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Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is in order for the Leader of the House, who represents the entire House, to provide a cue for the Foreign Secretary?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Such things are not a matter for the Chair.
Mr. Cook: I am happy to assure the hon. Gentleman that if I ever require a prompt I shall be delighted to take it from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, but I have quite a lot of material here that I wish to share with the House.
May I say briefly to the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills that I do at least salute the fact that he objected last Thursday when the Bill was proposed. He was the only Opposition Member who complained and I have to report to the House that, since the announcement last Thursday, we have not had one representation from the official Opposition.
Mr. Shepherd:
That is not surprising.
Mr. Cook:
I understand exactly what the hon. Gentleman means.
The motion is before the House because the House in Committee has dealt with only one third of the selected groups of amendments and is currently stuck on the fourth set of amendments. During our proceedings, hours of debate have been spent on monetary union, although the treaty of Amsterdam does not contain one new provision on monetary union.
I will not deny that some of those debates make entertaining reading, as much of the time has been taken up by one faction of the Conservative party arguing with another.
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe):
Nonsense.
Mr. Cook:
I have it all here. There were times when Tory Members appeared more enthusiastic about scrutinising each other's views than about scrutinising the legislation before the House. [Interruption.] If the right hon. and learned Gentleman disagrees, let me remind him that on the second day in Committee the former Chancellor disagreed with the shadow Foreign Secretary, the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor) disagreed with his hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Mr. Prior), the hon. Member for Wycombe (Sir R. Whitney) disagreed with his hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) and the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) disagreed with his hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Wycombe.
In fairness, I recognise that the shadow Foreign Secretary has done his bit to shorten our proceedings by preventing votes that would have revealed the divisions on his Back Benches. On Second Reading and in Committee, the right hon. and learned Gentleman
rehearsed his fantasy fears that all 14 other member states would enter into a conspiracy to use the new article on fundamental human rights as a pretext to rob Britain of its voting powers. Despite hours of debate in Committee, the amendment tabled by him on that point was not pressed to a Division. I read in The Daily Telegraph that the amendment was not voted upon because the hon. Member for Wycombe visited the shadow Chief Whip and told him that many Tory Members could not vote for it.
It is, I admit it to my hon. Friends, tempting to allow the proceedings on the Bill to continue to run, so that we can continue to savour the spectacle of an Opposition whose members cannot abide each other's views on Europe, but we have a higher duty--to protect the legislative programme that fulfils the mandate on which the Government were overwhelmingly elected and to ensure that the business of the House proceeds in an orderly fashion.
We therefore present to the House a timetable motion that provides for an orderly and reasonable completion of the proceedings on the Bill with a further full two days of debate. In total, that will mean that the Bill will have been examined on the Floor of the House over six days of debate, which, by any fair test, is a reasonable opportunity for the House to scrutinise it fully.
Mr. Swayne:
The Bill may have been examined over six days, but for how much time in any day was it scrutinised? On the days when we have examined it so far, there just happen to have been all sorts of Government statements, which has meant that we have not begun consideration of the Bill until later--not until 6 pm on one occasion.
Mr. Cook:
I concede that we are a Government who are active and have a lot of business to announce to the House. Indeed, we are frequently twigged by the hon. Gentleman's colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench on the ground that we do not announce enough to the House. If it would assist the hon. Gentleman, I could tell him that in future we will try to ensure that such announcements fall on an Opposition day rather than on one of the Government's legislation days.
I do not expect any display of gratitude from the shadow Foreign Secretary for curtailing the opportunity for the Conservatives to air their divisions. On the contrary, I look forward with keen anticipation to a display of virtuous indignation on behalf of the rights of Members of Parliament.
There are a couple of reasons why such a display of mock indignation will be especially misplaced in the context of the Bill. The first is that most of the policies in the Bill are policies that even Conservative Members support, notably the legal basis for Britain's external border controls. Indeed, the shadow Foreign Secretary keeps telling us that that is a provision that he himself negotiated. I am bound to say that no such provision was in any text of the draft treaty when we took over, but as he persists in believing his own rhetoric it is all the more odd that he should wish to talk out a provision for which at the same time he claims the credit.
Conversely, the one thing that most Conservatives can agree to oppose in the Bill is that it gives effect to Labour's commitment to take Britain into the social
chapter. It would be hard, even for the right hon. and learned Gentleman, to argue that that is a policy which we tried to keep hidden. On the contrary, we have campaigned vigorously for that objective since the Conservatives first invented the opt-out six years ago.
There cannot have been an elector who voted Labour in May who was unaware that the consequence of his or her vote would be to extend the benefits of the social chapter to Britain, and in that full knowledge the nation voted in gratifyingly large numbers for a Government to carry out the policy. It is a perverse distortion of reality to claim that a timetable motion to protect our commitment to the people is an affront to democracy. On the contrary, it is Opposition Members who have sought to frustrate the democratic vote of the nation by delaying the Committee proceedings.
Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate):
The Foreign Secretary must know that he went to the country wanting to extend qualified majority voting in four particular areas of policy, but succeeded in delivering only one of them. Never mind that he succeeded in conceding qualified majority voting in 13 other areas, of which the electorate were totally unaware. We are debating precisely that fact in Committee as the right hon. Gentleman introduces the timetable motion.
Mr. Cook:
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on complaining that I failed in my objective of extending qualified majority voting. That is a new line of attack for the Conservative Opposition. I must point out to him that the extension of qualified majority voting at Amsterdam was half the extension brought about by the Maastricht treaty, and was almost infinitesimal compared with the major extension that took place when the Conservatives entered the single market in 1986. In the light of that record, we shall take no lectures from Conservative Members about protecting the British veto.
Mr. William Cash (Stone):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Cook:
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I must make some progress. I shall give way to him later.
I also remind the House that during the Conservative years they presented guillotine motions to the House 82 times--one for every two Tory Members who survived the deluge of the last election. In a previous debate, the shadow Foreign Secretary described Robespierre as a great reforming socialist. I am not sure whether I would go all the way with that characterisation, but I would certainly agree that Robespierre's affection for the guillotine was entirely shared by the Conservatives while they were in government.
Only last year, the present shadow Foreign Secretary presented to the House a guillotine motion that provided not for two days in Committee but for two hours in Committee. At least three times in the previous Parliament, the Conservative Government presented a guillotine motion not after three days in Committee but before the Second Reading had even begun.
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