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Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): That includes Front Benchers' contributions.

Mr. Garnier: As my hon. Friend so kindly reminds us from the Front Bench, that time includes Front Benchers' contributions.

It beggars belief that the Financial Secretary dares go to the Dispatch Box and describe as adequate the timetable set out on page 852 of the Order Paper. It also beggars belief that she seeks to give cogent reasons for anything when she singularly failed to answer a direct question that I asked her, and did so with a boldness that I could only salute as it passed by.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills made the important point that, according to paragraph 7, dilatory motions can be moved only by a Minister of the Crown. It states:

"No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of proceedings on, the Bill shall be made in the Standing Committee or on an allotted day except by a Minister of the Crown".

This is the legislature of the British public, but only a Minister of the Crown can tell us how to conduct ourselves. It is not only in paragraph 7 that we find such powers given by the great silent ranks of the new Labour party. Paragraph 5(2) states:

"No Motion shall be made in the Standing Committee relating to the sitting of the Committee except by a Minister of the Crown, and the Chairman shall permit a brief explanatory statement from the Member"--

presumably, a Minister of the Crown--

"who moves, and from a Member who opposes, the Motion, and shall then put the Question thereon."

It is very kind of the Government to draft the motion in that way.

Paragraph 12(3) states:

"If on an allotted day on which any proceedings on the Bill are to be brought to a conclusion at a time appointed by this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee the House is adjourned, or the sitting is suspended, before that time no notice shall be required of a Motion made at the next sitting by a Minister of the Crown for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order."

First, only a Minister of the Crown can truncate the proceedings. Secondly, if he wishes to truncate proceedings further, he need not tell us that he is going to do so. I dare say that the statue of Cromwell outside this Palace is witnessing some changes--he must be smiling and enjoying the work of this Government as they become ever more as he used to be.

This will be a very bad period for Parliament. It started badly with the first guillotine--on the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Bill--and is made worse by this shabby motion. Two huge Bills of great importance, one on the constitution and one on the way we raise our finances, are to be crushed into a timetable designed by a Government who do not have the confidence to allow us to debate the ideas that they did not have the confidence to put in their election manifesto. Before very long, the Government will learn that such conduct does not sit well with the British public.

5.35 pm

Mr. Damian Green (Ashford): As a new Member, I have for several reasons found it educational to sit through all of this guillotine debate. First, it was a

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privilege to see a performance by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) live, as it were, having seen many previously through the media. It was educational not only for his performance which was, of course, inimitable but because of the interesting attitudes that lay behind what he said.

As I understand the hon. Gentleman's arguments, he felt passionately about the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and that it was therefore a constitutional monstrosity that it should have been guillotined. However, he does not care much one way or the other about the Budget, so, as he enters his declining years, he feels relaxed about voting for a guillotine motion on it. That is instructive for two reasons. First, the fact that he could not raise any enthusiasm for the Budget tells us a great deal about how it is going down with some Labour Back Benchers. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, it shows a gap between rhetoric and reality. When a Member with such a distinguished and anti-establishment history as the hon. Member for Bolsover cannot bring himself to condemn a guillotine motion, one feels that the last fires of libertarianism within the Labour party are finally about to be extinguished. That is one of the lessons that was interesting to learn this afternoon.

The other lesson concerns the abject silence from every other nominal supporter of this shabby motion. On the day that Ministers are announcing the formation of a gimmicky people's panel of 5,000 people, which the Government are to use as an enlarged focus group on which to test all their legislation, it seems particularly ironic that this people's panel--the Parliament of Great Britain--should be so completely ignored and treated with contempt. If the Government are prepared, uniquely, to put a guillotine motion on the Finance Bill to the House in this way, the least tribute that they could pay to hon. Members and, indeed, to those who sent us here, is to put up a few people to defend the motion.

Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire): Or even attend.

Mr. Green: The fact that they have not bothered to do so is the most serious sign yet in eight weeks of arrogant government of just how arrogant the Government really are and how little regard they pay to the House.

It was also instructive to listen to the Financial Secretary moving the guillotine motion. One should perhaps deal directly with some of what one could charitably call the arguments that she offered in support of it. The first was that, faced with this unnecessary Budget, taxpayers want certainty. That is patently absurd. To say that people need to be certain that their pensions will be less valuable, that they will have to pay the 17 tax rises and that their mortgage and medical insurance will become more expensive is genuinely worrying, suggesting that during the past eight weeks the Treasury has lost the ability even to come up with a plausible line. The Minister was clearly talking tosh and she knew that at the time.

The Minister's only other argument in favour of the guillotine motion was that it had been done before by previous Conservative Governments. The House will be grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) for so comprehensively blowing up that argument, proving that no similar guillotine has been imposed so soon after a Budget.

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I urge the Government to learn the lessons of the past 18 years. They have spent 18 years criticising Conservative Governments. Perhaps one of their occasionally more justifiable criticisms was that rushed legislation is very likely to be bad legislation. Many of us have felt that. The most dangerous legislation to rush through--barely announced, certainly not analysed and not allowing for any consultation with outside bodies--is a Finance Bill. It is inevitably full of complex, technical issues that require detailed examination. It is certain that a Budget rushed through without proper consultation will prove to be a bad Budget for taxpayers and, in the end, for the Government.

The Government do not even have the excuse of the hysteria that has sometimes caused Governments to rush into ill-thought-out legislation. On occasion, the country has been seized by what feels like a moral panic, when there is a demand for action to which the Government have responded hastily and usually unwisely. That was not the case here. Nobody was demanding an early Budget from the Labour Government. Nobody would have objected if the Chancellor had arrived at No. 11 and the Treasury and said, "Well, we want to get on with it, but we think that it is sensible to think seriously about what we are going to do and carry on with the normal Budget timetable." There was no need for a July Budget and certainly no need for a Budget that is to be railroaded through the House with no proper examination.

We can dismiss the ostensible reasons that the Financial Secretary gave for the guillotine motion. What are the real reasons for the motion? The first is clearly that the Government are desperate to bring tax rises in as early as possible. They want to put taxes up now and put spending up later in the Parliament. They are determined to carry the tax rises through. Every month that they can bring them forward increases their revenue, taking yet more money out of the pockets of the British people. The increases in petrol duty and similar taxes will come into effect earlier than they would have done in a November Budget, allowing the Government to take more money from people, which will have a more damaging effect on the inflation rate and on all businesses that require motor transport.

The second reason is clearly that the Budget, like every other measure taken so far by the Government, is driven by the following day's headlines rather than by any long-term strategy. The most ridiculous claim so far made by the Government is that this is a Budget for the long term. Never has there been an Administration more driven by the short term. For the Government, the short term and the long term simply mean tomorrow morning's headlines. Nobody must be allowed to scrutinise the Budget properly, because that would reveal the ways in which it will unravel.

The Government are afraid not just of parliamentary scrutiny, as the guillotine motion shows, but, perhaps more seriously, of scrutiny by the many bodies outside Parliament that have expertise to bring to bear on the Budget process. It has already been observed during the debate that most of the amendments to Finance Bills in recent years have been introduced by the Government. Most of those changes are due to expert input from outside bodies that feel that they can contribute to good governance by responding to a Finance Bill and picking at its bones, telling the Government the unintended effects of certain clauses and how to write them in a different

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way. The guillotine motion will remove any possibility of those non-political expert outside bodies having a beneficial effect on the Budget.

Not only are the Government doing a disservice to the House and the electorate with the motion; they are doing a disservice to their Budget. They know that because of their approach and the speed with which they are putting the Budget through, they are making it even worse than it need be. The Government should do themselves a favour and not ram the Budget through in a way that is unnecessary and damaging to the British economy.

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