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Mr. Maclean: The hon. Gentleman's statistics are entirely wrong, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) has already explained. It is not just the number of guillotines that count--we have heard that the Government have guillotined about 50 Bills--but at what point in the process the Government use the most draconian method of curtailing debate available to them.
Of course, one can defend the use of a guillotine in certain circumstances. I listened with incredulity--no, I was not incredulous. It was the usual speech that the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) makes before he bolts from the Chamber. We shall no doubt hear him make the same point in the debate on the next guillotine motion.
The hon. Gentleman went on and on about a Government not being able to tolerate sitting here night after night, hour after hour, debating the same measure. He said that the right of the majority must be respected, and that the Government must have the right to impose a guillotine after all that time. He missed the fundamental point. These Bills have had two and a half hours' debate at most, by probably, at most, 30 Members of Parliament upstairs. Another 630 of us have not had a chance to consider one iota of them on Report.
Mr. Forth: My right hon. Friend has just repeated the assertion that has been made a number of times during the debate--that the House repeatedly sits all through the night. My memory suggests that, in the three years of the current Parliament, the House has sat all through the night two or three times, but it is no more than that. Will he confirm that fact? Does he not believe that a mythology is arising? More often than not, the House now finishes at 10 o'clock and almost never sits through the night.
Mr. Maclean: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to come on to that point--it is in the part of my speech entitled "The myth of sitting through the night". We have heard hon. Members talk about it. There was a point during my 17 years in the House--it was in the mid-1980s--when all-night sittings were fairly common. When one did two in a row, that was tough going. No doubt two all-night sittings in a row, or going until midnight on the second night, tired Ministers, Whips and all those participating.
I am not saying that that was the best way of passing parliamentary business, or that we were at our freshest and best. I am not defending that way of proceeding. However, we must puncture the illusion--which has been quoted by too many people who want excuses to take away hon. Members' rights--that we are sitting all night, all the time. It just does not happen any more.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Does my right hon. Friend realise that the mid-1980s pale into insignificance compared with the early 1970s, when night after night--especially in our consideration of the Industrial Relations Act 1971; I did not miss a single sitting--we were kept up by skilful Labour Members, who--although, in my view, misguidedly--absolutely properly used all the instruments available to them to delay what they considered to be inappropriate and obnoxious legislation?
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He also has a more glorious record of sitting long hours than I have, as I was elected to the House in the 1980s. His intervention is relevant to this guillotine motion. One of the reasons given by Labour Members for seeking to curtail debate is that we must prevent all-night debates, because we have wasted so much time on them that they have been bad for legislation. In this Parliament, however, we have had barely any all-night sittings. Moreover, although we have not even started to consider on Report
the Nuclear Safeguards Bill and the Sea Fishing Grants (Charges) Bill, the Government have already moved to guillotine debate on them.I could understand the Government moving a guillotine motion on the Bills if, having ploughed on with debate on them until 2 am or 3 am, the Government decided that they could not get the legislation by continuing debate for another hour or so, and that it would be better to give up and to come back on another day with a guillotine. We have not even started debating the Bills on Report, but the Government are introducing the draconian instrument of the guillotine. One of their excuses for doing so is that they do not want the House sitting up all night.
Mr. Bercow: I do not want to deflect my right hon. Friend from the thrust of his argument, but will he take this opportunity to rebut the dangerous argument made by the hon. Member for Upminster (Mr. Darvill), who suggested that precisely because a Bill had been considered so briefly in Committee, that in itself justified minimal attention being given to it by the House on Report? Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Minister for Energy and Competitiveness in Europe recently used a similar argument in relation to another Bill, saying that she would not give way to me because I had not been on the Committee? Does he agree that it is essential to understand that Bills are reported to the House so that all hon. Members are able thoroughly to debate their contents?
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That illustration also portrays one of the frightening attitudes of some Labour Members, who believe that opposition to the Government is blasphemous. One can detect that attitude whenever any criticism is made of the Prime Minister. The Government's attitude is essentially one of, "But you cannot oppose us--we are right. You should not talk against the Bill--it is right. We are doing it--it must be right." That attitude is creeping into so many spheres.
The Government's attitude seems to be that because legislation has been considered in Committee, that should be it--it is good enough. They seem to think that we should not consider legislation at all on Report, because they gave it some time in Committee, where another noble bunch of Members of Parliament considered it. They seem to be asking what on earth we are doing trying to consider it in the Chamber.
Conversely, I have heard some Ministers suggest that it is outrageous for Opposition Members to table amendments on Report, because we were not on the Committee and did not raise the issues there. I have not heard that said by the Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office, who has been handed the poisoned chalice today. He is a nice, decent and honourable man, told to do a dirty job that should have been done by the Leader of the House. It is an outrageous contempt that the right hon. Lady is not here in person to face the House and justify the motion.
The Government, however, cannot have it both ways. If they want to gag us, they should be brutal enough to say that they do not like opposition per se. They should have the guts to say whether they believe that it is blasphemous, irrational or not to be tolerated for
Opposition Members--or Labour Members--to pop up and say that the Government may be wrong. They should not produce the type of guillotine motion that we are now debating. It is intended drastically to curtail debate on Bills that the House has not had a chance to debate or to run, to see how they might turn out.
Mr. David Taylor: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. A few moments ago, I attempted to roll back the calendar a decade to look at the experience of the first three years of the Government elected in June 1987, led by Lady Thatcher, of which the right hon. Gentleman was a member. The figures show that 20 Bills were guillotined in that period--making use of a tool that the right hon. Gentleman has described as a draconian instrument used by all-powerful Governments who arrogantly tread all over their Back Benchers and the Opposition. How many of those 20 guillotine motions did the right hon. Gentleman vote for?
Mr. Maclean: I sincerely hope that I voted for all of them if I was serving in the Government. If the hon. Gentleman has tried to do some research, he should tell us how many times Lady Thatcher or members of her Government argued for a guillotine after only one and a half hours of debate in Committee. If any Tory Minister had tried that, there would have been outrage from the Labour party and the media, who at that time considered it their fundamental duty to join the Opposition in opposing the Tory Government, because they thought that Lady Thatcher's 120 majority was too big and was bad for democracy. Now we have a Government with a majority of 180 driving through what they like with the media licking their boots--I choose boots as a safer and more advisable part of the anatomy.
Mr. Gerald Howarth (Aldershot): I wonder whether my right hon. Friend recalls the many late-night and all-night sittings that we had in the late 1980s and the excitement that ran through the Chamber at about 4 o'clock in the morning when, while we were feeling extremely weary, in through the door behind the Speaker's Chair appeared the Prime Minister, without a hair out of place and looking as bright as a button. How many times has my right hon. Friend seen the present Prime Minister in the Chamber when the House has been sitting late at night? Let us hope that he will be kept up late at night now.
Mr. Maclean: I should not care to speculate on matters that might be out of order, but in relation to the motion, it will be interesting to see whether the Prime Minister turns up. His Government appear to consider the four Bills under discussion today to be so vital that they must have these draconian motions, so I assume that if the Prime Minister can tear himself away from his family duties today, he might be able to pop through the voting Lobbies for a few minutes. When we had all-night sittings in the 1980s, one would always see the then Prime Minister participating, just as one always saw the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) and Bob Cryer going through the Opposition Lobbies, because they were the ones who had kept us here most of the day and night, doing their important parliamentary duty of scrutinising all legislation properly and in detail and trying to find flaws in it.
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