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Mr. Raynsford indicated assent.
Mr. Hughes: It will be. We share the Government's view about that. Clearly it would be illogical to have the new body free-standing rather than answerable.
However, I ask the Government to think again about whether the only logical region that we have around the metropolis for the foreseeable future should be that currently defined by the Greater London boundary.
Of course in politics there is no perfection. Of course in some senses parts of London continue beyond the edge. The Surrey borders around Spelthorne provide an obvious example, and the Kent borders stretching down to Gravesham and Dartford another. However, in reality the region has become fairly well established as that within the immediate Greater London boundary.
One of the things that troubled my hon. Friends and me was the fact that, on Monday, the Government did not accept even small and seemingly incontestably good
amendments. I shall cite only one example which, as it happens, was moved by the Conservatives. It seems to me undeniable that, when Scotland and Wales have had referendums with voting taking place between 7 am and 10 pm--the conventional period for voting in general elections--London should have the same.
When we are doing something as important as setting up a citywide authority, or the first regional government in England, we should allow people to vote for that extended period. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) put the obvious point that many people in London go out for various reasons well before 7 o'clock in the morning, and some are not back until very late. I can testify to that. I have seen people rushing in to polling stations at 10 to 10, or even 5 to 10, at night, having just returned from work and had a quick meal at home.
There will always be technical problems, but where there is a will there is a way. Why should the option be between having local elections with two hours more for voting and a referendum with two hours less? It strikes me that it would be to the benefit of everybody for local elections to have two hours more and the referendum not to have two hours less. I was sad that the Government did not accept that idea on Monday, because they did not seem to have any strong reason not to. I hope that they will be less dogmatic in another place.
As a result of the Government's position, we have had no Report stage. As I pointed out to Madam Speaker on Monday, no provision had been made for one. The Leader of the House had simply assumed that there would be none. Thank goodness that Madam Speaker was there to defend the interests of the House and to say that there may always be a Report stage--that even the present Government cannot assume that there will not be one.
On Monday an opinion was expressed on both sides of the House--or rather, to tell the truth, it was expressed more on the Opposition side than on the Government side. That was that, in the submissions that we have now been able to read--I must admit that I have not read every word of those; I have had better things to do--many voices have been raised against the Government's proposal.
I must be honest and say that I have not read the submissions in their totality, so I do not have an answer across the balance. However, I did what I said on Monday I would do. For the record, I read the submissions from self-identifying Labour sources--local Labour parties, Labour constituency parties, Labour borough or branch parties, Labour members, and Labour regional organisations.
I stand to be challenged--noticeably, the Minister did not challenge me on Monday--but, of the 30 Labour responses, 10 appeared to be or were expressly in support of the Government's proposals, four were very cautious about the idea of a directly elected mayor but did not expressly say that they were opposed, and 16, which is a majority of 30 by any definition, were expressly, explicitly, succinctly and in some cases fiercely against. From the available evidence--the best is the written evidence submitted to the Government's response--the majority of Labour submissions were against the Government's proposals.
We have all been digging around--or not digging around--to discover the history of the now famous meeting of the Greater London Labour party chaired
by the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Mr. Fitzpatrick). For a meeting that was presumably closed to non-members, we are all doing pretty well. I have the most explicit version yet of what happened, and will put it on the record, as it answers the Minister's difficult question.
This month, the Labournet--I always thought that technology was dangerous--which is the Labour news disseminated via the internet, contains two reports of that famous meeting. One is by Dorothy Macedo and the other by Leonora Lloyd, who are both members of the Greater London Labour party executive. Those reports are entirely available, and I intend to quote them, but I promise that I will not do so selectively in any way that distorts them.
Dorothy Macedo writes:
The questions are not far from being simply a breaking into two halves of the question in the schedule. The Minister seemed to find that difficult, but it seems extremely easy to me.
Sir Norman Fowler:
I do not want to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's narrative, but he might recall that that is exactly what we have been advocating over the past two or three days. He says that it is not what we advocated, but I have our words before me, and it seems to me that it is precisely so.
"The original discussion document, A Voice for London, was part of the Road to the Manifesto exercise in 1996. The Greater London Labour party . . . executive debated the matter in detail in June 1996 and voted that the mayor of the new Authority should be the leader of the majority party, not a separately elected person with executive powers.
that in itself might merit the observation, new Labour, no votes--
In July 1997 the Government issued the green paper, New Leadership for London. The GLLP convened a consultation conference on 12th October to discuss the options. It was a delegate conference but on arriving we learnt that it was not planned to take any votes"--
"At the opening session, GLLP chair Jim Fitzpatrick MP bowed to pressure from delegates and agreed that workshops could submit resolutions to the closing plenary if they had strong views.
clearly the popular one--
There were four workshops: the mayor and assembly, electoral issues, functions of the authority, and financial arrangements.
I attended the workshop on the mayor and assembly"--
"which was chaired by GLLP vice-chair Val Stansfield. The prepared list of issues for the workshop did not include the question of whether we actually wanted an executive mayor."
Well, there is a surprise.
"Speaker after speaker explained the democratic and practical objections to an executive mayor. Ken Livingstone pressed for the referendum which will ask voters if they want a new Greater London authority to also include the questions whether voters want such a mayor and whether the assembly should have tax-varying powers."
In an amusing byway, the report continues:
"Not everyone felt cross about being denied a vote: a member of the GMB delegation protested that they could not vote as they had not been mandated. But the closing date for submissions is 24th October, so if the GMB has not decided its attitude yet, it makes you wonder when they intend to do it.
Leonora Lloyd does not simply provide a critique: she comes up with the answer. She says:
And when the workshop chair allowed an indicative vote on the question of a separately elected mayor, the GMB representatives were among the eight (out of the 80 plus present) to vote in favour!
Some delegates passed resolutions to the chair but she declined to put them to the vote and when we got to the final plenary, Jim Fitzpatrick refused to put the views of the workshops to the vote on the grounds that they were not in the form of resolutions."
"The recent GLLP 'conference' to discuss the proposed Greater London Authority . . . and mayor was not allowed to take any votes, only 'soundings'. This was the first conference held by the GLLP for two years."
26 Nov 1997 : Column 994
There is a strong comment coming up, which I do not endorse; I am merely reading it:
I left out the parenthesis, which sets out two questions. They are not our questions or the Conservative questions, but they seem a good starting point. The first is:
"The chair Jim Fitzpatrick MP manipulated the meeting shamelessly to avoid even indicative votes. But it was clear that the London labour movement is still opposed to a directly elected Mayor and wants a bigger and more powerful authority than the one proposed.
For the London executive, the discussion has been going on for a couple of years, for others less. But we keep coming up with the wrong answer: No to a directly elected mayor. It appears that Londoners are a little dim. Ask them two questions . . . and they come over all faint. According to our leaders if we ask two questions we are likely to end up with a mayor but no assembly."
"Do you want an elected assembly?";
the second is:
"Do you want a directly elected Mayor?"
If the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, I and others do not rise to the challenge put to us, and we do not produce a better set of two questions, then those, from a member of the Minister's own party, are perfectly respectable.
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