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Mr. Twigg: Given the hon. Gentleman's position, I will give way once more.
Sir Patrick Cormack: As one who objected to that action against my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton) and who has been in the House for a long time, I must point out that we are recognising that things have not been perfect in the past. That is why we give such strong support to the report of the Liaison Committee.
Mr. Twigg: I love the way in which the Conservative party goes back to year zero, as though nothing happened before. Suddenly, the Conservatives are enlightened--they are in opposition now. What it comes down to is that they do not like the fact that the Labour party is in government with a massive majority. It also comes down to the fact that they are an ineffectual Opposition. They cannot make any headway in the way that they oppose us. In fact, some of the Opposition are not even worthy of discussion. Their failure to oppose the Government is what this is about--their frustrations and trying to score political points.
Let us deal with the Leader of the Opposition. I asked the Library to look up how many Opposition day debates the right hon. Gentleman had attended--I was interested to find out how important those days were to the Conservatives and to their leader. For some reason, the right hon. Gentleman did not manage to get to more than 50 per cent. of the Divisions on those days. The Conservative party and its leader say that they are serious about democracy and making an impact, but the right hon. Gentleman cannot get to a majority of the votes on Opposition days, which shows that they are not serious about opposition--really, it is about political point scoring. The idea of having more democracy is lost on the Conservative party.
I welcome the inroads that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has made with her Modernisation Committee--a number of hon. Members have also made important contributions--into making more democratic the way in which the House works. They have made great strides. They have certainly done better than the Conservatives when they were in power and much credit for that should go to my right hon. Friend. In just three years in government, they have made great strides.
The Conservative party, unfortunately, seems to have missed that point--perhaps it is fortunate, depending on which way one looks at it--and they do not seem to want to talk too much about their record. We all remember what they did when they were in government.
I mention the point that was made by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis) and by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) about the support for Back Benchers, which has been pretty derisory. When I came here in 1997, I could not believe that we were left looking around for weeks for offices, for support for staff and
for information technology support. Again, some improvements have been made, but if we are talking about accountability and giving Back Benchers real power to do things and to scrutinise, we must have proper resources. It is not good enough at the moment.Again, I have not seen too many Conservative Members jumping up and saying, "We must have more resources." They did not do so when they were in power. We have seen some improvements, but I want more. Back-Bench Members should have better support on both staff and resources generally, so that they can do their job better, particularly in research. That is important.
We must come back to the main issue: which party in the House is serious about making reforms and improving things? It is clear from the record that I have talked about that it is the Labour party, the Government party, that is trying to do that. The Opposition have an abject history of failure on the matter. They are not interested because they are a derisory Opposition. They cannot oppose the Government. The debate is about one simple thing: the Opposition's frustration that they can make no inroads into the Government. They are a poor Opposition and should be condemned for it.
4.36 pm
Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross): The trouble with the Opposition's motion is that it seems to be based on a premise that history began in 1997. For Francis Fukuyama, history has ended, but few of us with any memory of the past 18 years of the Conservative Government could restrain a hoarse laugh when we listened to the Leader of the Opposition. The importance of the debate and the subject matter of it are undeniable. Therefore, I welcome the fact that it has come forward. I greatly welcome the evidence of thinking belatedly beginning to bubble up inside the Conservative party.
I remember--I say it to the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major)--as a member of the Hansard Society committee on the reform of the legislative process, under the chairmanship of Geoffrey Ripon, bringing forward repeatedly to him in this place the request that its proposals be debated and discussed in the House, and they were not. There was a clear and deliberate decision by the Government of the day to stifle any serious discussion of constitutional reform. Time after time, Bills were brought forward to introduce a Bill of Rights in this place. Time after time, Conservative Ministers stood in the way.
It must be said that the problem did not even begin when the Thatcher Government came to office. It goes back even further. Some of us will remember how, when the House voted to establish a Parliament in Scotland in 1978, it was opposed by the Conservatives on the ground not that they were utterly opposed to devolution for Scotland, but that they did not like those particular proposals for a Scottish Parliament. We were led to believe that they would bring forward their own proposals.
It is plain in the memory of everyone that no such proposals were brought forward when the opportunity to legislate was given. Even the undertakings of the late Sir Alec Douglas-Home on the matter were totally
ignored. It is not only in particulars; it is in the wider understanding of the Conservative party. Its failure to act when it has an opportunity calls into question the validity, if not the good faith, of what Conservative Members utter when in opposition.Lord Hailsham did not make his oft-quoted criticism of our system of government as an elective dictatorship as Lord Chancellor; he made many speeches about the virtues of our constitution when he was Lord Chancellor. He did that before he became Lord Chancellor. The minute that he became Lord Chancellor in a Conservative Government, his enthusiasm for reform evaporated. Therefore, although I like some of the ideas being canvassed by Conservative Members, I have absolutely no confidence that they would be implemented if there were a Conservative Administration.
My experience is that this Labour Government have done a great deal to change the way in which we do things and make decisions. They are in the middle of major constitutional reform. That reform has been well begun, although it is far from complete. However, it was wrong to couch this debate in the strident, adversarial terms with which it was opened.
I think that this Parliament of ours, set against the Executive, has remarkably little authority. However, that is not new. The situation has been created because Parliament does not choose to use its powers to hold the Executive effectively to account and to cause the Government of the day, of whatever complexion, to change their mind. That is not universally true, and of course it is much less true when majorities are small.
The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon, referred to Lord Pym's famous remark--for which he lost his political head--about majorities that are too large. During debates on the Maastricht legislation, the right hon. Member certainly had to listen to Back Benchers. He certainly had also to listen to hon. Members from minority parties, including my own, on that legislation. The reality is that, if there are smaller majorities in the House, there will be more-listening Governments.
Mr. Hope: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maclennan: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, on this occasion, because of time, I would prefer not to.
I tell Conservative Members that they have never really dealt with how to address the issue of over-large majorities. On the whole, it is desirable that Governments should have majorities. However, over-large majorities clearly are not desirable. If Conservative Members were to examine the whole issue of electoral reform with greater seriousness, they would recognise the virtues of proportional representation and the fact that it would not only greatly diminish the risk of over-large majorities, but enormously strengthen both the position of Opposition parties and the power of this Chamber.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings): The right hon. Gentleman's thesis is predicated on a situation in which the governing party's Back Benchers do not think that a part of their responsibility is to hold
the Executive to account. A large majority gives the Executive unbridled power only if their own Back Benchers do not do their job properly.
Mr. Maclennan: I was going to deal with that point, because I do not take that view. In fact, I take precisely the converse view--that Government Back Benchers have a dual role. They certainly have to support their Government in some measure, as that is what they have been elected broadly to do, but they have also to exercise their own independent judgment. That has not been done with the frequency that I should have wished. However, that is not an entirely new phenomenon--[Interruption.]
The hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), whom I have never noticed in the Chamber before, speaks from not very long experience, and certainly not from experience that goes back to the days when I was a member of the Labour party. In those days, the Labour party was known to have a greater amount of independence than it seems to have now. There was one very important occasion, which at least history records, when 69 Labour Members voted against a three-line Whip on the issue of the European Union. Had it not been for that, I question whether we would have joined the European Union until many years later.
There were a number of other occasions when Labour Members thought it right to dissent. For example, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) was one of a number of Labour Members who supported the Government most of the time, but voted against their proposals for the reform of the upper House. That resulted in the defeat of those Government proposals. May I say to the hon. Member for Harrow, East, the Government Whip who is sitting below the Gangway, that, in those days, that was admirable independence. This is a short debate and a short speech, but the problems that I am addressing will not be resolved by mechanistic means.
The hours at which the Prime Minister chooses to come before us are as nothing compared with the powers of those sitting behind him to hold him to account if they choose to stand up to him. We have had metaphysics and mechanics from the Government--metaphysics about Parliament being the heart of the nation's debate, when in reality the public feels very divorced from it. I believe that the solution lies in ourselves.
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