Procedure (Standing Orders)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 4 November 1947.

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Photo of Mr William Brown Mr William Brown , Rugby 12:00, 4 November 1947

I wish to begin by very cordially endorsing what has been said by the hon. Member for Newton (Sir R. Young), who with great dignity and capacity presided over the sittings of this Committee. It is true that its approach to all these problems was a non-party approach; that it was extremely seldom that the dividing line on the Committee had anything to do with party; and that, in fact, the number of Divisions we took in the course of something like a year's sittings was so small as to be almost negligible. I think that is a very considerable achievement on matters, some of which were potentially controversial. I submit that it was a good committee, which did a good job. But, if the Committee had a responsibility to the House, with great respect I submit that the House has some responsibility to the Committee. After all, after a year's labour, we produced a pretty substantial volume, and we produced it for the House of Commons. We did not produce this only for the Government. We were appointed by the House to make a report to the House, and today the Report of the Committee comes before the House.

There would have been two conceivable lines of approach, neither of which has been adopted, but either of which would have permitted us adequately to discuss this Report. One line would have been a Motion that "This House doth agree with the Committee in the said Report." If there had been that kind of Motion we could have had a discussion covering all aspects of the Committee's work, enabling us to reach a conclusion whether on the whole we liked the Report or not. But the Lord President of the Council says that the position of the Government is that they regard the Report as like the curate's egg—only good in parts. If that were the view of the Government, I submit that another way of dealing with the problem would have been to allow each of the recommendations of the Committee to come before the House one by one, and if the Government objected to any of them they could oppose it, or put down an Amendment. Then, at the end of the day, we would have discussed the whole Report.

At the end of today we shall not be in that position at all. There will have been some general debate at the beginning, and then the discussion will narrow down to the Motions put down in the name of the Lord President of the Council dealing with only a few of the many issues with which we dealt; while the rest of the points will neither be discussed nor decided upon, but will go by default. I am not going to deal with what happened the other day, because I would be out of Order. But, I think I am in Order in pointing out that this is the second time in a week that reports of a substantial and major character have come to the House, and we have not had an opportunity of pronouncing a plain "yea" or "nay" on them. The other day we had a report which contained matters of grave importance and we could not pronounce judgment on them. We indeed pronounced sentence on a couple of hon. Members, but we have not pronounced judgment on the Report of the Committee of Privileges. Today we are asked by the Lord, President of the Council to pass a number of Motions; and all the rest of the Report will be left in the air. Whether it is a Report by the Committee of Privileges, which I do not like, or a Report by this Committee on which I served, and which I do like, the Committee have the right to have their recommendations considered, and determined by the House.

I agree generally with the line of criticism developed by the right hon. and gallant Member for Gainsborough (Captain Crookshank) and the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Newton. We gave great care to all aspects of this matter, and where the Government have departed from what we say they are wrong. We took into account all they had to say upstairs. We had the Lord President of the Council up there, and what he could not achieve by authority, he sought to achieve by charm. We resisted the attack from both angles, and firmly decided that our view about this particular matter was right, and that his was wrong. Then, about a year later, he bobs up like a smiling seraph with the same proposals which he put to us twice upstairs, and which we twice rejected. If this were not so sublime, it would be impudent. It is redeemed from impudence only by its sublimity, and I think the Committee merits the justice of consideration of its Report.

None of the motions of the Lord President of the Council deals with a matter on which I feel pretty strongly, and which, unless I say something about it now, I cannot refer to later on the Standing Orders which we shall be discussing. It is Private Members' time. Unless we get in on this general Debate, we shall be precluded from discussing the matter. But the Committee want that matter discussed. We gave prolonged and careful consideration to the question of whether Private Members' time was a valuable thing or not. We gave careful consideration to the question whether the time had come to restore it, and whether it should be restored in the same form or in a different form. We gave consideration to exactly what we should say to the House, taking into account the Government's need for time, as well as the desire of Private Members. When the Lord President came before us on that matter he made his approach plain—I hope I am not doing him any injustice, he has subsequently made it plain to the House anyway—that he personally has not very much use for Private Members' time. He thought its value was grossly overrated, he thought that very little good use had been made of it in the past, and that on the whole it was time that could have been put to better use.