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Mr. Denis MacShane (Rotherham): On and on.
Mr. Fabricant: If necessary, they will go on and on and on, as the hon. Gentleman says. However, I give way to the hon. Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Bermingham), who always makes welcome interventions.
Mr. Gerald Bermingham (St. Helens, South): The hon. Gentleman has called me unkind in the past, so I will not be unkind to him tonight. Does not he agree that we might get through our debates faster if our speeches were terse and to the point?
Mr. Fabricant: The hon. Gentleman is right. I shall be terse and to the point when I contribute to the Third Reading debates on these Bills.
Mr. David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire): For the first time.
Mr. Fabricant: That is very unfair. When I want, I can speak to the point, but sometimes we must expand on the role of Parliament. Too many people believe that Parliament is not a talking shop, and that we should not scrutinise legislation. They believe that hon. Members should merely vote, unthinkingly, according to the wishes of their Whips.
Mr. Bercow: Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister for the Arts wants to truncate scrutiny of the
Royal Parks (Trading) Bill because he lacks evidence about the pricing policies of burger sellers and the nutritional--or other--properties of their products?
Madam Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not go down that route.
Mr. Fabricant: I shall not go down that route, especially as it has been said that bird droppings--
Madam Speaker: Order. I asked the hon. Gentleman not to go down that route. He should concentrate on the motion before the House.
Mr. Fabricant: I draw the House's attention to the Parks Regulation Act 1872, which defines which parks are royal. We should have to debate the Bill for much more than a couple of hours if all the hon. Members with royal parks in their constituencies were present tonight. The Act states that the royal parks are Hyde park, St. James's park, Green park--known as "the" Green park in 1872--Kensington gardens, Parliament Square gardens, Regent's park, Kennington park, Primrose hill, Victoria park, Battersea park, Greenwich park, Kew gardens--including the pleasure grounds and the green there--Hampton Court park, gardens and green, Richmond park and green, Bushy park, Holyrood park, and Linlithgow Peel.
I must confess to my ignorance in not knowing whether Linlithgow Peel is in Scotland, Ireland or Northern Ireland. I suspect that it is not in England--but where are the hon. Members associated with those royal parks? They are not in the Chamber.
Mr. Swayne: Is it my hon. Friend's estimate that the provisions of that Act are in any way co-measurate with the provisions of the Bill that will be before us after the debate on the motion? How long did it take for that Act to pass through its stages compared with the time that we are being allowed in which to discuss this Bill?
Mr. Fabricant: I was going to refer to my hon. Friend, but as he has asked me a question to which I have no answer, I must refer to him as the hon. Gentleman. I am afraid that I do not know. The Parks Regulation Bill became an Act on 27 June 1872--I do not have its Committee stage here. Interestingly, it was printed not by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, but by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode. That is a good example of privatisation before HMSO was founded.
I believe that under no circumstances would the 1872 Act have been guillotined when it was still a Bill. It would have been scrutinised for far longer than the mere 35 minutes that this Bill received in Committee, or the 43 minutes that the Second Reading debate took.
Mr. Swayne: The argument has been advanced this evening that the very fact that the Committee stage was so short is an argument for curtailing the Bill's remaining stages. Does my hon. Friend agree that the shorter the Committee stage, the greater the care that those of us who wish to scrutinise the remaining stages should take?
Mr. Fabricant: My hon. Friend--the House will note that I am once again referring to him as an hon. Friend--is right.
It has been said that a number of amendments to the Bill were tabled on the Floor of the House just to be contentious. That is not the point. I do not know how many people served on the Standing Committee considering the Bill, but I know that there are 639 Members of Parliament--[Interruption.]--or rather, 659. I am showing my age. Actually, I was deducting 20 to take into account those who cannot take part in debate because they are Whips or work with the Speaker.
The remaining Members of Parliament may think of amendments that they want to table but are unable to do so unless they served on the Standing Committee. To accuse Conservative Members, as Ministers have done, of being provocative or trying to waste time by tabling amendments today is a disgrace and an abuse of the House.
Mr. Bercow: My hon. Friend refers to the scurrilous criticism that amendments and new clauses have been tabled "to be contentious". Will he confirm the important point that, for many Opposition Members, contentiousness does not need to be contrived when it is natural?
Mr. Fabricant: My hon. Friend, eloquent as ever, states the obvious. When legislation is badly drafted, one needs to be contentious to improve it.
Mr. Bermingham: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. When a Bill is uncontested on Second Reading and flows through its Committee stage uncontested, is it not an abuse of the process of the House to table spurious amendments and make stupid interventions and silly points in order to prolong proceedings?
Madam Speaker: Spurious amendments may have been tabled, but all the amendments that were selected by this Speaker are perfectly in order.
Mr. Fabricant: Thank you, Madam Speaker. In fact, the hon. Gentleman will see that the selection list refers to the Speaker's provisional selection of amendments. That is the point. Perhaps more amendments were tabled, I do not know. However, the fact that they will come before the House today demonstrates that they should have been discussed in Committee. If they were not, it is right and proper that we discuss them on the Floor of the House.
Mr. David Maclean (Penrith and The Border): Does my hon. Friend consider that Government new clause 2, in respect of the Television Licences (Disclosure of Information) Bill is a spurious amendment, to quote the hon. Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Bermingham)?
Mr. Fabricant: That is something that we shall have to debate. Sadly, we shall not be able to do so at length. The abuse of the House is not my debating these issues this evening but the imposition of the guillotine. I suspect that we shall have only an hour to debate six clauses and three groups comprising one new clause and five amendments. That is surely an abuse of the House.
Mr. Greenway: I am becoming a little concerned that my hon. Friend might think that the Committee did not
pay sufficient regard to the Bill, given the time that we took to consider it. I give him the assurance that that is not the case. New clause 2 has been tabled by the Government at the request of the Opposition.
Mr. Fabricant: That was a helpful intervention. It demonstrates that the Government have much to learn from the Opposition. Why is it that the Government think that they can learn from the Opposition only in Committee and not on the Floor of the House? How much more could they learn were we able to debate these issues until 4, 5, 6 or 7 am? We might be able to continue right through until Wednesday. We have learned that the Prime Minister is taking parental leave, and we could continue through Prime Minister's Question Time, as we did once before.
Mr. Swayne: Am I correct in understanding that my hon. Friend said earlier that these matters should have been considered by the Committee? I think that I am quoting him correctly. Is he criticising the Committee for not having done its duty thoroughly? If that is so, is it his contention that the motion could have been avoided if the Committee of Selection had attended properly to its task?
Mr. Fabricant: My hon. Friend takes me down an interesting line of reasoning which I think I would be wise not to pursue. However, two heads are better than one. I do not know how many Members served on the Committee, but let us say that there were 11. Given that there are 639 Members able to speak in the House, as opposed to a total membership of 659, surely they constitute a better body of opinion than 11 Members.
As perfect as the Committee undoubtedly was and as talented as all its members undoubtedly were, it would not be unreasonable to say that they would not be able to think of every improvement that could be made to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) has said, it is so easy to be contentious when dealing with Government Bills. Even the Government are contentious when it comes to their Bills. We have only to remember the Utilities Bill, half of which had to be torn up and thrown away. The remaining half was improved by the Government, who had to introduce new clauses that, when put together, were as big the original Bill.
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