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Mr. Bercow: My right hon. Friend will be aware that I missed the intoxicating excitements of the 1980s and
early 1990s to which my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) referred, because, as I am happy to concede and the House will be aware, I am a parliamentary virgin. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one reason why it is essential that we should debate the Report and Third Readings of the Bills before us today in particular detail is that, if anything, in the past three years the Opposition have debated for too few hours in the House, not too many?
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend is right. If he studies the time that the House has sat, he will see that, given the number of Bills and measures that we have considered, the number of hours allocated to debate has declined considerably since the new Government came to power.
My hon. Friend has made another confession. I was in the House a few months ago when he came out and confessed that he was heterosexual. We have heard today that he is a parliamentary virgin. However, there is still time left in this parliamentary Session for my hon. Friend to lose his parliamentary virginity in whatever way he thinks appropriate.
The hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) said that he would support the Conservative party in opposing the motions. He suggested that my right hon. and hon. Friends' scrutiny of legislation was like the monkeys who, with lots of typewriters and enough years, would doubtless write a Shakespeare play. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman did not intend that to be derogatory, but I took slight umbrage at that.
Amendments tabled to many Bills by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and I--particularly on Fridays--have, on most occasions, been accepted by the Government. Hardly a Friday goes past without a Minister agreeing at the Dispatch Box that an amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend or myself has merit. Ministers say that the Government will consider it and, perhaps, adopt it in another place. I will not embarrass the Ministers concerned by quoting their words about some of the amendments that we have tabled--amendments which Labour Members have described as wasting time or filibustering. On nearly all of those occasions, the Government have accepted that our amendments were valid.
I have tabled some amendments on the Order Paper today, some of which have been selected by Madam Speaker. I assume that they are in order and that the Chair does not regard them as utterly irrelevant. Over the past few years, I have been fortunate in having many amendments selected for debate. In drafting them, I have often thought that the Government would dislike them, that the amendments would get nowhere and that it could be a waste of time. However, I have persisted because I believe that it is our duty as parliamentarians to scrutinise legislation and draft amendments.
With regard to the Nuclear Safeguards Bill, my new clauses were an attempt to address the problems of entry and the powers of arrest and give foreign inspectors certain rights to go into people's homes. I thought that I could address some of the concerns, and I tabled amendments which have been selected. For someone to suggest--as the hon. Member for Walsall, North did--that we are wasting time by drafting irrelevant amendments is an affront to the whole purpose of Parliament, which is to scrutinise legislation, and an insult to the Chair.
When I have strayed out of order, the Chair has pulled me up; severely, on some occasions. I make no complaint about that; it is the duty of the occupant of the Chair. However, we can say that all my other remarks on these occasions were in order and that there was no wasting time. In last week's debate on the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill, the Minister welcomed some of our amendments and suggested that we had conducted the debate properly, efficiently and courteously. He said that there was some merit in our arguments. He then convinced us that his approach was better and we withdrew the amendments.
If we had wanted to waste some time, we would have forced a vote on the amendments, and that would have been even more embarrassing for the Government because they had given their Back Benchers the night off. That was at only 7 o'clock in the evening. If the Government cannot keep their Members here at 7 o'clock, there is not much hope of them being here on a Friday between 9 and 2, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst vainly hopes.
Why are we considering this motion today? I can only assume that the Government have got frit and lost their nerve. We face a massive amount of legislation, because the Government have overloaded their legislative programme. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North was right to question the Government's priorities. Some chap from London wrote to me recently to say that the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill was vitally important and that I must, in no circumstances, speak against it. He wanted the powers to drive out the smelly hamburger sellers within days. I could respond only by saying that I am just one Member of Parliament. If the Government think that the issue is so important, they should adopt it as a programme Bill and get it through that way. However, the hon. Gentleman questioned the wisdom of the Government in selecting measures that he considers not to be of earth-shattering importance. He told the House today that some measures in the Government's programme are sufficiently important to fight about that we could sit up all night debating them.
Mr. Doug Henderson: The right hon. Gentleman has drawn conclusions from what I said and claimed that I said something that I did not say. I said that the House needed reform and should draw a distinction between important and less important legislation. I did not say that any of the legislation before us today was not important. I actually said that the House must consider effective ways to deal with the issue.
Mr. Maclean: I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's clarification, but in his next breath, or in his next sentence, he mentioned the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill, and he seemed to minimise its importance by referring to ice-cream sellers. He dismissed ice-cream sellers in royal parks, and I took it that he was using that Bill as an example of a measure that he did not consider as important as other legislation.
I cannot make such distinctions. The Government lay out their legislative programme and the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill is a Government Bill. Therefore, I expect it to get the sort of scrutiny that a Government Bill should get. It should not be bounced through on the nod on a Friday, which is a bad way to make legislation. It should not be bounced through after one hour and 10 minutes in
Committee. The Government should not then claim that it has been debated by 18 or 24 Members in Committee and that we should just let it through. That is not the proper way to make legislation and that is not doing our duty as parliamentarians.
Mr. Bercow: Does my right hon. Friend agree that there should be some consistency in the statements from Labour Members? If they wish the job of a Member of Parliament more closely to resemble that of almost anybody else, in the private or public sector, they should answer the question that would be on the lips of many millions of members of the public why the House does not sit for approximately 20 weeks of the year. If they defend that arrangement and continue to want the House to consider the quantity of legislation that it currently considers, they have to accept that many more late nights will be required.
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend makes a valid point, which brings me to the comments made recently by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Ms Kingham). There were many new Members after the election and I do not recognise all of them, but I confess that today was the first time I have ever seen the hon. Lady. On Fridays, I have the pleasure of contesting with some very able-- I am not being patronising--hon. Ladies on the other side who have driven through legislation and are often here participating in debate, giving myself and my hon. Friends a tough time of it. I can only assume, given that some hon. Ladies on the Government Benches are able to cope, that the hon. Member for Gloucester was looking for an excuse when she decided to make her comments at the weekend about leaving Parliament.
If the hon. Member for Gloucester wants the House to operate from nine to five, or to work a shorter week, or to finish earlier at night--not that it goes on as long as it used to--she must accept the 48-week year worked by most people outside the House. Hon. Members have constituency engagements in recesses, but Parliament cannot have both a nine-to-five working day and a 30-week year. Something has to give, and that something is scrutiny of legislation. The Government have overloaded the legislative programme. They should not complain when some parts of the programme receive more scrutiny than they would wish.
It is not the Minister's fault that the Government have got into this problem with the four Bills before the House today. The Minister is decent and honourable, but he is not in the driving seat of the programme. The Government's business managers, the Cabinet Ministers and the Chief Whip are in the driving seat, and they are the ones who have got the Government into this muddle. They have added these Bills to the programme without considering that there might be opposition to them, or that hon. Members might want to debate them.
It was assumed that no one cared about the Bills and would not oppose them. It was assumed that they could be bounced through Committee and Report--although the Sea Fishing Grants (Charges) Bill will not have a Report stage at all.
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