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Mr. Campbell-Savours: Holidays?
Mr. Beith: I suspect that that is the pressure on the Government. The hon. Gentleman may, like me, have plans to do constituency work on Thursday, but I suspect
that the Government did not believe that they could keep their Members here on Thursday. Why else did they fail to take the obvious step of ensuring that on each day of this week, a stage of the Bill was taken? For example, the Bill could have been taken in the Lords later on Wednesday and Lords amendments could have been considered on Thursday. That would have enabled us to take the Committee stage on Wednesday, following Second Reading today.
There are a number of ways in which the procedures for the Bill could have been dealt with. [Interruption.] Hon. Members who seem to think that this is some kind of joke should realise that if there are no gaps between the stages of a Bill, the people outside the House, who will have to live with the legislation--some of them will have to arrest people in the street on the basis of it--will not get the chance to consider it properly.
I made some inquiries outside the Metropolitan police area and discovered that in other police authority areas, chief officers were not familiar with what was going on, and did not know the precise content of the proposed powers. Those are the sort of people whom we would consult between the stages of the Bill, to ensure that the powers reached the statute book in an appropriate form.
Sir Michael Shersby (Uxbridge):
Will the right hon. Gentleman cast his mind back to 1994, when the House debated extensively the provisions of what is now section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which extended the powers of a constable to search without reasonable suspicion for an offensive weapon? All that is proposed here is to allow a constable to do the same thing in relation to a device--a device that could cause a serious explosion and massive loss of life. That is not a huge change of principle; it is a comparatively minor change. Moreover, the power is hedged around with all the provisions in the 1994 Act, in that a senior police officer has to authorise it and the Home Secretary has to keep a close watch on it. So what is the case for the extension of time, when we are debating something that is simple to understand?
Mr. Beith:
The hon. Gentleman cannot have been listening to my opening remarks. I said that there was indeed a case for clarifying the powers that the police use in that connection, and that we needed to consider them carefully in detail. It may even be that when we come to those details we shall be able to deal with the matter more expeditiously than would now appear. However, the House will be up against the problem that if there is a substantial debate on the early clauses in Committee, when the axe falls every other clause will be read out as a number and passed into statute without any debate. That is how the timetable works. There is no Business Committee, and no subdivisions within the timetable period. If hon. Members become especially concerned with an early part of the Bill, its later provisions will not be debated at all.
There will be no Report stage, because the Government will accept no amendments. I was struck by the fact that the Leader of the House spoke as if he had already accepted that there would be no Report stage. He said something like, "That will be an hour for Third Reading"--but actually the hour is for both Report stage
and Third Reading. The Leader of the House has already taken as part of the scheme of things the fact that the Government, however wrong they may be shown to be on detail, will not amend the Bill in Committee because they do not want a Report stage. So we can forget about a Report stage. And they will take the same attitude in another place.
That is government by decree. The Government have already decided the precise form that the Bill should take. Whenever Governments make such decisions, they get things wrong. Even with the best will in the world, the best organised Government in the world, with the finest Ministers and the finest civil servants, might still make mistakes. The present Government have a record of making mistakes. The Home Secretary and the Home Office certainly have a record of making mistakes about what the law is, and about the position in which they will be found when the matter comes before the courts. The Home Secretary has made so many such mistakes that he should be bound to expect it to happen in this instance.
Mr. Skinner:
In view of what the right hon. Gentleman says on behalf of the Liberal Democrats--there will be no Report stage; it is pretty clear that the Government will get their own way; the debate will be time-limited; the matter should have been dealt with earlier; perhaps we should have sat on Thursday--he seems to be leading up to a great principle. He seems to be about to say not only that he will vote against the guillotine motion, but that such is the nature of the process that he and the whole Liberal Democrat party will vote against the principle of the Bill. Is that correct?
Mr. Beith:
It is important that the hon. Gentleman should learn to recognise the difference between the procedures of this place and the contents of a Bill. [Interruption.] It is significant that the Labour party appears to find that idea funny. Labour in office, in both central and local government, sees no difference between the value in its eyes of what it wants to carry out, and the procedures by which we protect people's liberties, and protect proper democratic debate.
There is an important distinction to be drawn between those two factors. One of the things that the Leader of the House is paid to do is to be aware of that distinction, to represent it in Cabinet and to ensure that the House has procedures for controlling the way in which even the most pressing of matters on the Government's agenda are dealt with.
There is always a good reason for doing a bad thing. There is always some compelling argument for undermining the basis on which parliamentary democracy operates, and in a way that will cause damage in the future. I have absolutely no doubt that, just as hon. Members have asked for precedents for this motion, on a future occasion a Minister will say, "We have the precedent in the Prevention of Terrorism (Additional Powers) Act 1996. That Act went through on a timetable motion in one day, with no amendments being accepted. Why should we not do that on any of a wide variety of other pieces of legislation?"
I remind the House that there was no timetable motion when the original Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 went through; the House simply continued considering it until it had completed
consideration of the amendments. It is possible to imagine a better timetable motion in which the allotted time was subdivided to ensure that each part of the Bill was discussed, but we do not have such a motion before us. The Standing Order relating to the Business Committee will not apply.
The time that is taken up in Committee will be taken off the time allocated for the Report stage and Third Reading. This timetable motion is very unsatisfactory. It has been moved to get the Government off the hook because they delayed introducing the Bill. The Home Secretary then went to the Leader of the House and said, "Can you get this Bill through this week?" The Leader of the House said, "I can do it only on a timetable motion, and a fairly stringent one. No problem; the Labour party will agree to it," and that was that. If that is how we are to run this place, we might as well go home. We are supposed to be here to ensure that the law is properly discussed and considered and that, when it gets on to the statute book, it achieves the purposes for which it was introduced.
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
I agree wholeheartedly with what the right hon. Gentleman said about Parliament's role in scrutinising legislation. However, since this legislation is being rushed through--it will not be considered and it will be subject to a guillotine motion--can he be clear about that? Does he agree that the best message we can send to the British people when the Government try to treat Parliament with contempt is to say no and vote against the Bill?
Mr. Beith:
The opportunity to say no will arise today when we vote on the timetable motion. I hope that most Labour Members will vote with me when we reach that stage; but that remains to be seen.
Another principle that we want to make clear is that we are determined to fight terrorism and to assemble such powers as are necessary for that purpose and consistent with the maintenance of our civil liberties. That is why the Liberal Democrat party has voted for prevention of terrorism legislation when Labour opposed it and continued to vote for it when Labour abstained. We are prepared to make such decisions as long as we have a proper parliamentary process by which to do so. The House is being denied that process today, and it is an extremely bad precedent.
I am quite convinced that, in times to come, there will be criticism of the details of the legislation. Some ordinary police constable who seeks to exercise the powers granted under this legislation will find, when he is called to account, that those powers crumble in his hands. That will happen because the House did not properly consider the powers, which subsequently did not satisfy the purpose for which they were enacted.
I always remember the phrase used by the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when he was Solicitor-General, when one of his Bills went before a Special Standing Committee--the type of Committee in which hon. Members scrutinise in detail what a Bill does. After a couple of sittings of the Committee, he announced that he had discovered that the Bill could not satisfy the purpose for which it was intended--it could not do so and it could not be made to do so. I am not suggesting that the proposals in the Bill are in quite such a mess as that,
but it is almost certain that any proper, detailed consideration would discover defects in them and ways in which civil liberties could be more effectively protected. We will be denied that opportunity for scrutiny.
Therefore, I invite the House to extend the time available to the Committee. I also invite the House to ensure that amendments other than Government amendments are voted on at the end of the guillotine period. That measure is contained in an amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), to which he will no doubt speak later.
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