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Mr. Hogg: Will my hon. Friend remind the House of yet another factor? When the Conservative Government were in office and they moved guillotine motions, it was normally done by the Leader of the House, which showed respect to the House. We now have a junior Home Office Minister moving the guillotine motion. Is that not a disgrace?

Mr. Shepherd: I hope that I indicated that. There is a casualness here. At least the Secretary of State responsible for taking a Bill through the House used to move the motion, if not the Leader of the House, who is the custodian of the interests of hon. Members on both sides of the House, and safeguards the House as an institution.

Mr. Mike O'Brien: The hon. Gentleman wants me to justify the guillotine motion. I thought it best to do so at the end of the debate, once I had heard the points made by hon. Members such as him. I shall be happy to justify the motion then. Given that the hon. Gentleman feels so strongly and speaks so forcefully about this matter, and given that he is so outraged, why, earlier in our proceedings, did he take the view that he would not even vote against the guillotine motion?

Mr. Shepherd: I have spoken on almost every guillotine motion in the House for the past 20 years. There comes a point when it feels as if repetition does not serve the cause. Let us weigh what is happening. The Minister says, rather audaciously, that he intends to address the ruminations of the House after the motion has been discussed. He does not speak to the motion, but merely responds to hon. Members' observations: it is a motion on the Order Paper, moved formally. It would cheer the ghost of Lord Garel-Jones as he ranges round the House. The Government are implementing the device that he stumbled on and used but once--the incorporation in the time allowed of the guillotine motion. If we take the

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guillotine seriously, there will only be 45 minutes in which to discuss all the amendments to the Bill. That is less than five minutes for each group. It is palpably nonsense.

Some 35 Bills have already been guillotined. The Government clearly want practice, requiring something like 52 guillotine motions, including today's supplemental motion. What has gone wrong with them? Why are they so arrogant when it comes to due process?

Hon. Members have heard me say often enough that the liberty of this people is formed through this Chamber. It is our only representative institution--we have nothing else but this Chamber. Wilfully and cheerlessly, the Government march through guillotines, because they insist on having 10 Home Office Bills in this Session alone. I feel for the Minister who is, as often as not, charting two Bills simultaneously through Committee. How can this be a serious process?

The Labour party should listen to what is happening in the Government. We have a Prime Minister who barely comes here, whose factual attention to detail such as guillotine motions is nil, who gives us inaccurate answer after inaccurate answer, even contradicting the information given by his Ministers, as if this were a show place.

The Home Secretary told us yesterday about ritual opposition, as if opposition in our system is ritualistic. It is not. Opposition is in the clash of idea and counter-idea. The Home Secretary's Hegelian vision of how, through synthesis, we come to an understanding of what is appropriate is all nonsense. Every one of us is elected on an equal franchise. We come here to represent our people and say our bit for them, and they can then judge whether we have acted appropriately.

What of due process? A long time ago it was said that our freedom and liberty lie in the interstices of procedure. That is true. We must remember Burke, as I have said many times. The Minister knows as well as I do that a parliamentary majority is not just x divided by 2 + 1: it is informed by the process and our right to argue and say what we think is appropriate.

I think that the whole London mayor idea is nonsensical. It has no relevance to Aldridge-Brownhills, and only 23 per cent. of the electorate in London voted for it. It is typical of the Government in that they play around with the constitution not knowing what they are doing, and then do not wish to discuss it. They break up our Union and undermine the Welsh nature and culture. They do all that with no solid signal from the electorate to the effect that that is what they want: whatever the agenda, it must be steamrollered through, and that is what the House is doing yet again tonight.

Mr. Mike O'Brien: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is a neighbour, for generously giving way to me again. The Bill was debated on the Floor of the House, and had three days in a Committee of the whole House. On the second day in Committee, only two Conservative Back Benchers bothered to speak. On the third day, only four Conservative Back Benchers bothered to speak. We then had lengthy speeches from one or two hon. Members, who were clearly abusing the procedures of the House. The Deputy Speaker had to intervene on

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19 occasions during those debates. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that the abuse is coming from the Opposition rather than from the Government?

Mr. Shepherd: I know one thing, and I say it as gently as I can to the Minister: he is not a solicitor or barrister whom I would employ in these matters. After all, who is he to determine where an argument lies or at what stage simpletons such as me begin to appreciate what is happening? I have begun to appreciate from the figures that I have quoted that the Government are using the guillotine more frequently than it was ever used under Mrs. Thatcher, and in a more savage and aggressive way than she ever used it. I can only conclude that it is because she had a parliamentary history, and the new Labour Government have almost none. They do not remember the traditions of allowing other people to speak.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr. George Foulkes): Rubbish.

Mr. Shepherd: Although the hon. Gentleman says "rubbish", he remembers full well his own anger at the use of the guillotine in the past.

I return to the idea that opposition to the guillotine is not ritualistic. It is the right of every Member to try to express himself. The Liberal Democrats have fought hard on some of the issues in the Bill and have a right to argue their case; I have a right to argue my case; and the Government's official Opposition have a right to argue theirs. In forgetting due process, the Government forget the trust of the British people that in this place our liberty and freedom are secured. They are not secured by measures such as this.

11.34 pm

Mr. John Greenway (Ryedale): I said at the outset of the proceedings on the Bill, when I had other duties and spoke from the Dispatch Box, that I believed that the Bill was deeply flawed. I made very unkind remarks about it. I am glad that some of those deficiencies have been corrected in the other place, but I am bound to say to the Minister that all the warnings that we gave on Second Reading and in Committee, which as the Minister said, was on the Floor of the House, have turned out to be true in even greater measure than we expected.

One other negative aspect is that, by the introduction of the Greater London Authority election measure, the Government have included in the Bill a matter that clearly does not command consensus. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King) said, in a Bill of such importance, affecting electoral matters, that is a great mistake. It says something of the Government's lack of preparedness for the assembly and mayoral elections that the only way in which they have been able to rescue the situation at this very late stage has been to introduce a measure that has no place in the Bill. As a result, a Bill on which we hoped there would be complete consensus has ended up the subject of bitter and acrimonious argument.

Such acrimony is made all the greater because, regardless of whether the Government are justified in deciding to impose a guillotine on proceedings on Lord

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amendments, it is abundantly clear that they have not allocated enough time. There should have been at least a whole day's debate.

The Minister says that hon. Members were given three whole days in Committee--indeed we were. He says that, in some debates, Conservative Members did not speak. I shall give him two reasons why. For the first two days, we were debating not what is in the Bill but what some of his hon. Friends and Liberal Democrats Members would have liked to be in it. That is not scrutiny of the Bill but an attempt to add other measures to it. In reality, we had only one day in Committee in which to scrutinise the Bill. That is why some of my hon. Friends were persuaded not to speak in some debates. Otherwise, we could not have debated some of the issues that should have been discussed. I know, I was there and I understand entirely the reason for the number of contributions: lack of time. We are using the time allocated--it is the only way available to us--to register our protest yet again at the Government's mishandling of a measure that should have commanded consensus.

I turn to the most telling argument that one can deploy on the mess that the Government have got themselves into.

Mr. Mike O'Brien rose--

Mr. Greenway: Let me finish. The Minister can answer points in his winding-up speech.

As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), the tragedy for democracy and our democratic process is that we were not able to put this Bill right before we sent it to the other place. We have had to rely on the other place to make changes, some of which the Minister told us only three or four weeks ago were totally unnecessary but is now asking us to accept.

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