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 Michael Foot Mr Michael Foot , Ebbw Vale 12:00, 18 March 1965

And what is more, we did not have any Scots here interfering with business.

It is a serious proposition for the House to understand that hon. and right hon. Members opposite stated, as if it was an unarguable dogma, that it is impossible for Government business to be transacted when Parliament is sitting earlier, but this is not borne out by the facts. I never like to overstate an argument.

The right hon. Member for Rushcliffe said that his last argument concerned the whole question of Government time and he tried to look as shocked as possible by the claim of the Leader of the House that the Government must have control over the time of the House of Commons. I am in favour of protecting private Members' time in the House, although I think that private Members often make a great mistake in thinking that the way for private Members to use their time is in private Members' time. Some of the worst Governments we have had in recent years—and I will not go into any controversial matters on this—have been very eager to restore private Members' time. The more time that is wasted on private Members' time the less time there is to gel through important business.

The right hon. Gentleman sneered at the Government of 1945 because they had taken away or failed to restore some of the private Members' time that existed before the war. The reason was very proper. The Government had a series of very important Government Measures to get through. It would not be a denial of the rights of private Members for the Government to take more time to get important business through the House. It is a denial of the proper function of a private Member to say that the only time during which he can be effective is in private Members' time. The laziest Governments would like to give as much time as possible to be squandered on such matters as cattle grids, though I would not wish to diminish their importance—I have had a few established in my constituency recently. They like to see time squandered. The right hon. Member for Rushcliffe was extremely good at it in his day. It was easy to give time when there was plenty of time to waste and the situation was quite different from that which the present Government have to face. I say that the right hon. Gentleman is guilty of humbug when he talks as if the question of allocation of time was one which had nothing to do with party considerations, and it was quite improper for the Government to have asserted their right to influence the time at their disposal in connection with this Bill.

The right hon. Gentleman knows, as everyone in the House who is engaged in these activities knows, that on questions of time every Bill, of whatever nature, is important. I remember when some of us were engaged in seeking to prevent the Government of 1950 from carrying out some very wicked Measures. We decided to examine in the closest detail a whole series of other Measures. We gave exhaustive scrutiny to the Isle of Man Customs Bill. The knowledge has never left me since. I have never set foot on the Isle of Man again without a sentimental feeling aroused by my recollection of the part which I played on that Bill. What we did by our detailed and deep application to our Parliamentary duties at that time was to manage to hold up several other even worse Measures.

The right hon. Gentleman must not talk as though the proposal made by the Opposition that the Bill be taken on the Floor of the House came solely from a concern that its examination should be taken here, and there were no ulterior considerations. If some of his hon. Friends on the back benches were sufficiently blockheaded not to understand the implications, I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman understood them. He knows perfectly well that the best thing for him to do, particularly in the present situation when many of the Government's most important Bills are necessarily crammed into the later part of the Session, is to hold up as much business as he can at the beginning. The more he can do that, the better it will be for him later on. Therefore, for the right hon. Gentleman to suggest that all such ulterior considerations were out of his mind is just a piece of humbug.

It would have been perfectly proper for the Government to have responded to the manoeuvre—we have to talk of manoeuvre on this Bill and there was manoeuvring on the Friday before last—by saying, "Do not behave like schoolboys any more. We are sending the Bill back to the Standing Committee to be taken up again at the point which it had reached, and we are perfectly satisfied that full consideration will be given to it on that basis. We do not intend to follow what the Opposition have done, that is, denigrate the status of Committees of the House of Commons". That would have been perfectly proper.