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Fiona Mactaggart: The right hon. Gentleman made it clear earlier that his strategy when he is frustrated by one thing is to fuss about something completely different.
He made it clear that he did that on Monday night. That is what I described as a failure of the procedures of the House. I imagine that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House thought that he might choose this occasion to do it again.
Mr. Maclean: What a preposterous idea. I assure the hon. Lady that, had we intended to disrupt the Food Standards Bill, there would be 50 amendments in my name on all aspects of it. I have tabled no amendments to the Bill because I was largely satisfied by most of the Minister's comments in Committee. I am also satisfied with the few--it is a few in parliamentary terms--sensible amendments that have been tabled by my hon. Friends, which are adequate for debate. It is preposterous of the hon. Lady and outrageous of the Leader of the House to suggest that a Bill that we have not even started to discuss on the Floor of the House should be guillotined, especially given that there was utterly sensible co-operation from the Opposition in Committee.
Mr. Barron: Ten minutes ago, the right hon. Gentleman said that all that he wanted to do this afternoon was discuss the Food Standards Bill, the Standing Committee considering which we both sat on, until 7.30 or 8 o'clock tonight. Why, then, does he not sit down so that we can do that?
Mr. Maclean: Because I shall not be blackmailed by the Government, who want to curtail remarks on a guillotine motion by wrapping it up with the substance of the Bill. That is the evil that my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills complained about, and that is what other Labour Members have been threatening us with today. They are saying, "Don't talk on the guillotine motion. Stay gagged. Let us drive it through ruthlessly, because every minute you talk on the motion takes time out of discussion of the Bill."
I deplore the fact that time is being taken out of the debate. That is not happening because my hon. Friends and I are talking on the motion; it is happening because the Government have phrased the motion in that way. They could have phrased it to give us two or three hours on the guillotine motion and then presented a separate time limit for discussion of the Bill itself. This is, therefore, a simple blackmail motion, because we know that for every second that we take in protesting about the Government's illiberal behaviour in trying to drive through guillotines, we are taking time out of discussion of the Bill. Although the Bill is extremely important, the freedom of Members of Parliament to have a say on all aspects of legislation is even more important.
Labour Members also suggest that, because this and other Bills have been before a Special Select Committee, we need less time to debate them. They suggest that they can be guillotined and that it does not matter if we have a shorter debate on Report because Special Select Committees of experts have looked at them. That is a jolly good thing for the 17 people fortunate enough to be on the Special Select Committee, excellently chaired by the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), but what about all the other Members of the House? What about those who were not even more fortunate in being on the Standing Committee that considered the Bill line by line? The only opportunity for those 635 Members to discuss the Bill is on the Floor of the House.
This motion is preventing that discussion from happening, not because I am protesting about the motion, but because the Leader of the House has drafted the motion in such a way that every word of protest against this illiberal, intemperate motion takes time out of the debate. That is why I shall vote against the motion. It is wrong because it seeks to curtail parliamentary democracy when there has not been one second wasted on the Food Standards Bill, or on the Employment Relations Bill last night.
Mr. Hoyle:
The right hon. Gentleman must be aware that he is taking time away from Back Benchers who want to get on with the debate. He must realise that he is filibustering.
Mr. Maclean:
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is stupid or slightly deaf, but he has missed the point that I am making.
Mr. Maclean:
The hon. Gentleman is using the standard blackmail on us. His Government have phrased this motion in such a way that it amounts to parliamentary blackmail.
Mr. Hoyle:
How can the right hon. Gentleman say that I am blackmailing him when I simply asked him to get on with the debate and allow Back Benchers who were not on the Select Committee to contribute to it. That is not blackmail. The right hon. Gentleman should withdraw his disgraceful comments; he should know better.
Mr. Maclean:
I have been here slightly longer than the hon. Gentleman, and I profess that, on this matter, I do know slightly better. It is parliamentary blackmail to phrase a motion in such a way that, every minute that one takes in protesting against the illiberal nature of the motion takes time out of the subject that we really want to debate.
This motion is the Government's responsibility. They should have phrased it differently, as such motionsused to be phrased on most occasions in the past. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Chorley(Mr. Hoyle) can laugh his head off, but he is part of the parliamentary blackmail. If he really wants time for debate on this measure, he should vote against the guillotine motion.
The motion is not necessary for the Food Standards Bill and I doubt whether it is necessary for the Bill that we were dealing with last night. I shall oppose it because I shall not be blackmailed by the Government into staying silent on a guillotine motion.
Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West):
The Leader of the House made it abundantly clear that the motion arises out of the events of Monday night. I do not
When the Minister for Transport was unable to explain the events that would follow on from the motion that she was proposing, Conservative Members naturally, and quite properly, wanted to investigate that fully in the debate that followed. As that debate was then curtailed arbitrarily--and improperly, in my view--it led to the subsequent Divisions that kept hon. Members up until 2 am. As a consequence, we now have the motion before us.
The motion is absurd; it is a punishment motion. The Government are saying, "You did this on Monday night; therefore we shall do this now." It is an absurd way for the Government to run the business of the House.
The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said, in support of the motion, that we should have programme motions on all our business and sensibly agree a timetable in which to discuss Bills. We have been through that. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) will agree that, when we sat through hour after hour of the Committee stage of the Scotland Bill, all of which had been timetabled through the usual channels, the timetable proved thoroughly inadequate because it was a straitjacket. Indeed, the Bill was effectively guillotined.
The timetable constrained debate of matters that arose quite naturally out of the investigations and probing amendments of Back Benchers. When issues were suddenly discovered that required fuller and more expansive debate, the timetable simply could not accommodate that. Timetables drawn up in advance cannot take account of what may be discovered by proper scrutiny.
Mr. Nick St. Aubyn (Guildford):
I expected that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) would have much more to say. Given that he does not, I certainly do.
I agree with those of my hon. Friends who, like me, were present throughout Monday's proceedings, that we have been traduced by the way in which Ministers have described our behaviour this afternoon. We have heard from other Labour Members that we are hooligans and vigilantes. Various other phrases have been used, but they have not discouraged the Leader of the House from saying that we employed legitimate tactics. We are not surprised that the right hon. Lady considers it all right for Back Benchers to be hooligans and vigilantes, because last night we saw a Minister being a hooligan, delaying the very legislation that is now to be subject to the timetable motion. It is the Government's Front-Bench hooligans who pose the real problem.
That Minister is not the only one, however. This whole difficulty arose from an attempt on Monday to assuage the pride and the prejudice of the Deputy Prime Minister. His pride demanded that there should be a Railways Bill from his Department--a Bill which, as is becoming clearer by the day, simply cannot proceed in the current Session. That is what provoked all that happened on Monday night. A Minister was not prepared to admit to us how the Bill would proceed and would not reply to the points that I was making. I gave way to one of her ministerial colleagues in the belief that we would be enlightened about how the Government would deal with the innovative structure for Bills; instead, we were faced with a closure motion, as a result of which we spent three and a half hours on procedure. We shall spend more than three hours on procedure this afternoon and we shall spend more than three hours on it on Monday. If we take into account the time spent on points of order concerning these issues over the past few days, that amounts to a total of 10 hours of debate on procedural matters.
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