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Mr. Fabricant: Mr. Speaker, how can we believe anything that the Minister says when, on Friday, he said that he would table a motion on Monday, only to table it a few hours later on the same day?

Mr. Speaker: Order. I have already dealt with that matter.

Mr. Clarke: I believe that, on that key list of amendments, Conservative Members sat on the fence for a very simple reason. They wanted to hide the deep split in the Conservative party and to hide their policy differences on every issue.

Mr. Brady: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Will the hon. Gentleman please take his seat while I am speaking? I hope that we will not go over points of order that have already been dealt with. It must be new business.

Mr. Brady: It is new business, Mr. Speaker. I cannot see any relevance to the motion that we are discussing in the rather pathetic, feeble excuse for an argument that the Minister is advancing.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I will be the judge of that.

Mr. Clarke: For the illumination of the House, the relevance of what I am saying is that I believe that the Conservatives had a deliberate strategy of trying to wreck the working of the Committee by their conduct throughout. The explicit political reason was that their judgment was to obfuscate and obstruct, to prevaricate and pontificate, as a way of hiding their own internal divisions. That is what is was about.

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Mr. Blunt: I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. He will recall saying at the Committee's ninth sitting:

"I praise the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), whose contributions, throughout the proceedings and without exception, have been constructive and to the point."

The hon. Gentleman then went on to say that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell)

"has shown no evidence of having read or discussed the Bill, and has been repetitive ad nauseam on points of no substance."--[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 1 March 2001; c. 343.]

Will the hon. Gentleman accept that he had to withdraw clauses 7 and 8 after arguments from my right hon. and learned Friend showed just how deficient the Bill was? Will he also accept that the fact that more than 50 clauses were not debated in Committee is the cause of this debate and of the difficulty in which the hon. Gentleman finds himself?

Mr. Clarke: No, the cause was the Opposition's decision from the outset not to come to the kind of accommodations and discussions about the conduct of business in the House that is conventional.

I turn finally to the judgment of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald. She made her position clear in the media. In the Financial Times, she said that her protest--

Mr. David Wilshire (Spelthorne): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Clarke: No, I shall not. The right hon. Lady said that her protest was about the fact that the Bill could not be reported and that her aim was to delay its passage. That was very explicit. She said in The Mirror that it was an official Opposition protest. She confirmed again on GMTV on Sunday that it was an official Opposition protest. The right hon. Lady deliberately flouted the House's rules to pursue her dishonourable cause. [Interruption.] She was aided and abetted by the Opposition Whips--

Hon. Members: Order.

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman has not been out of order. I ask again that we should not have this shouting across the Chamber. I will not tolerate a situation in which hon. Members tell me how to do my job.

Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald): On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: I hope that it is a proper point of order.

Miss Widdecombe: It is a proper point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I ask you to rule on whether the use of the word "dishonourable" to describe the conduct of an hon. Member is in order?

Mr. Speaker: Order. My understanding is that the hon. Gentleman used the term "dishonourable cause". He was not calling anybody dishonourable; he said that it was a dishonourable cause. [Interruption.] Order. I am giving a ruling. The hon. Gentleman is not out of order and I do

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not want any Member to shout at the Chair. I have already given a ruling and a statement about Members telling me how to do my job.

Mr. Clarke: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can confirm by reading from my text that the right hon. Lady deliberately flouted the House's rules to pursue her dishonourable cause--exactly as you stated, Mr. Speaker.

Mrs. Ann Winterton (Congleton): Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Clarke: No, I shall not. I went on to say that the right hon. Lady was aided and abetted by the Opposition Whips. The hon. Members for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Cran), for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) and for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) assisted her in her disruptive action. That was their deliberate intent.

The right hon. Lady was also aided and abetted by the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald). After the entrance into the Committee by the right hon. Lady and her colleagues in crime, the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire said:

"On a point of order, Mr. Gale. I understand from 'Erskine May' that there have been occasions . . . when hon. Members have entered a Committee and stayed there . . . The Committee has no power to require Members to leave. My understanding of the procedure set out on pages 703 and 704 of 'Erskine May' is that after the requests have been made, the position is reported to the House".--[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 8 March 2001; c. 675.]

My point is that before the right hon. Lady and her hon. Friends went in, the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire knew and had prepared himself to deal with the situation in that way. It was an Opposition conspiracy--[Hon. Members: "Oh!"]--to deal explicitly with that situation.

If we are talking about defending Parliament, I contrast the Opposition's practice with the experience in 1988 in respect of the Standing Committee of the Local Government Finance Bill. On that occasion the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) was leading for the then Government and disruption of the same type occurred. On Thursday 21 January 1988, it was caused by the then Member for Falkirk, West, Dennis Canavan--exactly the same thing happened and exactly the same issues arose. An hon. Member moved a resolution--as I did last Thursday. On that occasion, the resolution was that the then hon. Member for Falkirk, West be reported to the House. The Standing Committee member who moved that resolution was the present Minister of State, Department of Social Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker)--then an Opposition Front-Bench spokesman. He said that such behaviour could not be tolerated or understood. That is quite unlike the position of the current Opposition.

If it was an official Opposition act, we need the answer to some questions--from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) when she opens for the Opposition or from the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald when she winds up. Was that act explicitly approved by the Leader of the Opposition? Was it or was it not? Was it approved by the Opposition Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot)? Was it approved or was it not? Did the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire explicitly and

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directly plan those acts with his right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald and the Opposition Whips?

My conclusions are clear--as, I believe will be those of the House. That act was a conspiracy to deflect Parliament. It was agreed by the official Opposition--by the whole Conservative party. It does immense personal discredit to every Conservative who does not publicly dissociate himself or herself from the actions of the right hon. Lady. It proves the right hon. Lady's unfitness for high office of any kind. It shows that the Tories are not fit to be an Opposition, let alone a Government.

I hope tonight that the House will not reward in any way such contempt for its rules. I urge the whole House to support the motion.

10.42 pm

Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton): It is with regret that I note that the Leader of the House is not leading for the Government tonight. Clearly, the Minister of State, Home Office, the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), who opened for the Government--[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the Leader of the House tells me that it would have been a pleasure to open the debate; I am sorry that she was disappointed. She knows that matters to do with the House's experiment on programming--especially in respect of the Criminal Justice and Police Bill--have not only occupied the Committee dealing with that measure; as shadow Leader of the House, I have raised them no fewer than three times recently, because of my concern and that of my colleagues about the way in which the Committee was proceeding.

Although the Opposition are opposed to programming in principle, in the spirit of the experiment, we accepted the Government's word from the Dispatch Box that they would co-operate, that they would be flexible, that the official Opposition would be listened to and that the Government would negotiate with us in good faith.

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