| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Those matters are nothing to do with the timetable motion.
Mr. Chope: I accept your ruling, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
11.3 pm
Mr. Owen Paterson (North Shropshire): It is a great pleasure to be called in the debate, and I shall be as brief as I can, as I know that other hon. Members want to speak and time is short.
This is a completely unnecessary guillotine motion. I was here at 10 o'clock on Wednesday last week. Few Labour Members were present. Progress was being made. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) was speaking to amendment No. 6, and the debate was going smoothly. Serious points had been made by my right hon. Friends the Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean). To my astonishment, the Labour Whip closed proceedings down and moved the motion that the House be adjourned. That was completely unnecessary. It was a symptom of the fact that the Government and Government Whips in particular have lost control of their Back Benchers. It is as simple as that.
Mr. Maclean: The Back Benchers had gone home.
Mr. Paterson: They had. They wanted to go to bed. I wonder what their constituents think about that. Why were those Members sent here? The debate has been most interesting because it has thrown up major differences on either side of the House. I regard it as a huge honour to be elected to the House. I am allowed to stand here and to say what I like. I am one of 659 people with an enormous privilege: to come here and to speak. That is what Parliament is all about.
I might be a bit of a traditionalist. The first Parliaments were held in Acton Burnell and Shrewsbury in Shropshire. I regard it as a retrograde step that, soon after, Parliament moved to Westminster and has been here ever since. There is always hope that it might move back to Shrewsbury. It is unlikely, but I am prepared to travel from Shropshire to speak, to represent the people of North Shropshire, to say what I think about matters and to give my judgment. I may be wrong. I may be laughed at. I may be shouted down, but that is my role as a Member of Parliament.
I find it extraordinary because people have gone to such trouble to get in here. We all know it because we have all been through the process. We all had to go through the party system, to fight our duff seat, to be councillors and to work our way through our party machines to get in here. It is a long hard slog to become a Member of Parliament.
Mr. Quentin Davies (Grantham and Stamford): Is not the Government's behaviour a much more worrying and sinister phenomenon than my hon. Friend suggests? Is it not a fact that they have become so arrogant with their enormous majority that they do not feel that they need to listen to parliamentary opinion any more? If the going gets a bit rough, they know that they can always pull stumps and guillotine the measure through with their vast docile majority.
Mr. Paterson: My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point, which I shall come to. The Government do take advantage of their huge majority. My hon. Friend is right. What I
find extraordinary is that many Labour Members are here on a temporary stay. They will not be here for more than one Parliament.
Mr. David Taylor: Will the hon. Gentleman explain how it is possible to reconcile the view that we have just heard--that the Government have a large docile majority--with his own view that the reason for the timetabling of the legislation is because the Government have lost control of that large docile majority?
Mr. Paterson: The Government are lazy. It is as simple as that. They are lazy in imposing discipline on their troops. We see that. There are ridiculous objections to the time here. In an earlier debate, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst pointed out that, on Friday morning, he was here from 9 o'clock until 2.30. I was here in the later stages of that debate. Surely those qualify as civilised hours for a debate, according to all the criteria of the new Labour luvvies. Surely they can all get out of bed in time to be here by 9.30.
Mr. Gordon Marsden (Blackpool, South): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Paterson: I am delighted to give way to the hon. Member for Blackpool, North.
I have been listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman's argument. Does he not agree that it is perhaps a sign occasionally of greater maturity among Labour Members that many of them prefer--and, indeed, need--to spend Fridays in their constituencies listening to and representing their constituents, rather than sitting in this place and listening to some of the waffle that we have heard this evening?
Mr. Paterson: That is an important contribution because it shows the difference between the attitudes on both sides of the House. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that he should be visiting his constituency. He should be concerned with his constituents. That is right, but I feel that too many Labour Members are obsessed with face-to-face meetings with their constituents and not with their equal responsibilities here: passing laws that make very important decisions affecting the civil liberties of the citizens of this country.
Mr. Maclean: Is it not the case that, now, almost every second Friday is a non-sitting Friday to enable Members to visit their constituencies and to meet constituents, but that, when we do have sitting Fridays, there is important business before the House? We had two Bills on Friday, which we passed. One was promoted by a Conservative Member and the other by a Labour Member. There was total support from both Front-Bench teams and from hon. Members on both sides of the House. One Bill dealt with the freedom of patients to have doctors' practice investigated. The other tightened up on animal cruelty. It was not waffle or rubbish that Members dealt with on that important Friday, when the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) could not be bothered to be here.
Mr. Paterson: My right hon. Friend makes his point with his usual eloquence. On Friday, he was in the Chamber, speaking and proposing sensible amendments that have improved those two Bills.
It is most important that Labour Members should consider their role. They are more than county councillors or district councillors. Although councillors have a very worthwhile occupation, there is an awful lot more to being an hon. Member than acting as a councillor, by only holding surgeries and paying attention to constituents' nitty-gritty details. Members of Parliament have another role and that role is performed here in the Chamber--by speaking up for constituents.
The hon. Member for Blackpool, South has rights that the 70,000-odd people whom he represents do not have.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman has to speak to the timetable motion, not remind us of the duties of Members of Parliament. Most of us know those duties.
Mr. Forth: Those Labour Members do not.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I do not need to be reminded.
Mr. Paterson: I shall follow your stricture, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Bercow: Does not this allocation of time motion admirably explain the mindset of Government Back Benchers--this is utterly germane to the allocation of time motion--in that they are wholly docile in agreeing not to speak about any of the matters for which time is being allocated, but they are utterly outspoken about their selfish right to go home when it suits them?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The allocation of time motion is not about when hon. Members go home--it has nothing to do with that--but about an allocation of time for the legislation that we are about to consider. Hon. Gentlemen must speak to that.
Mr. Paterson: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is important to discuss the allocation of time motion in the light of how Labour Members seem to respect parliamentary time. I think that that is the point that Opposition Members are trying to get at.
Mr. Bercow: I certainly comply, immediately and without hesitation, with your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, does my hon. Friend not agree that, if sufficient hon. Members were motivated to comment on powers of seizure, on counterfeit, on offences and penalties on the disclosure of information and related matters, substantially more time than the Government are allocating would be required?
Mr. Paterson: Certainly; and perhaps they would be if it were their own property.
A telling phrase was used in a debate, last year, when one of the Government Back Benchers described himself as a "middle manager", which perhaps explains the difference between Opposition Members and Government Members. We think that our role is to oppose the motion, because we believe that we should be spending our time going through the Bill line by line. In the 1240s, knights came down from Shropshire to Parliament to examine Bills line by line, in the light of their own experience. They did not see themselves as middle managers. [Interruption.]
The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Bradley) laughs. One of his predecessors--one of those very first knights from Shropshire--was described by Peter de Montford as being "over independent". The hon. Gentleman should remember that. He has been sent to this place to examine Bills line by line.
We are considering important legislation, affecting confiscation of property--
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |