| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Forth: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Maclean: I give way to my increasingly erudite right hon. Friend.
Mr. Forth: My right hon. Friend should be grateful that I am on my feet and compos mentis--at least, I think I am. Will he hazard an explanation as to why Ministers, having listened to his questions, which are so germane to their Bill, are apparently prepared to sit, glued to their seats, with a smug, self-satisfied grin on their faces, and are apparently unprepared to offer the Committee any explanation to answer the questions that my right hon. Friend has posed? If they cannot respond at all, where can the Committee look for guidance?
Mr. Maclean: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have no doubt that, in some quarters, in the next few hours or the next few days, Labour Members will complain that my speech was tedious. [Hon. Members: "Never."] If either of the Under-Secretaries seek to catch your eye, Mr. Lord, to sum up the debate, and promise to take even five minutes explaining what is behind clause 3, reassuring my right hon. and hon. Friends and myself that there is nothing sinister, or simply giving us the legal advice that the removal of clause 3 would not render the rest of the Bill unworkable, I shall sit down immediately. I am talking merely to give the Ministers a chance to grab their notes and make that intervention.
Mr. Bercow: Will my right hon. Friend allow me?
The Second Deputy Chairman: Order. I think that the right hon. Gentleman is saying in his own way that he is buying time. [Hon. Members: "No."] He is becoming increasingly repetitive. Unless he can move on to fresh ground, perhaps he should think about bringing his remarks to a close.
Mr. Maclean: You anticipate me, Mr. Lord.
Mr. William Ross: The problem is that some of us have very great difficulty in understanding the Bill, and we need it repeated from various points of view to get things absolutely clear in our minds. I fear that we are more obtuse than the Ministers.
The Second Deputy Chairman: Order. This is not a Second Reading debate. We are dealing not with the Bill but with a very simple clause.
Mr. Maclean: I had anticipated your intervention, Mr. Lord, because I said a few minutes ago that I would conclude on this point. I was certainly not buying time.
I have given the Ministers a few opportunities to reassure me and I was trying to winkle out answers. If there was repetition, it was to try to make the point to the Government in different ways, and to give them opportunity after opportunity to reassure me that there is nothing Machiavellian in this--that there is nothing incompatible with the rest of the Bill if we delete the clause--and to give me the reassurances that I seek.
Mr. Bercow: Has my right hon. Friend noticed, throughout the deliberations over the past 20 hours or so, that Ministers have intervened several times, entirely properly, in the speeches of my right hon. and hon. Friends in order to clarify or rebut a point? Therefore, is it not entirely reasonable now to expect that they will intervene in my right hon. Friend's speech to give the commitment that we seek, or simply to nod the head?
The Second Deputy Chairman: Order. That point has been made ad nauseam.
Mr. Maclean: I was concluding my remarks. The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien) has, indeed, intervened numerous times, usually to tell the Chair how to do its job. No Opposition Member would ever dream of doing so--especially not when you are in the Chair, Mr. Lord.
I am tempted to join my right hon. and erudite Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst in challenging clause 3 standing part of the Bill and in voting against it, because I am no longer convinced that it is a simple consequential repeal. There is more to it than meets the eye, and I have been trying to find what lies behind it. Why is the deletion of the term "Irish Senate" done in this way, when it is not incompatible with keeping section 36(5) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and this clause in the Bill?
If the Minister can reassure me on that point, I may be persuaded to go into the Lobby with him. Otherwise, I shall have to conclude that my right hon. and hon. Friends have put their finger on the nub, that there is more to this than meets the eye and that we ought to reject clause 3.
Mr. William Ross:
I have been here constantly for nearly 21 hours--very rarely leaving the Chamber. I have followed the debate as closely as anyone, and I am as dissatisfied now as I was when I first came in to the debate. If we carry on tomorrow, tomorrow will see me still here. That is a part of the duties of a Member of this House: to attend this place, to argue the case for our constituents and to see that the laws that are passed are clear, simple and can be understood even by people such as myself--men of simple mind, and what used to be simple faith. That is no longer true after so long in this place.
Rev. Martin Smyth:
One reason why there should not be dual mandates is that folk should be here when proper debates are being held.
Mr. Ross:
Indeed, and given that, in some places, different languages are spoken, it is much better to be in a place where English is the mother tongue.
Mr. Bercow:
Is not it a matter of the utmost seriousness to us and to the people of this country that even with currently only a single mandate applying, only three Labour Back Benchers are present in the Chamber?
The Second Deputy Chairman:
Order. That is not a sensible intervention at this stage.
Mr. Ross:
The House will have heard the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), and I am sorry that there is so little interest among Government Members in this important Bill. Labour Members should have come to hear the criticism, and the impossibly poor defence that Ministers are making of the Bill. They describe new clause 3 as a consequential amendment.
Mr. Letwin:
I am conscious that we should not do a disservice to any hon. Member. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we are not in a position to judge whether the Under-Secretary's utterance was an impossibly poor defence or otherwise, as we did not know what was in it?
Mr. Ross:
That was the Under-Secretary's last but one defence. Earlier, he had been quite lucid. However, he has been up all night and has been under great strain, trying to think up excuses for what he is trying to ram down people's throats.
Another aspect has been touched on several times in the debate, but it took me some time to realise the point that was being made. The right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) drew attention to the fact that the clause could be described as consequential--and it takes a fair stretch of the imagination to do that--only because of its strange construction. If the Bill had been written in another fashion, the clause, far from being consequential, would have been central to it.
Last week, we discussed the complex provisions of the Representation of the People Bill. At the end of the debates on that, I asked the Minister in charge of the Bill whether it was intended to consolidate all the legislation that that Bill affected. There is no sign of that consolidation in a far more complex Bill than this small one. The Representation of the People Bill runs to book after book on electoral and representation matters.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |