the balance between protecting the safety of the community as a whole and sustaining the rights of the individual in particular. The Bill shifts that balance drastically in the direction and in the favour of the individual, but it does not abandon the need to protect the citizenry as a whole.
I ask the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland in particular--and the House--to look at the test of harm which deals with our armed forces and the safety of our citizens. There is nothing here about the authority to prosecute because of some embarrassment to Government or vague general interest.
Mr. Maclennan : Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Hurd : I am not giving way. The hon. Gentleman made an attack on the general handling of the Bill, as did his hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith).
The secrets which we have to protect effectively are needed for the protection of the citizen. They are at one remove the secrets of the citizen, and the effective protection of those secrets is the protection of the citizen against the criminal and political--
Column 116
It being three hours after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, Mr. Speaker-- proceeded to put the Question necessary to dispose of them, pursuant to Standing Order No. 81 (Allocation of time to Bills).The House divided : Ayes 305, Noes 213.
Division No. 91] [10.00 pm
AYES
Alexander, Richard
Alison, Rt Hon Michael
Amess, David
Amos, Alan
Arbuthnot, James
Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Arnold, Tom (Hazel Grove)
Aspinwall, Jack
Atkins, Robert
Atkinson, David
Baker, Rt Hon K. (Mole Valley)
Baker, Nicholas (Dorset N)
Baldry, Tony
Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Batiste, Spencer
Beaumont-Dark, Anthony
Bellingham, Henry
Bendall, Vivian
Bennett, Nicholas (Pembroke)
Bevan, David Gilroy
Biffen, Rt Hon John
Blackburn, Dr John G.
Blaker, Rt Hon Sir Peter
Bonsor, Sir Nicholas
Boscawen, Hon Robert
Boswell, Tim
Bottomley, Peter
Bottomley, Mrs Virginia
Bowden, A (Brighton K'pto'n)
Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
Bowis, John
Boyson, Rt Hon Dr Sir Rhodes
Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard
Brandon-Bravo, Martin
Brazier, Julian
Bright, Graham
Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
Brown, Michael (Brigg & Cl't's)
Browne, John (Winchester)
Bruce, Ian (Dorset South)
Buchanan-Smith, Rt Hon Alick
Buck, Sir Antony
Burns, Simon
Burt, Alistair
Butcher, John
Butler, Chris
Butterfill, John
Carlisle, John, (Luton N)
Carlisle, Kenneth (Lincoln)
Carrington, Matthew
Carttiss, Michael
Cash, William
Chalker, Rt Hon Mrs Lynda
Chapman, Sydney
Chope, Christopher
Churchill, Mr
Clark, Hon Alan (Plym'th S'n)
Clark, Sir W. (Croydon S)
Clarke, Rt Hon K. (Rushcliffe)
Colvin, Michael
Conway, Derek
Coombs, Anthony (Wyre F'rest)
Cope, Rt Hon John
Couchman, James
Cran, James
Currie, Mrs Edwina
Davies, Q. (Stamf'd & Spald'g)
Davis, David (Boothferry)
Day, Stephen
Devlin, Tim
Dicks, Terry
Dorrell, Stephen
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James
Dunn, Bob
Durant, Tony
Eggar, Tim
Emery, Sir Peter
Evans, David (Welwyn Hatf'd)
Evennett, David
Fallon, Michael
Favell, Tony
Fenner, Dame Peggy
Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)
Finsberg, Sir Geoffrey
Fishburn, John Dudley
Fookes, Dame Janet
Forman, Nigel
Forsyth, Michael (Stirling)
Forth, Eric
Fowler, Rt Hon Norman
Fox, Sir Marcus
Franks, Cecil
Freeman, Roger
French, Douglas
Fry, Peter
Gale, Roger
Garel-Jones, Tristan
Glyn, Dr Alan
Goodhart, Sir Philip
Goodlad, Alastair
Goodson-Wickes, Dr Charles
Gorman, Mrs Teresa
Gow, Ian
Gower, Sir Raymond
Grant, Sir Anthony (CambsSW)
Greenway, John (Ryedale)
Gregory, Conal
Griffiths, Sir Eldon (Bury St E')
Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth N)
Grist, Ian
Ground, Patrick
Grylls, Michael
Gummer, Rt Hon John Selwyn
Hamilton, Hon Archie (Epsom)
| Next Section
| Home Page |