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Mr. Woolas: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one advantage of a deferred Division is that if a Member has not been present for a debate, there is an opportunity for him or her to be made aware of it before casting the vote?
Mr. Tyler: That may be true. What I have also noticed, which is interesting, is that Members on both sides of the House—no doubt this applies to the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst as well—sometimes take the advice of others on how to vote when they go through the Division Lobby with their pink bit of paper on a Wednesday afternoon. He is a man of great independence, so I recognise that he will weigh up the advantages of the advice that he is given, perhaps from the usual channels, as he goes through the Division Lobby. Let us not fool ourselves, however. The House could not operate if every time we divided every hon. Member had to weigh up every issue debated in the preceding discussion, as much as I may wish that that were the case.
Mr. Tyler: The hon. Gentleman does his best to be here for every debate but, as I am about to finish, I will not give way again.
Deferred Divisions are not the ideal way to operate, but they are a reasonable way of dealing with a small problem. It is significant that we do not have to vote in that way often. The Modernisation Committee still has a great deal of work to do. I look forward with interest to hearing what other hon. Members think should be our top priority.
2.34 pm
Mr. Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent, Central): It is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler). As is so often the case when we discuss parliamentary matters and the way in which we discuss our business, I find myself broadly and strongly in agreement with almost everything he says. I shall cover in detail some of the points he made.
I hope that the House listened to what my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) said. She put the debate in the right context. What is Parliament all about? What are we doing here? How well do we hold the Executive to account? We are sent here both to support our parties and also, as parliamentarians, to scrutinise the Executive. The proposals, in that they affect the procedures of the House, go to the heart of those issues. The truth, as I think hon. Members on both sides of the House recognise, is that we scrutinise the Government very poorly indeed at the moment, and it is getting worse.
When the former leader of the Conservative party, Sir Edward Heath, gave his final speech to the House—he sat where the hon. Member for North Cornwall is sitting now—he said that in his parliamentary lifetime power had shifted inexorably from Parliament to the Executive, and that if we had any sense we would scrutinise ourselves, resist that move and correct the position. If anything, things have got worse since then, as any fair-minded parliamentarian on either side of the House would recognise. If we cannot see the dangers in that and the warnings to us, we will blindly bear witness to the complete decline of Parliament and parliamentary democracy. It is as serious as that. That is why we have to get the procedures right.
Unlike the shadow Leader of the House, I think that, in principle, there is a lot of good sense in the programming of business, but in practice it is not working, and the ways in which it is not working are serious. Unless Parliament asserts itself and corrects the position along the lines discussed today, we will become a place that simply rubber-stamps the Executive, and that will be to the detriment of everyone.
I am in favour of programming in principle. There is nothing exceptional about trying to have an orderly procedure for our business. The first Standing Committee that I sat on was in 1983 on the Telecommunications Bill, which privatised the telecommunications sector. We prided ourselves in opposing it rigorously. I sat beside, and at the feet of, Mr. John Golding, the former Member of Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme, who took me through the procedures. He said, "Our job, my boy, is to oppose."
Indeed, he drove me back to north Staffordshire every Thursday night and explained what we had done well and what we had done badly. His idea of opposition was to make life as uncomfortable for the Minister, Mr. Kenneth Baker, now the noble Lord Baker, as we possibly could. His view of how that could be achieved was by prolonging procedures. Colleagues, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich, will remember his famous 11-hour speech when we considered that Bill.
Mrs. Dunwoody: John Golding was a remarkable man. I do not want my hon. Friend to be unfair to him. He went on for more than 11 hours, but because he knew everything there was to know about telecommunications not only did he not repeat himself, but the Chairman did not have to call him to order because, almost unusually, he knew what he was talking about.
Mr. Fisher: I concede to my hon. Friend that nobody knew more about the telecommunications industry and its practices than Mr. John Golding. However, I should explain that he kept in order only by the skin of his teeth. He explained to me what he described as the Swiss roll way of scrutinising amendments in Committee. His method was to roll out an argument against an amendment. Having reached the end of the argument, his practice was to say, "It is just possible that I am mistaken." He would then roll out the entire argument again from a negative point of view, thus scrutinising his own opposition to the amendment.
Everything that Mr. John Golding said was well informed. Perhaps he was much better informed than the rest of the membership of the Committee put together because of his great experience. It is a slightly romantic idea that everything that he said was completely constructive or in order.
I suspect that we were wrong to oppose that Bill in the way that we did. It certainly made consideration of it nonsensical in Committee. It was not really proper scrutiny, not least because when eventually we so irritated the Government that they imposed a guillotine, swathes of the Bill—I think that we reached only clause 30 of an 80-clause Bill—that affected people working in the telecommunications industry enormously were never debated.
From that moment on, I recognised that, exciting and macho though it was to fight the Government in such a way, it was wholly non-productive and did not serve good scrutiny. Ever since, I have recognised that there is much to be said for good programming. However, that is a big proviso. There must be intelligent programming.
Mr. Shepherd: The hon. Gentleman is setting out the grounds of the judgment of opposition parties as to how they treat consideration of a Bill. In consequence of the decisions of the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues the then Government introduced a guillotine, which was a matter that had to be debated on the Floor of the House. We are talking about who has ownership of a Bill in Committee, and that has historically been the Committee itself.
Mr. Fisher: I do not dispute the hon. Gentleman's last statement. A Bill should be the property of a Standing
Committee while it is in Committee. However, I dispute his earlier point. The assumption behind it is that time is the only weapon of any interest, and it was not an effective weapon against the then Government.
Mr. Shepherd: The assumption was not that time was the only weapon. It was the judgment of those who were then in Opposition as to how they should conduct themselves.
Mr. Fisher: I accept the distinction.
Mr. Shepherd: It is an important one.
Mr. Fisher: Indeed. I concede that. However, it was the convention that Standing Committees saw time as their only way of putting pressure on the Government, and it was not effective pressure when it came to scrutiny. It was pointless pressure. I do not think that either party can point to a substantive concession being made in Committee or on the Floor of the House because of the pressure of time.
Mr. Forth: One of the points of harassment, nuisance and guerrilla warfare is that occasionally it might elicit information from a Government or even a concession. More important, in the overall sense of the parliamentary Session and the way it works, such an approach may force a Government to prioritise their business in the relationship between this place and the House of Lords. The weapon of time is not necessarily as futile as the hon. Gentleman suggests. It may seem sterile in Committee when considered in isolation, but in the overall context of parliamentary procedure it can have relevance.
Mr. Fisher: I concede that strategically time has a significance. However, specifically, in the scrutiny of a Bill, it is irrelevant and possibly even counterproductive. There is a distinction between strategy and detail.
Mr. Kidney: Would my hon. Friend agree that these recent exchanges overlook an important body of membership of the House? I refer to Back-Bench Members who support the Government of the day. Under the old system they were under great pressure to shut up and do nothing. I can remember a Whip telling me to fill in my Christmas cards rather than even follow the debate. Under programming, Back-Bench Members get an equal share of the time if they want to participate in debate. I would argue that the quality of debates in Committee has increased greatly.
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