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Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath): The right hon. Gentleman voted against the Bill.
Mr. Straw: I voted against it. There is something synthetic about the lather worked up by most Members on guillotine motions, although I except those such as the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills who have a principled position that they maintain through thick and thin.
I shall cherish the reply of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst who is on the record as saying that he always opposed guillotines. When I put to him the fact that "always" was subject to Clintonesque qualification and that he voted in favour of the guillotine on the Football Spectators Act, he explained that he was in government then. The right hon. Gentleman had a strong principle against guillotines, but another principle collided with that, namely the principle that he wished to carry on collecting the Queen's shilling as a Minister.
Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald): May I ask the Home Secretary to be terribly specific and, instead of making a general defence of guillotine motions, address himself specifically to this guillotine motion? Will he tell us what circumstance makes the curtailment of debate necessary, when he received all the necessary assurances and when there was not a single indication on Second Reading to suggest that there would be any undue delay? Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) took up precisely five minutes of Second Reading. No previous indication was given in any business statement that there was going to be a guillotine. What is the justification for this guillotine?
Mr. Straw: The justification is straightforward, as the right hon. Lady knows. The record of the Conservative Opposition is that, whatever they say, they cannot deliver undertakings that they make to the House. The right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire implicitly accepted that when he said that, in seeking an informal arrangement not bound by a guillotine motion, the Opposition were reasonably confident of delivering a timetable. We have Government business tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and at this stage, especially in July, any Government must not be "reasonably confident" of having its business delivered, but certain. I remind the
right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald that the shambles of the Opposition is such that, earlier this year, maverick action by her own Back Benchers meant that they shot themselves in the foot by preventing Prime Minister's questions from taking place and by causing the abandonment of two Opposition debates.There is no point the right hon. Lady shaking her head, as that is the truth. Given the fact the Opposition can wreck their own business with that kind of maverick action, they could wreck Government business more easily still. What the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire, as shadow Leader of the House, said about a communications failure treads delicately over the events that took place. I was present at some of the discussions and the right hon. Gentleman knows very well that, had there been a cast-iron guarantee that the Opposition would deliver the business tonight and to which every other Member of the House was bound, we would, of course, happily have proceeded by agreement. However, having been a Minister in the previous Government, the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald knows only too well the imperatives on Government and the need for Government to get their business--[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. We cannot have the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) shouting across the Chamber. She has had a very good innings and made an intervention.
Mr. Straw: I turn now to some of the other matters that have been raised.
Mr. Maclennan: In response to the right hon. Lady's intervention, the Home Secretary made the case for having a guillotine motion, but not for having this guillotine motion. Surely the argument is not so much about guillotines--the Government may be right to say that they must complete their business before the House rises--but about whether we should continue the debate right through tonight.
Mr. Straw: I do not believe that all legislation should be guillotined, and I recognise that the fact that most legislation is not guillotined is an important safeguard for the rights of Back Benchers, whether they are on the Government or the Opposition Benches. However, for reasons that I have already explained, I think that it is necessary to complete this business tonight so that it can go to the other place. That, I understand, is what has been agreed between the business managers.
I shall deal now with the other points raised in the debate because it is important that I sit down by 6.35 pm so that any votes can take place and the House then has a full opportunity to debate the amendments. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden made the interesting observation that hasty legislation was bad and that legislation on which there had been insufficient conflict also turned out to be bad. I happen to agree with him on the latter point. It would be interesting if one of the House Committees examined whether all legislation that had been put through the House with some speed has turned out to be bad legislation, although I do not think that that is the case. Governments of both parties sometimes have to pass legislation quickly. I had that duty in September 1998 in the aftermath of the Omagh
bombing, and I believe that it was appropriate to pass that legislation and that there is nothing defective about it, although people may have argued about its merits.I am in no doubt that the legislation that is most likely to be defective is not that which has been dealt with speedily, but that on which there has been no argument. I can think of several pieces of legislation during the previous Government and earlier Governments on which there was a broad consensus, and we repented in leisure about the fact that there was no engagement about the detail in Committee or on the Floor of the House.
In this case we are proceeding with greater speed than I would wish for in a perfect world, but one of the benefits of that, not only in the process that I have sought to adopt outside the House, but inside the House, is that there is a real engagement on the key issues and, to some extent, a greater engagement than would have been the case if the Bill had proceeded at a normal pace.
Mr. David Davis: Will the Home Secretary explain exactly why he could not separate the Committee and Report stages and meet the point, made by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) that we could get the Bill through the Lords and back again in this Session?
Mr. Straw: That was discussed and determined by the business managers, and I understand that there was anxiety that if we did as the right hon. Gentleman suggests, there would not be enough time to have the Bill printed and sent to their Lordships' House by Thursday. If there is any change to that, I will ensure that it is put on the record later in the debate.
The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) said that the legislation was always foreseeable, and that point was also made by the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale). As the hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) noted, three of the four measures in the Bill were perfectly foreseeable--so much so that they have been discussed at great length in the past. That ought to reassure the House. As the whole House has accepted, the first two measures are nothing more than a compression of the domestic and international banning orders on which there has been almost no disagreement in our debates or in earlier debates on the consultation papers.
The third measure relates to the football banning order, and here I make another observation sparked by the remarks of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden. As the hon. Member for West Chelmsford pointed out, 15 months ago we published a consultation paper about a football banning order that was not exactly the same as, but similar in concept and structure to the one in the Bill. One thing that I have learned since becoming a Minister is that one can publish as many consultation documents as one likes, but it is not until there is legislation before the House that--
Mr. Simon Hughes: Everybody wakes up.
Mr. Straw: As the hon. Gentleman says, everybody wakes up. One can try to spray on people's faces what one is proposing, but it is not until the legislation comes
before the House that people begin to wake up. None the less, if one does consult, as we did 15 months ago, people are given notice and can start putting forward their ideas. We have not suddenly thought of banning orders; the idea has been around for a long time and has been the subject of discussion for a long time.On the fourth element, the hon. Gentleman was simply wrong to say that the legislation was foreseeable. In the abstract, one could have foreseen our taking the powers that I propose should be taken under proposed new sections 14 and 21C in schedule 1. However, in advance of the trouble in Charleroi and Brussels, it was broadly accepted and I made it clear that such powers would be disproportionate. Our judgment was that those powers were not needed because all the advice that we had received was that our existing powers were likely to prove sufficient to deal with the problem.
Circumstances have changed and, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, if circumstances change, it is a good idea to change with them. As I argued extensively last Thursday, I have sought to make it clear that in addition to the hard core of known hooligans, against which there is pretty effective police and legislative action, we must deal with the new dimension that we saw in Charleroi and Brussels--the considerable proportion of people who turn out to have records for violence and disorder in general but not for football-related violence and disorder. That is why it is nonsense to say that the fourth element of the Bill was foreseeable.
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