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Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, which goes to the very heart of the relationship that exists between the Government and the House of Commons and returns us to my introductory remarks and the paradox that we have to deal with: at one and the same time, the House of Commons provides and sustains the Government while trying to hold it to account. He is absolutely right. In an ideal world the Government should have no role in determining the procedures of the House of Commons. That is the ideal. Even I, extremist that I am in these matters, would have to concede that we have to find some sort of accommodation and understand the fact that the Government, with their elected majority, should probably have the major influence—I put it no more strongly than that—in the way in which the House works. However, that balance has now become so grotesquely out of kilter that we are put in the current position.
 
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Mr. William Cash (Stone) (Con): Would my right hon. Friend care to reflect, although he wants to stay in the 20th and 21st centuries, on the fact that the pass was sold in the 19th century, when during the difficulties that arose in relation to Home Rule, Lord Randolph Churchill and others fought against the changes that transferred the Speaker's rules effectively to the Executive. As a former Clerk of the House said in writing about that, that was when the House of Commons lost its control over business, and from that moment onwards, things have gone downhill.

Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for taking us back to the 19th century. He would not have to tempt me too much to go further back than that—the further back perhaps the better—but the point is that debates on such issues occasionally give us the opportunity to try to put a stop to that process and perhaps even to reverse it.

Mr. Hogg: I share an awful lot of the views that are being expressed, but is not the basic truth that Members of Parliament have surrendered to the Executive powers that they ought to exercise and that, until we recover our self-respect, the Executive will dominate the House? Should my right hon. Friend not continue to make the point, when people talk about free votes, that all votes are free? It is because we have surrendered our liberty to the Whips that we need to talk about free votes. I believe that Members of Parliament should vote in accordance with their views, and I do not give two hoots about what the Whips say.

Mr. Forth: My right hon. and learned Friend displays the independence of mind of someone who is at a mature stage in his career, with perhaps not very much expectation of future advance.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire) (Con) rose—

Mr. Forth: I shall give way to the man who could decide that one way or the other.

Mr. McLoughlin: Will my right hon. Friend think back to the time when my right hon. and learned Friend was in the Whips Office?

Mr. Forth: I am a glad that I was not the one who had to remind my right hon. and learned Friend of that matter.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Both my right hon. and learned Friend and my right hon. Friend, who is making an excellent speech, reflect most magnificently the zeal of the convert.

Mr. Forth: Yes, indeed. I accept what my hon. Friend says. I have found myself having to say this more than once during my period in opposition.

Mr. Hogg: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Forth: Not while I am making my confession.
 
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Of course, one's view varies from time to time, depending on how safe one's seat is, the stage of one's career and whether one is in government or opposition. That is self-evident, but it does not diminish the fact that those of us who have had the privilege of being elected for some little time now and have seen the House from the point of view of a Minister, a Government Back Bencher or an Opposition Back Bencher and so on can still hold views about the role of the House of Commons and of Members of Parliament that are perhaps better informed by that experience.

Mr. Hogg: Does my right hon. Friend accept the basic proposition that, whereas it is true that people like me bullied our Back-Bench colleagues when we were Whips, we would also make the confession that we did not think any more highly of them for allowing us to bully them?

Mr. Forth: I think that those are sufficient confessions for one day.

Mr. Cash: My right hon. Friend is making important points, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd), although he and I have not experienced the need for confession and contrition—or coercion for that matter. Does my right hon. Friend agree that Churchill got it right when, in acknowledging the necessity of political parties and a degree of discipline, he unequivocally said none the less that a Member's first duty was to his country, his second duty was to his constituents and only in the third instance was his duty to his party's policies and programme? If we stuck to that and undermined the overweening power of the Whips, would we not also increase the interest of the people of this country in what goes on here?

Mr. Forth rose—

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman replies, may I remind hon. Members that we are discussing the motion on programming?

Mr. Forth: I think that we are discussing all the motions before us. In agreeing with my hon. Friend, I was about to mention deferred Divisions, which is the subject of one of the motions—I hope that we will all vote against it.

Deferred Divisions are symbolic of Labour Members' desire to make life as easy as possible. As I recall, the rationale behind deferred Divisions was that it was rather inconvenient for Members of Parliament to have to be in the House at the end of a debate—be that 7 o'clock or 10 o'clock—and vote at that hour. We have moved causally and glibly from that simple proposition to a situation in which absurd ballot papers are made available on Wednesdays for use by hon. Members, not least the Prime Minister so that his abysmal voting record can be improved easily. We now have the phenomenon whereby a motion and the Division on it are neatly detached, often by several days.

One could argue that that situation is not necessarily significant in itself, and I would be the first to concede that on a day such as this, given the number of hon. Members in the Chamber, there may well be some detachment between the debate and the Division on the
 
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matter, even if it occurs at the end of the day. However, the symbolism of the deferred Division procedure remains important. It says yet again that we do such things for the convenience of the Government and Members with no regard for the parliamentary process or the relationship that is developing between the Executive and Parliament.

Mr. McLoughlin: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the growing demand from Labour Members—the Leader of the House confirmed this today—to deal with private Members' Bills on Tuesdays or Wednesdays after 7 o'clock? If that proposal is acceded to, does he agree that the explanations given for the deferred Division procedure show that the Government were concerned about only their convenience rather than that of the House?

Mr. Forth: The proposal raises interesting points— I shall not discuss them at length, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I shall touch on them if I may. If the proposal were followed through, we would go back to sitting late to deal with private Members' Bills, but we were told that such hours were unacceptable to hon. Members. I am happy to deal with private Members' Bills whenever they come before the House, but I would prefer to consider them on a Friday because we are able to see off most of them because fewer than 40 Members bother to attend on that day to support them. It remains to be seen whether sufficient Members would bother to attend later on a Tuesday or Wednesday, but the proposal gives the lie to the validity of the argument that was originally put before us.

May I say a brief word about the carry-over of Bills? The right hon. Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes)—I can actually say the name of his constituency properly—challenged us when he said that he had never heard a rationale set out for why carry-over was not self-evidently a good idea. Let me attempt to do that in the hope that he will read Hansard in the future. One of the main disciplines on a Government is Sessional discipline, which is the tradition that at the end of a Session, a Government have either legislated on a matter or they have not. That was a key discipline on my Government and it used to be one on this Government. The Government want to escape from that discipline so that they can legislate in any year without limit, but that is a bad thing. We have far too much legislation. The few controls that exist on the Government are diminishing, and Sessional discipline was one of the last remaining ones. For the Government to say, "Oh, by the way, if we run out of time at the end of a Session, let's just go on into the next one so that we can do what we want", without any restriction or discipline strikes me as extremely bad. That is the main reason why the carry-over of Bills is wrong.

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