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Mr. Paterson: I have not come to the Mafia yet.
I am concerned about extending the powers of law and order to the confiscation of private property. The Television Licences (Disclosure of Information) Bill contains dramatic powers on the disclosure of confidential information to the BBC, of all organisations.
Mr. Fabricant: At least the BBC is a public corporation that is governed by royal charter. Is it not also true that the information to which my hon. Friend refers would be disclosed to private corporations contracted under the Bill's terms? Is that not worrying?
Mr. Paterson: That is worrying, but I will not be tempted by my hon. Friend to go into too much of the detail of the Bills, because we are discussing the timetable motion. The Bills deal with serious matters relating to law and order and the disclosure of information.
The hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), who is sadly not in his place, made a brief speech earlier, arguing that subjects that are debated in the House should be divided between those that are very important and those that are not. That is a dangerous suggestion. We are here to scrutinise the Executive and hold it to account. The Walsall doctrine, as we might call it, would give power to the Executive to decide what is important.
We have pushed as hard as we can this evening at the Liberal Democrats. The first contribution of the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) was about as satisfactory as chewing cardboard and I am afraid that his second contribution did not enlighten us much more.
Mr. Swayne: The right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan), who is sadly no longer in his place, likened his speech to the Gettysburg address. He said that he had received no representations during the Committee stage from those who would be affected by the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill, but the hamburger salesmen who would be affected were inarticulate and unlikely to be in a position to make such representations.
Mr. Paterson: My hon. Friend makes a telling point. My right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) has also tabled important amendments about language. One problem is that the entrepreneurs who sell their interesting sausages, hot dogs and other goods, including hot nuts, we have been told, speak a lot of foreign languages.
Mr. Stunell: It might be more helpful to remember, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan) pointed out, that the right hon. Member for Cities of London and
Westminster (Mr. Brooke)--a Conservative Member who represents those who work in the parks--was keen for the Bill to proceed in its current form and took a dim view of the delays that had taken place. That is a different perspective from that offered by the hon. Member for New Forest, East or West, as the case may be.
Mr. Paterson: There was plenty of time after 10 o'clock last Wednesday evening to sort out the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill. It could have been long behind us and we could be discussing something more interesting and more important. It is unnecessary to be discussing it now.
The hon. Member for Hazel Grove had a second shot in this debate. He said that there should be an all-party legislative Committee consisting of Front-Bench and Back-Bench Members from both sides of the House. I thought that that was a pretty accurate description of the House of Commons. It was the most bizarre constitutional suggestion from the Liberal Democrats. We had waited all evening for it, and all that we heard was that the House of Commons should decide these matters.
Mr. Fabricant: The irony is that if there were such a Committee, as proposed by the woolly hatted woolly thinkers along the gangway, its consideration would be guillotined, so there would be no advantage.
Mr. Paterson: We have got nothing out of the Liberal Democrats about how they would sort out the problem.
We are faced with a capacity problem. The Government are trying to crash through 28 Bills in one Session and are tacking on a few private Members' Bills as well. Not long ago, a senior member of the Tory party who had been involved in running legislative programmes during the 1980s told me that it was not possible to get more than 18 Bills through. The Government are trying to crash through 28 when 18 will go into the pot. We are not increasing the time available--if anything we are reducing it, because the luvvies all want to get home to bed by 10 o'clock.
The problem is compounded by the Government's rotten drafting. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Mr. Fraser), who has just left the Chamber, referred to amendments tabled to the Utilities Bill that were not spoken to. We all know that that Bill had to be ripped up and started again from scratch. Those are problems caused by the Government. We are already overgoverned. We already have too much legislation, too many bureaucrats and too much taxation and the Government are only increasing that.
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend commented on the rotten drafting. One can always criticise aspects of drafting, and I have found some measures that the Government have accepted could have been drafted more appropriately. However, the real criticism should not be of the parliamentary draftsmen--who are desperately overstretched by the Government--but of the instructions issued by Ministers on the Utilities Bill, which tried to do far too much and was nonsense, the Transport Bill and the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Act 1997.
Mr. Paterson: That is a fair comment. I have sat on the Standing Committee considering the Transport Bill, and elements of that Bill were badly drafted. Mistakes were made.
The hon. Member for Hazel Grove mentioned Europe. I am a member of the European Scrutiny Committee, and I wholly admire the Clerks who have to give us a precis of detailed legislation. Even then, we are making mistakes because we do not scrutinise European legislation as we do in the Chamber; or should do, if the Government allowed us the time--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We have a timetable motion before us, and I remind the hon. Gentleman again that that is what he must speak to--not other matters in the House. That is not the point before us.
Mr. Paterson: I follow your point, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I am just making the comparison between the need--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I have given the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) some leeway, but making the point and demonstrating what can happen in other Committees is one thing. Going on and on at great length is something that I cannot permit. We have a narrow timetable motion. If the hon. Gentleman cannot speak to it, he has an option; he can sit down and let someone else be called.
Mr. Paterson: I will follow your strictures, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The first guillotine motion was on 11 June 1887, when the House had got bogged down in debates on Ireland for more than three weeks. It is interesting that Gladstone described that as
- a further abridgement of parliamentary liberty.
Mr. Paterson: My hon. Friend makes a good point. We should be scrutinising the Bill line by line.
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend may like to contrast the guillotine introduced in the 19th century to deal with a long-running debate on the Irish question with the debate on the Television Licences (Disclosure of Information) Bill, which has not had a Report stage. It had a brief Second Reading, two brief sittings in Committee and no time at all on the Floor of the House. Surely there is a world of difference between the guillotine of the Irish business in the late 1800s and the guillotine of the Bill tonight.
Mr. Paterson: My right hon. Friend makes exactly the right point. The first guillotine was brought in to try to resolve the titanic problems of Ireland, which dominated parliamentary debate throughout the 19th century and have not been resolved now. I shall not refer to Parnell, Gladstone and those involved, as the House will be
familiar with them. These were huge issues, debated at enormous length--and here are we, guillotining a relatively little Bill on television licences. The contrast could not be more dramatic. Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill did not make their names by going to bed early at 10 o'clock, but by speaking in this House with great erudition, in great detail and at great length. The Minister is laughing, but this debate is totally unnecessary.
Mr. Fabricant: My hon. Friend mentioned the first time that guillotine motions were used following the titanic debates on the Northern Ireland question. How does he contrast those debates, which went on for months, with the debate on the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill, which lasted 43 minutes on the Floor of the House on Second Reading and just 35 minutes in Committee? At that stage, the Government say, "Enough is enough, the Blair babes want to go home so we will table a guillotine motion."
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