Memorandum submitted by Bill Cash MP
1. I strongly believe that members and chairmen
of select committees should not be appointed at all but should
be elected. The whips should not be involved at all and should
prohibited from involvement by Standing Orders. Both members and
chairmen should be elected on merit and experience and if the
whips are effectively prohibited from involvement, then it would
be down to the good sense of the House using the authority it
has and also to prove its authority by showing its independence
to have the good sense to ensure that there is proper and fair
representation of the political spectrum so that when the select
committees report, the voting on the content of their reports
reflects proper analysis and not party political allegiances of
the kind I have witnessed in my 25 years on the European Select
Committee, now the European Scrutiny Committee, on many occasions
of vital importance. The Chairmen of Scrutiny Committees, ie in
particular Public Accounts, Procedure and European Scrutiny, should
always be from the Opposition and not the Government.
2. The House should elect the Chairman and
Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means according to similar principles
of (1) above.
3. There should be a business committee
and the House should run this and restore and enhance its authority,
which was lost in the Irish obstructionism of the 1880s, as was
fully described by a former Clerk of the House, in an essay by
Sir Edward Fellowes in The Commons in Transition, edited
by A. Harry Hanson and Bernard Crick (Fontana, 1970). The closure,
the guillotine, programme motions and similar devices which originated
in the 1880s might have been justified in view of the wilful obstructionism
of the then Irish Members in order to undermine the authority
of the House of Commons and its business.
However, now these devices are used in themselves
as a means of delivering the Government's own business and intrinsically
to undermine the authority of the House of Commons and to enhance
the authority of Government as an objective in itself. They have
almost nothing to do these days with the fair and proper allocation
of time, but everything to do with ramming through legislation
even though this means that Bills and large sections of Bills
are not properly discussed at all, as everyone knows. Parliament,
as I have said on a number of occasions, is now "a sham"
and many Bills and much of the legislative business of the House
is derived from the European Communities Act 1972 and hardly debated
at all. The supremacy of the House of Commons has been whittled
down to almost ground zero and must be restored in line with the
amendment which I have now put forward on many occasions, most
recently in the Parliamentary Standards Bill a few months ago
and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill in 2006, which
on both occasions was supported by the Conservative Party, the
explanations of which are well known and are set out in Hansard:
"Notwithstanding any provision of the European Communities
Act 1972, nothing in this Act shall affect or be construed by
any court in the UK as affecting the supremacy of Parliament".
4. I believe that Members of Parliament
are elected as representatives of the electors. I do not subscribe
to the idea of enabling the public to initiate debates and proceedings
in the House. This would be a prescription for chaos and could
well lead to unwarrantable pressures unrelated to the democratic
principles of government and stimulated by, for example, Internet
chatrooms and noticeboards or networking sites.
September 2009
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