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Mr. David Hunt (Wirral, West): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. [Interruption.]
Madam Speaker: Order. I understand that Opposition Members are complaining because the Prime Minister's parliamentary private secretary has passed the right hon. Member for Wirral, West (Mr. Hunt) a note. I have very good eyes and I know exactly what happens in the House; I saw what happened, do not worry.
Mr. Hunt: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I have been listening carefully to the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) and I have calculated that he has
been asked 16 key questions in this debate. Is it possible for you to communicate to the right hon. Gentleman that he can continue his speech until he has answered them?
Madam Speaker: The right hon. Gentleman knows that that is not a point of order; it is a point of argument.
Mr. Blair: That is all that the Tories have left--a few dirty tricks, and that is about it. Just look at them--has anyone every seen a party more obviously preparing for opposition?
I said that the Prime Minister's only weapon was fear and that the problem with his wielding that weapon was credibility. Why? Because people remember. They remember the man who took us into the exchange rate mechanism and said that it was the basis of his policy, and then it collapsed around his ears; the man who said that he would never raise tax before the last election and raised it 22 times; the man who said he would be at the heart of Europe and is now at the margins of Europe; the man who said he would end the beef war by last November but still cannot tell us when the ban is going to be lifted; the man who set up the Scott inquiry because of the worry about Ministers' accountability and then ignored the findings because they did not suit him.
The Conservatives no longer frighten, because they are no longer believed--they are not believed about themselves and they are not believed about us. Across the country, fear is being driven out by hope of change: hope that Britain need not be like this and can be better, hope that our constitution can be modernised--
Mr. Blair:
They do not like it. If they are so confident of their case, and if they believe that they can win the arguments on devolution, the economy and the state of our society and the health service, let them have the courage to call a general election. Frankly, that is all that they have left.
Mr. Paddy Ashdown (Yeovil):
The Prime Minister said at the start of the debate that he intended to make the constitution a major issue of the general election. Well, on the basis of this debate so far, I sincerely hope so. I do not think that I have ever heard a debate in the House on such a serious matter in which the Government have put together such a tawdry, thin and intellectually unconvincing case. Nor, I am bound to say, have I heard a debate greeted with responses from Conservative Members intended more to disrupt than further the debate than we have heard in the past half an hour. If ever there was a case of using scaremongering tactics and disruption to overcome the opposition when one's argument is thin, we saw it today--and that was not from the Opposition but from those who are supposed to be in government.
The Prime Minister made two points--he made them very badly, but he made them. The first was that Britain today is so well governed that nothing, or at least nothing substantial, needs to be done. I noticed that during the Leader of the Opposition's speech there was outrage among Conservatives at the suggestion that constitutional legislation may not be dealt with on the Floor of the House. However, Conservatives cannot argue--wrongly, in my view--that this Parliament is sovereign but then
argue that this Parliament can control the next. That is a ludicrous proposition. Of course, we cannot give an undertaking as to how the next Parliament will deal with the matter.
Among the tiny measures of change included in the Prime Minister's speech was a significant one--that Parliament would sit for Sessions of two years. Really? That is up to Parliament to decide, not the Prime Minister. The next Parliament will decide that. It is as inappropriate for the Prime Minister to seek to bind the next Session of this Parliament as it would be for the leader of the Labour party to do so. The leader of the Labour party gave a perfectly reasonable answer to a serious question.
Sir Patrick Cormack:
Will the right hon. Gentleman answer the question that I asked the Leader of the Opposition? Does he believe that constitutional measures should always be dealt with on the Floor of the House?
Mr. Ashdown:
That is for the next Parliament to decide, but let me see whether I can answer the hon. Gentleman's question. If he is correct, how is it that a major constitutional matter in this Parliament was not debated on the Floor of the House? I refer to the Maastricht treaty. If we could change the role of the House at that time, why not in future, too?
Mr. Ashdown:
I have given way once and want to make progress.
Sir Patrick Cormack:
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You know better than anyone that the Maastricht treaty was indeed debated on the Floor of the House.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris):
Order. It is not for the occupant of the Chair to comment on any particular answer, but I have a long memory of the Maastricht treaty.
Mr. Ashdown:
The point at issue is that the House cannot bind the actions of the next Parliament. That is a principle related to the sovereignty of the House, one that the Conservatives keep talking about and to which I shall return later.
Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham)
rose--
Mr. Ashdown:
No; the hon. Gentleman must forgive me for not giving way at this stage. I want to make some progress.
The Prime Minister's first argument is that Britain is so well governed that nothing, or at least nothing substantial, needs to be changed. His second is that our constitution is so fragile that, if we were to change anything, we would risk changing everything, and the whole lot would simply fall apart.
Let me take the Prime Minister's first proposition first--that, since nothing substantial is wrong, nothing substantial should be done and our politics should, substantially, stay exactly as it is. I invite any hon. Member to leave the Chamber, go out on to the streets,
stop any member of the public and put that proposition to them. They would get a very blunt, very frank and very different answer.
No one outside this place thinks that politics--the way in which we govern ourselves--is working effectively. They see a system that produces fiascos such as the poll tax or the dangerous dogs legislation because we cannot hold the Government to account and because of the way in which the House passes laws; they see people buying influence from political parties because the rules governing party funding are such a mess; they see scandals such as the arms to Iraq affair and the secrecy and abuse of power that was exposed by the Scott inquiry; they see Parliament tainted by scandals such as cash for questions; they see the introduction, for the first time in our history, of a watchdog to uphold parliamentary standards, because we are incapable of upholding them; they see Members who are presumed to be no longer honourable enough to give evidence without doing so on oath; and they see politicians speaking in a language that most people do not understand and behaving in ways that most people find bewildering at best and offensive at worst.
Those are not the signs of a healthy system that does not need change--they are the signs of a rottenness that has to be rooted out. That is a comment not just on the failings of the Government, but on the failings of the political system. Closed off, over-centralised and out of touch, our political system is not succeeding--it is failing and needs to be modernised. The public and outside observers know that. Are we in this House the only people in the country who do not know it? We should be debating not a question designed to protect the status quo, but how we can modernise our political system so that it is suitable for the next century, not rooted in the last one.
5.24 pm
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