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Mr. Straw: I do not accept for a second that the Government are in any sort of mess. I was dealing with charges made in the House and elsewhere regarding our reasons for imposing guillotines--
Mr. Hogg: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Straw: I will give way in a second.
I was explaining why we have had to impose four guillotines this week. I merely point out that, looking back over the past 20 years, there is nothing especially unusual either in the number of guillotines or in the number of Bills for the whole Session. The central allegation made by the Conservatives is that there have been too many Bills during this Session. That is incorrect. The main reason for this end-loading is that we have accepted many amendments; we have listened to what has been said-- I regard that as a merit; and, above all, we do not command a majority in the other place.
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): The Bill left this House at Easter and its first day in Committee in the other place was on 11 May. After that, will the Secretary of State confirm that it did not reappear in the House of Lords until 10 October? Surely that delay is entirely down to the Government. If they had been prepared to bring the measure back earlier, the current logjam would not have occurred and we would not be facing this disgraceful situation today.
Mr. Straw: The hon. Gentleman would be correct had the other place been idle from the day on which the Bill left this House to the day on which it went into Committee in the other place. It is true that the Bill could have been scheduled earlier, but that would only have meant that--assuming that the Conservatives had behaved towards other measures as they did towards this one--some other measure would have been subject to the guillotine.
Mr. Hogg: May I take the right hon. Gentleman back to his point that the Government do not command a majority in the other place? That is true. The right hon. Gentleman implies that a large number of amendments are passed by the other place contrary to the Government's advice, and that that is the source of his problem.
There are 665 amendments to this Bill. Will the Home Secretary tell the House how many of them are Government amendments--or are supported by the Government--and how many were passed contrary to their advice?
Mr. Straw: My recollection is that there are 666 amendments, one of which was passed contrary to the advice of the Government. However, the fact that there are a great number of amendments makes my point rather than the right hon. and learned Gentleman's--[Interruption.] A great number of amendments were tabled in response to the concerns that were expressed. Neither this House nor the other place can have it both ways. We have been listening, and I have been anxious to ensure that, so far as possible, we proceed with the Bill on the basis of consensus between the parties.
It is widely accepted--in this country, at least--that we do not want to go down the same road as the United States and that it is not a good idea for a campaign manager also to pop up as a returning officer. Therefore, we should ensure that the ground rules are operated and moderated by people who are above the battle and that, so far as possible, there is widespread agreement between the parties about how those ground rules should operate.
Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan): The Home Secretary is missing the point. He started with consensus on the Bill. Its main provisions were implemented by voluntary agreement between the parties in the Scottish elections last year, but he has now arrived at a pig's breakfast and the consensus has totally fallen apart, especially on section 4. That must surely be his responsibility. Is he seriously suggesting that a Bill with 666 amendments is in a fit condition to be guillotined?
Mr. Straw: I do not accept for a second that the consensus has fallen apart, but there will be disagreement about some issues. The hon. Gentleman refers to clause 4. I am not sure whether he is talking about the provisions on advice for the conduct of referendums. We have strengthened the provisions on controlling expenditure in referendums; they are far stronger than those proposed in the Neill report. I exempt the Scottish National party from criticism about party funding because, so far as I recall, they were always in favour of statutory controls on party funding, but I shall not take criticism from the principal Opposition party, because it presided over the most scandalous situation with regard to the funding of political parties. In the face of all sorts of unacceptable things that appeared to be going on, we called for the Nolan committee on standards in public life to be allowed to examine party funding.
Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): The Conservatives fought it.
Mr. Straw: They not only fought it, but refused to allow the Nolan committee to look at the matter. It has fallen to us to clean up the conduct of British politics--we said that we would do so in our manifesto--first by asking what became the Neill committee to study the matter and then by introducing the changes that we propose.
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham) rose--
Mr. Straw: I shall give way, but then I want to make progress.
Mr. Bercow: Is the right hon. Gentleman seriously advancing the novel and pernicious parliamentary doctrine that the more heavily amended a Bill is in the other place, the greater the justification for truncating its consideration in the House? Does he not accept that, irrespective of whether more or too many Bills have been introduced this Session, there is a serious case to answer--the charge that there have been more ill-conceived, badly drafted and hastily introduced Bills under this Administration?
Mr. Straw: The advantage of my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) and me is that our memory goes back beyond May 1997, as does the memory of many of those sitting on the Liberal Democrat Benches. If the hon. Gentleman wants to have a competition about really badly drafted Bills, he should have been in the House during the first and second Sessions of the 1979 to 1983 Parliament.
Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend was still at school.
Mr. Straw: That is no excuse. After all, the Leader of the Opposition was also still at school then, but while other people were going out in the evening and enjoying themselves, he was studying Hansard--between his 14 pints--day by day and week by week. He would surely have known about the utter chaos that the previous Administration got themselves into. For example, with the help of my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), the Local Government, Planning and Land Bill was so huge and chaotic that the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) had to withdraw it altogether and start again. Then, when the Bill came back at the end of the 1980 session--[Interruption.] The Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill (No.2) is in good order. The only problem is that the other place has decided not to acknowledge that. There cannot have been a better drafted, simpler Bill than that and, in due course, it will ensure justice for the victims of crime as well as justice for defendants. It will speed up the criminal justice system. The fact that the Conservatives have sabotaged that Bill illustrates how hollow is their claim to be taken seriously on law and order and crime, as on many other issues.
I did not answer the first question of the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). I do not think that the guillotine is pernicious; it is regrettable, but it has happened under Governments of both persuasions. The majority of the 666 amendments are technical and consequential. Owing to the structure of this Bill, one change in principle has led to a huge number of consequential and similar amendments.
So far, the Bill has been the subject of considerable scrutiny. First, I made an oral statement on the Neill report in July 1999. We then had a full day's debate on the report, on a motion for the Adjournment, in November 1999, and we published the draft Bill. Since the Bill itself was published, the two Houses together have spent 114 hours considering it and a considerable number of
changes have been made. With the hours that we will spend on the Bill today, we think that that is adequate time for consideration.One of our anxieties was also the anxiety of a Government of a different persuasion in the early 1980s--that if we did not guillotine the Bill, the debate would simply be filibustered. The Conservatives often deny that charge, but leaving aside the provocative term "filibuster", let us consider what happened during the debate on Monday. I gather that one of the complaints today is that it will be some time before we get to group 10. On Monday, there was every opportunity--even in the three or four hours available--for the House to debate the three important groups of amendments. The other groups were all technical.
What happened? We spent an inordinate length of time on the first group, which was third in order of importance. We then moved on to the second group, which concerned the most technical issue imaginable--the naming of the National Assembly for Wales--and other consequential amendments. The Conservatives decided to go on at such length on that issue--to dance on the point of a needle, for hour after hour--that when 12 o'clock came there was no chance to debate any of the other issues or to allow my hon. Friends or hon. Members to express concern about what the Government were doing.
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