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Mrs. Taylor: My hon. Friend is right. Conservative Members cannot have their arguments both ways. On occasions they say that there is no authority for devolution, but when we seek to provide that authority through a referendum, they still complain.

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham): We are seeing an arrogant, presidential style of government. Will the right hon. Lady tell her right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that he should not snub Her Majesty when the President of the United States visits and that he should not override the House of Commons in this high-handed way? Will she do her job as Leader of the House and stand up for the rights of the House on crucial constitutional matters?

Mrs. Taylor: I am not sure whether all the other contenders will have equal right to speak and equal time this evening. I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman has done his party's fortunes in Scotland and in Wales any good by his attitude. We are not overriding the opportunities that will be available. We are making better use of the parliamentary time that is available, which is in the interests of the House.

Mr. Andrew Welsh (Angus): Given the recent opinion poll which shows that 75 per cent. of Scots favour the inclusion of a multi-option referendum, an idea with majority support in all the parties, does the Leader of the House accept the importance of allowing sufficient debating time for the issue? Can she guarantee that the substantive issues will be given adequate debating time?

Mrs. Taylor: I understand why the hon. Gentleman has strong feelings on the matter and I know that some of his hon. Friends share them.

Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan): Guarantee it.

Mrs. Taylor: The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position, "Guarantee it." If the House behaves sensibly, that debate could be guaranteed. If we do not see disruptive tactics, there will indeed be more time for the debate to which the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Welsh) has referred. If we pace the debate, we can guarantee that the main issues will be given time--not perhaps as much as the hon. Gentleman would like--to be aired and that there will be time for decisions to be taken by the House. That is one reason why we are going down this path.

Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): I am sure that the Leader of the House agrees with the dictum of Lord Acton that all power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Did she expect it to happen, however, so early in this Parliament?

Mrs. Taylor: The Labour party was very specific during the election campaign about its intentions with

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regard to a referendum being held in Scotland and a referendum being held in Wales in the autumn. It is clear from looking at the amendments that some Conservative Members, not all of whom participated in our previous debate and many of whom were not present during it, have tabled them to frustrate debate. We want to facilitate debate.

Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South): Although I appreciate that the Leader of the House wants to facilitate debate, is it not always a Government's task to try to stymie debate and therefore move a guillotine motion? Speaking as one of those who have suffered in the past when the then Opposition joined the Government of the day in imposing a guillotine rather than allowing free debate, I ask: should not we guarantee real debate? We should not restrict the rights of Back Benchers to examine Government policies.

Mrs. Taylor: The hon. Gentleman should consider what has happened on other occasions and what could have happened during tomorrow's debate. We could have started the debate with whatever amendment happened to be top of the list and spent all evening and all night voting on the more minor amendments--some of the amendments that the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Wallace) has called frivolous. We are trying to make better use of parliamentary time by trying to ensure that there are debates on the key issues that have been indicated to us.

Mr. Nicholas Winterton (Macclesfield): A limited number of us were here in the 1970s, when devolution for Wales and Scotland was debated. May I remind the House how seriously hon. Members on both sides of the House took those debates? Those debates were long and detailed. The House took them extremely seriously because they were of great constitutional importance.

I look to you, Madam Speaker, to protect the interests of Back Benchers on both sides of the House. Should a guillotine motion be moved without detail and before the Committee stage of an essential constitutional Bill--essential from the Government's point of view, very damaging from the Opposition's point of view--has begun?

I ask the right hon. Lady to take account of those of us who have been here a number of years and who are deeply concerned about the Union of the United Kingdom. The matter is being introduced the wrong way round. We should see what the Bills on devolution are about before we start discussing the referendum.

Mrs. Taylor: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the devolution debates in the 1970s. I, too, was in the House during those years and remember the hours spent on them--though I have to say that very often the debates were dominated by a relatively small number of hon. Members. He says that the Bill is very important. In that case, I wish that the Opposition Benches had not been so empty on Second Reading.

Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): Does the right hon. Lady recall that, during the business statement that she made on 22 May--the day the House rose for the recess--I asked her directly and clearly whether she intended to move a timetable motion. She gave no

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indication that she was going to do so. Can she explain why? Can she reconcile her attitude with the speech that she made later that very day, when she talked about the House having the opportunity to call the Executive to account?

Mrs. Taylor: I think that I was very wise not to give any indication on 22 May because at that stage we had not had any indication of how Opposition Members would be treating the Bill. The simple fact is that 250 amendments, 21 new clauses and 12 new schedules have been moved to a Bill which has only six clauses. What I said later that day in the debate on modernisation proves the point. I said that some Bills have a highly political content on which there is no possibility of agreement across the Floor of the House and, on that basis, the Government must act to get their legislation through.

Sir Edward Heath (Old Bexley and Sidcup): This is a matter of the utmost importance to hon. Members on both sides of the House. Those on the Government Benches may find that the time comes when they also have a great interest in such a procedure. Does the Leader of the House acknowledge what all her predecessors have acknowledged: that it is her responsibility to look after both sides of the House and not just her own side? If she does, in my experience it is completely novel that such a motion should be moved before the Committee stage of a Bill has even begun. In all my time in the House, I cannot recollect that ever happening before.

Nor do I think it advisable that it should happen particularly in this case because, as has already been pointed out, the Bill is to introduce a referendum on another matter that is not yet embodied in parliamentary draft, let alone approved by the House as a matter on which there should be a referendum. Therefore, I must ask the Leader of the House to give fresh consideration to this because it is a completely new introduction into procedure in the House and not one--

Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover): The right hon. Gentleman did it.

Sir Edward Heath: No, I never did it.

The change is not one which I believe that the House as a whole, on reflection, would wish to consider to be a precedent for future action.

Mrs. Taylor: The right hon. Gentleman says that there might be a time when we are interested in such procedures. I must tell him that, after 18 years of watching the former Government introduce guillotines, we have taken a great deal of interest in that procedure. He asked me directly whether I believed that the Leader of the House has responsibility to all parts of the House. I say to that, "Yes, I do." I strongly believe that. That is one of the reasons why I am so glad that the minority parties agree with the procedure that we are adopting.

Mr. Skinner: Does my right hon. Friend recall that in 1971 the then Prime Minister, the present Father of the House, whose memory is obviously beginning to fade a little, introduced a guillotine on the Industrial Relations

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Bill? That was one of the most controversial Bills that came before the House at that time. The net result was, as he might now recall, that we used to have to vote night after night in the Lobby because he and his Tory Members of Parliament guillotined that Bill. As a result, we had to fight tooth and nail even to make a speech on it.

After all that turmoil, the then Prime Minister decided to put the Industrial Relations Act on the back boiler. It fell into disuse within two years of being passed by Parliament. It is some cheek for the Father of the House to make an intervention now. It is a wonder that the Tories can keep their faces straight when they make such speeches.

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