Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 March 1965.
I should like to take up right away, while it is fresh in my mind, one point which the Lord President of the Council has made. He said that the only way in which those who wished to see the Bill through the House could hope to get it through would be by the procedure of taking the Bill in the mornings, and he said that if it were taken on the Floor of the House in the ordinary way it would take three or four days.
The right hon. Gentleman is as well aware as I am that the equivalent of three or four days on the Floor of the House, without even allowing for any extensions of time, is between 10 and 12 or more sittings of a Standing Committee, and, of course, the sittings of the Committee of the House in this instance will be even shorter than sittings of a Committee upstairs, because for seven minutes—and seven minutes is precious—there will be Prayers to start the proceedings. Therefore, those who are considering this procedure at very best cannot hope to see the Bill through the Committee stage in less than nine or 12 weeks. This is a consideration which must be borne in mind.
I will return later to the question whether the Government ought or ought not to give time in the proper manner, but I should like, first, to revert to the question of the Select Committee on Procedure, which was set up by the House on 22nd December
to consider the Procedure in the Public Business of the House; and to report what alterations, if any"—
I ask the House to note "if any"—
are desirable for the more efficient despatch of such Business".
That was a Government Motion and it was passed by the House without debate.
The House gave the Committee
Power to report from time to time
and it was an
Instruct on to the Committee to report first on
three matters. Two, which I will put briefly, concerned Committees for Second Readings and the Ten Minute Rule Bill
procedure. The third matter, which is the most important for the purpose of our debate today, was
the times of sittings of the House".
I have the honour to be a member of that Select Committee, and it could be that my trade in this House during these last 13 years makes me to some extent suitable to be a member, but in the course of that trade I have learnt many things, good and bad. Among the first is that impatience with our procedures is often in all our breasts, whoever we may be, whether Chief Whips of the Government, Chief Whips of the Opposition, Privy Councillors, old Members or new Members. All have their separate impatiences. This is one of the things which one learns. The second thing, which is much more important, is that practically every proposition that arises out of those impatiences has as many effective and well-reasoned arguments against it for maintaining the established custom.
I say this to those hon. Members—and I think that they are mostly new hon. Members—who have been pressing for morning sittings because they fondly imagine that they will then get home to their wives at 7.30 or 8.30, or whatever the case may be: that the Government Chief Whip, who normally sits in his corner of the Government Front Bench, will always see that there are pressing and urgent reasons why they should support their party sitting on in the House to get the Government's programme through. The right hon. Gentleman himself has rather given the game away by stressing how much business the Government have yet to do, although, I must say, we have so far seen precious little sign of it.
When I was Chief Whip, I liked this House and enjoyed it and even loved it at times. I certainly hated it at times; that is understandable. But at all times it earns my profoundest respect in all its institutions. I want to see reform just as much as anybody else, although, perhaps, some of us see the difficulties more clearly than others. I want to see, and all of us want to see, that the reforms which we make are wise, and wise particularly in the nice balance between the Executive and the rights of the House, which are the true virtue, the keystone, the ark of the covenant of parliamentary democracy.
If I want reform, I also want to safeguard the conventions by which we work. For example, it is a convention that the proceedings of a Select Committee are not divulged until that Committee itself reports. In anything I say, I certainly will not divulge anything of the proceedings of that Committee.