Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill (Committee Stage)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 March 1965.

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Photo of Mr Martin Redmayne Mr Martin Redmayne , Rushcliffe 12:00, 18 March 1965

I have looked for precedents of any sort of importance and I can find no precedent of the sort of importance of this change which is proposed by the Government. I make no secret of the fact—and this does not disclose anything about the Select Committee—that I think that the House gave the Committee a very difficult task that it should first report on the times of the sittings when its main remit was to consider the procedure in public business as a whole. The first task is difficult enough, the second is immense, and I doubted from the first whether the first task was possible of achievement until the second task had been concluded.

Be that as it may, what we now find, as I have suggested, is that the Government, impatient of the difficulties which have been brought on them by a free decision of the House that the Bill should be brought to the Floor of the House, now choose, regardless of the responsibility given to the Select Committee, and regardless of the difficulties which they acknowledge by remitting the subject to this Select Committee, to "jump the gun" and set up a morning Committee on the Bill. I said that the Government were impatient of this matter. If I were not by nature polite, I would use a phrase often used by hon. Gentlemen opposite when they were on these Benches and say that the Government were arrogant. As a member of that Committee I resent very much this cavalier treatment of a Select Committee of the House.

I will not discuss the merits of the Bill, but I should like to make my position clear. I voted against the Bill. I think that it is untimely. I am a moderate man. I do not doubt that abolition will come, but I hope not yet. That is all that I shall say on that subject now.

I want to discuss the procedure, and the tangle of procedure, in which the Government have become involved. The right hon. Gentleman quoted the phrase in the Queen's Speech: Facilities will be provided for a free decision by Parliament on the issue of capital punishment. Sufficient was said on 5th March about sending the Bill upstairs, and the method by which it was achieved, and the right hon. Gentleman has dealt with this. I doubt whether a Standing Committee, which is, after all, only an agency of the House, however carefully composed— and I do not quarrel with the way in which it was composed—is "Parliament" in the terms of the Queen's Speech in respect of a subject of this importance. I would support that by reminding hon. Gentlemen opposite of what the late Lord Morrison of Lambeth said on this subject. He ruled that Bills of constitutional importance should always be kept on the Floor of the House.

We have had many arguments—and the right hon. Gentleman will recollect this—in the usual channels as to what was meant by a Bill of constitutional importance, yet there can be few Bills which come closer to the meaning of the phrase than a Bill which is concerned, in one way or another, with the exercise of the prerogative in respect of the life or death of a subject of the Queen. This seems to be almost a perfect example of such a Bill.

That point has been properly decided, and the Bill is to be taken here. What we now have to decide is whether the Government should accept the will of the House and permit the Bill to be debated in Parliament as we know it, and at the times which, by custom, are accepted, or whether they should be allowed to change those customs for their convenience and for the inconvenience, as I shall seek to show, of the House as a whole.

I propose to deal now with another point to which the right hon. Gentleman referred on 5th March. He said: … it ought to be made absolutely clear that the Government must have control—any Government must—of their own time on the Floor of the House and in Standing Committee …".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 5th March, 1965; Vol. 707, c. 1787.] There spake an ex-Chief Whip, and I do not doubt that if I were Chief Whip, or if I were Leader of the House, or if I were a member of the Executive, I would think the same, and would hope to achieve it, but I doubt very much whether, in circumstances of this sort, I would say it in this House.

I claim no greater wisdom than the right hon. Gentleman. I suspect that I might have said it, but I would, at the same time, not have been surprised if the heavens had fallen on my head —and this relates back to the point made by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman)—because this is the House of Commons, and any Government can survive only by the grace and favour of Members of the House, regardless of party.

What is this talk of Government time? What, for that matter, is this talk of Opposition time, or private Members' time? These conventions exist because the House, not the Government, wills them, and the House must be jealous of its power in this respect. I should like to refer Members to what Erskine May says on page 311. This is in the chapter which deals with exceptional methods of economising time. I do not doubt that the right hon. Gentleman has studied this carefully, either now or earlier in his career. There are four headings under which exceptional methods are set out.

First, there is the application of time limits to the discussion of Bills, which is a crime sometimes committed by Governments. Secondly, there is prolongation of the sittings, which happens all too often. Thirdly, there are abnormal sitting days, and may I say that the only abnormal sitting days are the rare occasions on which the House, for good reason or bad, has sat on Saturday or Sunday. Fourthly, there is the appropriation of private Members' days, something which Members will remember was done without conscience by the Labour Government of 1945, but has not been done by a Conservative Government at any time except in time of war.

I want to read the concluding paragraph of this section. After referring to the four methods which I have quoted, it says: The conclusion which emerges from the facts, collected in this chapter from the whole range of procedure, is that, while a Government is placed by standing order"— that is by will of the House— in effective control of the time of the House, and while it can and sometimes does use its influence over the majority of the House to remove any and every impediment to the full exercise of this control, yet reasonably adequate safeguards exist for the rights of the minority and of private Members as individuals; for these rights are inextricably embedded in the procedure by which Ministers secure the passage of indispensable portions of national business, and no Government could go far in withholding these rights without bringing the machinery of Parliament to a standstill. Perhaps it could be said that I am using a sledgehammer to crack a nut in this matter, but those are important words, and words which should be borne in mind by hon. Members in this connection.

I am concerned to hear from the Lord President of the Council that he has a whip on this Motion tonight. This is essentially a House of Commons matter, a matter of our own procedures, a serious matter—it is a big change which is contemplated by the Government—and I should like to tell the right hon. Gentleman, and, indeed, every hon. Gentleman opposite, whether in the House or not, that there is no whip on this side of the House in this matter. I hope very much that those, like the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne, who have learned to love the House—and I say that in all sincerity—will set aside their allegiance to the Government and vote as free Members on this occasion.