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9.33 pm
Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate): I come to this debate as a new Member; it is the first timetable debate in which I have taken part. Faced with a new Government who came to office talking about openness, change and cleaning up after those frightful Tories, one would have thought that the examples that they were quoting in the debate would not be examples from the previous Government--but that is what we are faced with. They cited the Single European Act 1985, and the Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, cited the poll tax debates, to which I shall return in detail in a moment.
I have looked back at the various precedents. We have had 12 hours discussion in Committee on the Bill so far, and much of the talking has been done by Members from the Government side. The Minister for Europe spent an hour carefully summing up the points made by Members of all parties. That was a proper consideration in Committee of a treaty of fundamental importance. Once the treaty is signed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) made absolutely clear, there is no way back except with the nuclear bomb of repealing the treaty in its entirety.
We have sat in Committee for three days. Each day we have started late--almost as late as 6 pm--and we have ended at 10 pm. I am not a zealot who says that we must discuss everything endlessly and that a minority should be allowed to obstruct Government business, but the Single European Act 1985 had 17.5 hours discussion in Committee, and that discussion was clearly subject to filibuster and obstruction by opponents of the treaty. I understand that up to an hour on each occasion was taken up with points of order, and clear delaying tactics were used. The Government's justification for introducing a guillotine was clear under "Erskine May", as my right hon. and learned Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary said.
An extremely useful document from the Public Information Office of the House of Commons goes further and says:
As a new Member, I wanted to find out whether 12 hours was a long time to consider the Bill in Committee. After all, we are only dealing with a treaty that we cannot do anything with. The motion will mean that we have considered it in Committee for less than 20 hours in total.
I looked up the other Bills that have been considered in this Session.The Finance Bill had 36.5 hours consideration in Committee, and that was not a Committee of the whole House, as it was not a measure of constitutional significance and parts of it can be repealed if the House so wishes; the Bank of England Bill had 30 hours consideration in Committee; and this Bill has had 12.
We heard sedentary interventions from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker)--or perhaps I should call him the Minister for beef on the bone and vitamin B6, as he has shown his contempt for the ability of the British people to make their own decisions and could be an embodiment of the nanny state. He spoke about the poll tax; when that legislation was before the House there had been 16 Committee sittings and 13 clauses had been considered before the Government introduced the guillotine motion. Indeed, after that guillotine motion there were a further 18 sittings. If that is the precedent that the Government are citing today, it is a pretty shabby and self-evidently thin one to present to the House on a measure of constitutional significance.
It was 110 years ago that Sir William Harcourt warned that great
My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills talked about joining the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), in opposing previous guillotine motions. On those occasions, the right hon. Gentleman was on the other side of the debate. On 22 February 1977, the right hon. Gentleman will find that he was voting on a guillotine measure on the Wales Bill. The right hon. Gentleman's principles seem to change, depending on which side of the Chamber he is sitting.
We are faced with a treaty of profound importance. In discussions about defence, I have talked about the progressive framing of a common defence policy--a significant Government concession. We have been discussing that policy in Committee at the same time as Defence Ministers of the United Kingdom, Germany and France have given instructions to their aerospace industries to produce proposals by 31 March for the reunification of a European aerospace industry.
There is an agenda of stealth and we are seeing it implemented before our eyes. The Government are forcing through decisions by cutting short discussions in Committee. At the same time, significant issues are running in tandem which are fundamentally changing the United Kingdom's position in the world, in Europe and in the United States. These issues are not being discussed because there is no opportunity to do so in the House.
We were in the middle of discussing qualified majority voting when the motion was put before the House. We heard the Foreign Secretary talking about a mandate from the electorate. He referred to the trust that it had been given and talked about the social chapter. The right hon. Gentleman did not set out the Government's policies on QMV. I accept that he promised to try to extend QMV in four areas, but he succeeded only in one: employment policy. The right hon. Gentleman conceded that there
were 14 other areas on which the British electorate had no idea that it was being asked to vote on 1 May, including public health.
We had to listen to the Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, who is turning into a pretty impressive food fascist. What we must endure from the hon. Gentleman is what the House and the Government will be able to do nothing about when faced with a diktat from the majority of member states of the European Union. We shall not have time to discuss these issues. We are left with the possibility of only about seven hours of debate in Committee.
The details of the treaty are not understood outside this place. I thought that we were sent to the House to get into the nitty-gritty of these issues. How can we expect our constituents to get to grips with these issues and understand them? It is a task which is virtually impossible except for those of us who are prepared to go through the detail, with the time to do so.
Mr. Nicholas Winterton:
My hon. Friend said that people outside the House--the electorate, Mr. and Mrs. average citizen--do not understand what the issue is all about. Why, then, does every public opinion poll on entry into the single currency and further integration into Europe--the development of a federal state--show a substantial majority against? I believe that our people fundamentally understand the matter. That is why I believe that the House needs more time to explore the issues.
Mr. Blunt:
My hon. Friend is right to a degree. People have an instinctive understanding of the issues, but it cannot be a detailed understanding. They do not have the time to go through it. I worked in the Foreign Office for 18 months. Getting to grips with and preparing for the Committee on this legislation, working it through detail by detail, took far longer than what I did there. It deals with vital issues of national interest, especially defence and qualified majority voting. Hon. Members will identify issues of special concern to them.
Mr. Winterton:
Is not one of the great problems that the House and the people outside whom we have the honour to represent face that people such as the Foreign Secretary--for whose manner of dealing with the matter in the past I have had immense respect and who before the general election was strongly anti-Europe--are now so positively pro-Europe?
Mr. Blunt:
My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point. We have watched most Labour Members turn themselves upside down on European policy not once, twice or three times, but four or five times in the past three decades. They are victims of fashion. They have no idea or understanding of where the basic interests of the United Kingdom lie. That is why they can table a measure to curtail discussion in Committee.
"The guillotine is not lightly used, and is not applied without reason. The usual reason is to counter delaying tactics . . . amounting, in the government's view, to obstruction."
We have not had that in the 12 hours consideration of the Bill in Committee. I have listened to contributions from Members on both sides, and they have been constructive. I made one contribution myself. It is hardly as though certain hon. Members had constantly been getting up to obstruct the Government's purpose. So constructive were the contributions that it took the Minister for Europe an hour to sum up on the first occasion.
"constitutional measures might be pushed through the House in a fortnight when the guillotine procedure was first introduced . . . All our parliamentary safeguards are now swept away.
Sir William was talking about the theoretical possibility of the disestablishment of the Church of England. We are faced here with a treaty which, once ratified by Parliament, we can do nothing more about in this place. The warning that Sir William gave 110 years ago is a real warning today.
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