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Mr. David Cameron (Witney) (Con): Not that hard.

Sir Patrick Cormack: My hon. Friend says that the Minister did not try that hard, but that is a matter for debate and discussion. It would not be appropriate to go into the matter in this debate on the procedure motion. If we did so, I am sure that Mr. Deputy Speaker would pull me up short, and quite right too.

Whether or not the Minister tried very hard to get the original Bill through the House, he eventually gave up the attempt and became a convert to the theory of the total ban. As a result, the Bill under consideration today is very different from the one that he commended to the House last year. He is introducing it with the protection of the most draconian procedural motion that we have had to debate in this Parliament. The Minister is depriving this House of an opportunity to hold a proper Second Reading debate, and of having any debate at all in Standing Committee.

There is absolutely no reason for the Minister to adopt that course of action. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), the shadow Leader of the House, made an admirable speech, and I intervened on him to make the point that, over the past few years, the House—wisely or unwisely—has introduced a raft of so-called modernisation measures. It is no secret among colleagues on either side of the House that I am deeply unsympathetic to many of those changes, but the fact is that they have been brought in. One of those changes means that we can now carry over Bills into a new Session to a much greater extent than before.

It would have been entirely consistent with the Government's so-called modernisation theory if, instead of commending this motion to the House, the Minister had commended a carry-over motion. That would have been much more respectful of Parliament and of the rural minority. The members of that minority feel beleaguered and aggrieved, as the economy is a long way from being as buoyant as was alleged earlier today.
 
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After all, this Parliament has almost two years left to run. In many quarters, it is suggested that the Prime Minister is likely to decide that he does not want to go on for another two years and that he will go to the country on the day of next year's county council elections, which will be held on 5 May. Even if that is his preferred option—we would not expect him to tell us the date at this stage—we have a state opening of Parliament fixed for 23 November. Another Queen's Speech will be presented, and there is no reason at all why this Bill could not be proceeded with in this Session in a more seemly and proper manner in both Houses and carried over to the next Session.

David Winnick: May I clear up one point, which is the one about the Prime Minister bringing the Bill back because of Iraq? Many of us who supported the Government's policy on that issue, and who continue to do so, were among those who at every opportunity, be it Prime Minister's questions, business questions or whatever, pressed for the Parliament Act to be used. Not one of my colleagues—not one—who takes an opposite view about the war would change his or her mind because of what is now being done. It is absolute fiction to say that the only reason the Bill is before us is that the Prime Minister wants to curry support within the parliamentary party.

Sir Patrick Cormack: I suggested not that it was the only reason, but that it was a contributory reason, and I am firmly convinced that it is. The urban masses on the Labour Benches do not understand—do not want to understand—the ways of the countryside. You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, sit for a largely rural constituency, but we must remember that the majority of our people live in towns, or near them. The majority of people in the world, I heard on the "Today" programme this morning or yesterday—it must be true, therefore—will be urban well before the middle of the century. Does not that make it more incumbent than ever on those of us who represent all our people to have a particular regard for that rural minority on whom we depend so much for sustenance?

Mr. Henry Bellingham (North-West Norfolk) (Con): The people whom my hon. Friend has mentioned will have their democratic rights taken away because the Bill is not going to be debated. Surely the Government usually put a Bill through all its stages in one day only when there is an emergency or where something has suddenly cropped up or there is all-party agreement when the House is proroguing, yet they have known about this Bill for months and months and months.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Those points have already been made very powerfully by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) in a most magnificent speech. Of course, that is true, but it is much more serious than that. What we seek to do today is to use a parliamentary steamroller—that is what the procedural motion is—to criminalise a very large number of extremely law-abiding people, upon whom, to a large degree, the fabric of rural society depends.
 
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I tried today to get in at Prime Minister's questions. I make no complaint about the fact that I was not called, but what I was going to ask the Prime Minister was whether he would vote to criminalise large sections of the rural community. At a time when law and order rightly dominates the postbags and surgery time of most Members of Parliament, is it sensible to introduce a whole range of criminal acts when those acts are at the moment entirely legal, and to do it, moreover, in this procedural way?

Mr. Banks: The hon. Gentleman is a great expert on constitutional and parliamentary matters, and we defer to him in that respect and listen carefully to what he says. Surely, though, Parliament does not criminalise people. We pass legislation, and if individuals then decide to defy the law, as democratically carried through, they criminalise themselves. We make certain things unlawful, but if people persist in doing them, they criminalise themselves.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Let me make one thing plain. I have made the point to friends in my constituency and in the Countryside Alliance that I have not, do not and never will condone the breaking of the law, however stupid that law may be. What I have just said is still entirely valid and relevant, however. At the moment, country sports are legal, and I am proud today to wear the tie of the Countryside Alliance. Country sports are legal, and what we are saying to the responsible, animal-loving, animal-caring people who practise our country sports—no section of our community loves or cares for animals and wildlife more than these people do—is that we are going to make what they do criminal. In a moral sense, I believe that it is criminal to do that, and all of us ought to pause before we do it.

Mr. Heald: Does my hon. Friend agree that there is also an essential issue of trust between the people and the Government? If the Government believe that the Bill is unworkable, as the Minister has said, and unenforceable, as the Secretary of State has said, how can the Government use this steamroller mechanism to criminalise people with a defective Bill?

Sir Patrick Cormack: My hon. Friend reinforces the very point that I have made. What we are doing in this extraordinarily tight procedural motion is proceeding on a Bill that will make the lives of the police force of this country, particularly in the rural areas, almost impossible.

Chris Bryant : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Sir Patrick Cormack: In a moment, if the hon. Gentleman will just contain himself.

I have talked to police officers—senior police officers, at that—who of course will have no option but to enforce the law, if this becomes the law, but who say that it will take their eye off many things, such as rural burglary, vandalism and all those other crimes that bedevil society in our constituencies. I have the honour to represent a number of rural villages, but not a single one is not defaced by vandalism and nuisance crime, and not a single one has adequate policing from the point of view of numbers, whatever the Prime Minister and the
 
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Home Secretary may protest from that Dispatch Box. Yet here we are, making the life of the police more and more difficult.

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman has a deserved reputation in the House for standing up for the rights of Back Benchers and for the Chamber vis-à-vis the Government, yet he seems to be arguing, as several other hon. Members have, that if this Bill were the Government's Bill, unamended—the Minister's original Bill—there would be a greater reason for using the Parliament Act. Surely it makes more sense when this Chamber has spoken through the will of ordinary Back Benchers that the Parliament Act should apply.

Sir Patrick Cormack: I do not agree. I said earlier, intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire, that I have been profoundly unhappy about the use of the Parliament Act in recent years. I was one of those who spoke out very forcefully, having voted against the War Crimes Bill, on the use of the Parliament Act—in that case, by a Conservative Government. If that was bad, and I believe that it was, this is a thousand times worse. To use the Parliament Act in a manipulative way, having sacrificed a Government measure and superimposed a private Member's measure on top of it, is frankly indefensible. It is all the more indefensible when there is readily available the procedural device of the carry-over. The Minister seeks to intervene, and I shall of course allow him to do so, but let him respond to that point.

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