Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 3 June 1964.
We are dealing with men's work and livelihood. There is an existing power and a working party is considering the whole question. I should have thought that in the circumstances it was a mistake to drop that power at the moment.
That leads me to a broad consideration of the whole business of the Bill. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby that it would have been better to have left the selection of what was to be kept and what was to be dropped to the Government, of whatever colour, that there will be after the General Election. That would have needed a short general continuation Bill for the time being, but there ought to be no difficulty about that. The Government are making a selection now, but they do not know—as none of us knows—whether the next Government will be formed from hon. Members opposite or from hon. Members on this side of the House. In those circumstances, it would have been far better to have left the selection to the new Government.
I cannot see a new Government from this side of the House feeling itself in any way tied by the particular selection that the present Government have made. It may be more inconvenient to have to deal with the matter again, but it certainly will have to be looked at—and looked at, I think, without any acceptance of the present Government's selection one way or the other. I say that because I can see no reason to oppose the Second Reading of this Bill. There may be objections in Committee, but that is another matter. I do not want it to be thought, however, that because we do not oppose the Second Reading we necessarily agree with what the Government have done either by bringing forward this Measure at this moment or by their selection. Perhaps they did not want to be overtaken by the Obscene Publications Bill, as they appear to have been overtaken by a similar Measure last time. We are equally critical because we think that some of the things they propose to drop by this Bill may not be safe to drop at the moment.
There it is. We on this side of the House feel critical in many respects but not on points which we feel involved opposition on Second Reading. May I add one concluding remark? My hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby suggested that there ought to be some definition of the word "emergency". Curiously enough, the only place in which the word "emergency" occurs in the Bill, as far as I can see, is in the Title, and perhaps that does not matter quite so much. In many cases these Regulations were brought in to deal with an emergency, and the use of the word caused a good deal of difficulty. The Attorney-General will no doubt call my attention to the existence of the word elsewhere in the Bill if it is there, but otherwise he would not wish to do what was done once before in a Government Bill—define with precision a word which did not occur in it.