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Mr. Salmond: The hon. Gentleman is far too modest. I recall that exactly. The target was not the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), but the hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Swayne: I thank my hon. Friend, if I may call him that as he approaches his swan song in the House.
The Secretary of State closed his remarks earlier by saying that he deserved to be kissed. In my estimation, given the damage that the guillotine motion does to the very substance of democracy, those who introduce such motions deserve not to be kissed. Rather, they deserve to be garotted with their own intestines.
7.19 pm
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham): Unless provoked, I shall be brief. Before dealing with a couple of particular concerns, I want to refer to the important issue highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), who raised the subject of character assassination on the internet during an election campaign. It was my impression that he was genuinely aggrieved that, as a result of the timetable motion, there would be inadequate time properly to consider that matter. I also had the impression that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), had some thoughts on it.
Mr. Mike O'Brien: I do not know whether the timetable will allow us to discuss the points raised by the
hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), but I can tell him that although we were unable to deal with his serious concerns in the Bill, the Government do not have a closed mind on such matters, and I shall be happy to discuss them with him if an opportunity arises
Mr. Bercow: I am grateful for that observation. It reassures me and, I imagine, is even more reassuring to my hon. Friend.
I want to address two points made respectively by the Home Secretary and the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours). The Home Secretary appeared to advance the novel and pernicious parliamentary doctrine that the greater the amendment of a Bill in the other place, the more compelling the argument for its truncated consideration in this place.
I utterly reject that spurious doctrine. The rationale behind it would allow all sorts of Bills--ill-conceived, badly drafted, hastily introduced by the Government and duly amended, in a draconian manner, in the other place--to be rushed through the House. That is unacceptable. I hope that the Home Secretary will ponder that doctrine again. I do not know whether he planned to come to the House to defend and advance it, or whether he simply made an off-the-cuff comment that he dreamt up in response to criticism. Either way, it was unsatisfactory and indefensible.
Mr. Bercow: The hon. Gentleman is quivering in his seat, as well he might, but he must exercise what self-restraint he can muster in the circumstances. I want to deal with him briefly, but with relish.
The hon. Gentleman provided a charge sheet of alleged parliamentary sins, culled from the historical record of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Mr. MacKay), the shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, as though that justified the vicious assault on the rights of Members of Parliament which the Government are perpetrating today. For the avoidance of doubt, I repeat that I could not give a tinker's cuss whether my right hon. Friend has a sinful track record or whether he is the epitome of parliamentary virtue, as I have always imagined him to be. The issue is not how many guillotines there have been in the past, or whether consideration of Bills was truncated in the 1970s, 1980s or the 1990s, but what is proposed now. If the hon. Member for Workington has a half defence of his earlier utterance, I shall readily give way to him.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: The hon. Gentleman is a very young man. Will he give an undertaking that if there were a Tory Government in 15 or 20 years' time, there would be no circumstances under which he would go into the Lobby to guillotine a substantial number of Lords amendments?
Mr. Bercow: No, I will not give that undertaking, and for two reasons. First, it is unwise to say never; secondly, one has to consider particular circumstances. The hon. Gentleman has helpfully brought me on to the relevant matter.
Dr. Julian Lewis: Will my hon. Friend give way?
The hon. Gentleman is perfectly well aware that we are dealing with the issue of 666 amendments that were made in the other place to this incredibly poor legislation--the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill. In practice, that amounts to something like 21.6 seconds for the consideration of each amendment if there are no votes, which is, of course, an unrealistic assumption.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: If the number of amendments were cut by 75 per cent., leaving us with 150 to discuss, the hon. Gentleman would have one and a third minutes for each one. Would that enable him to give the undertaking that I requested?
Mr. Bercow: It is extremely unlikely that I would want to support such a proposition. If the hon. Gentleman wants to hold me to account in future years to judge whether I have stood by the pledge that he believes me to have given, I shall be happy to see what the record demonstrates. The House will have detected that he is keen to divert attention away from the parliamentary vandalism in which the Government are engaged.
It is offensive that the Government should suggest that the matters for consideration are minor, trivial, insignificant or piddling. They are nothing of the kind. They involve the transfer of functions from boundary commissions to the Electoral Commission and the creation of the parliamentary parties panel. We do not know how that new body, previously not mentioned, will work, who will be involved in it or what level of accountability it will attain. This is a proper time to consider such matters. Another consideration is the obligation of the Secretary of State to consult on the wording of questions in future referendums. Those matters cannot be lightly cast aside.
We are also dealing with the Disqualifications Bill. I believe that it is an odious, repulsive and disgraceful measure. It is an affront to the rights and integrity of the House that the Government should seek to justify the circumscription of debate on a matter that is so repugnant to so many people. It is especially repugnant when we reflect on the fact, as the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) and the hon. and learned Member for North Down (Mr. McCartney) suggested, that the debate is being truncated to curry favour with, to appease and to suck up to an unrepresentative minority called Sinn Fein.
We can learn from some of the great figures who made this place great. Edmund Burke was one of the finest parliamentarians in the history of this country and, as it happens, the father of modern conservatism. What did he have to say about unrepresentative minorities? He said:
- Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the most noise are the only inhabitants of the field.
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): The debate has been varied, but one point of view has been overwhelmingly expressed, and not just by Conservative Members. Other hon. Members on the Opposition Benches have also said that the decision to guillotine this legislation is a serious mistake.
Ministers on the Treasury Bench have missed the point that the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill creates 69 criminal offences. They are being justified by the need to regulate what previously was an unregulated activity. When the Bill was before the other place, the Under-Secretary of State, Lord Bassam, said:
- I readily admit that the Bill is cumbersome and bureaucratic.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 October 2000; Vol. 617, c. 272.]
That need not have mattered. I found the period that I spent on Committee on the Bill one of the most rewarding that I have had in the course of the three and a half years that I have been in the House. It was an opportunity to look logically and straightforwardly, on a cross-party basis, at difficult issues and to examine them. The difficulty was that, at the end of the process, the theory that had appeared to be so good appeared in practice to be sadly wanting in many areas.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office, had the decency to say that the Government would go away and think about that and do their best to remedy the matter, that the matter would be considered carefully in another place, and that every effort would be made to improve it. The sad fact is that that did not happen. Not only did that not happen, but I regret that the Government started to look around for someone else to blame for the fact that the Bill was not working.
In late May, there was a wonderful exchange of correspondence in which the Minister of State, Home Office sought to suggest, on the letter paper of the Labour party press office over the House of Commons logo, that in some way the Opposition parties were to blame for the difficulties that had come about. He even went so far as to suggest that in some way the Opposition parties were seeking to obstruct the Bill.
That is far from being the case. We have glowing testimony from Lord Bassam, and Lord Carter said:
- I should like to offer my sincere thanks to the Opposition Chief Whip, the Opposition Front Bench, the Liberal Democrat Front Bench and the Back Benches of all parties. We reached the target that we were hoping for . . . I am truly grateful for the co-operation that has been demonstrated by the whole House.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 24 October 2000; Vol. 618, c. 273.]
However, at the end of the day we have ended up with 666 Government amendments and the Bill is a shambles. In the time available, I cannot do justice to explaining the need for time to consider what we are about to do. However, I shall select a couple of amendments which we shall never reach in our consideration of the Bill in a month of Sundays.
First, it may surprise some Government Back Benchers to learn that if, during the course of the next general election, a person in their constituency nominates them as a candidate, even if they have not been consulted, as the Bill is currently drafted the election clock will start to tick against their expenses. That is a matter that I should like to address in today's debate, but I cannot because it arises under amendment No. 294, and there is no possibility that that will be reached.
Then we have the extraordinary fact that, whether one is a Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, if one's local association treasurer drops dead and one is worried or saddened and wants to visit the widow or widower with regard to the funeral arrangements, if the Electoral Commission is not notified of a replacement within 14 days, a criminal offence is committed. The law will be draconian. There is a sentence of up to one year's imprisonment for failure to comply with the regulations that we are introducing in this gross and cavalier fashion.
All we ask of the Government is some time for reasoned debate. It is unbelievable that the Representation of the People Act 1983 should be reworded in serious and major ways entirely in the other place, not by ourselves. The Parliamentary Secretary admitted how rewarding it was that Members of Parliament, Back Bench and Front Bench, could attend the Committee and present reasoned arguments based on personal experience. There may be a lot of personal experience in the other place on these matters, but our experience of the practical requirements of running political parties, which are ultimately voluntary organisations--we hope for the public good--means that we can address the practical problems in a way that cannot be done elsewhere. Yet that is the tone of the entire way in which we are approaching the matter.
We are simply told that we should not worry about all this and that four hours of debate will be sufficient. The fact that we are about to take dangerous and rotten steps--as pointed out by the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell), eloquently and in short form, by the Liberal Democrats and by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young), my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), my hon. Friends the Members for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) and for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), and even by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who made a perfectly valid point about the iniquities and inequalities that we are introducing by not having a single United Kingdom regime--is ignored.
A Bill that started off as gold has not just ended up as brass but as really base metal. That is a tragedy. The guillotine motion is a reflection of the fact that the Government, when confronted with those difficulties, have simply buried their head in the sand. The motion is unacceptable and I hope that all hon. Members will consider the issue and vote against it.
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