Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 March 1965.
The hon. Gentleman does not think so. I have caught Mr. Speaker's eye in order to express my opinion and I think that it was a serious embarrassment to the progress of the Bill. That brings me to the next point which I want to make.
I have dealt with the hon. Member for Windsor, who talked about sharp practice, but I would now like to deal with the suggestion of bad faith on the part of the Government. The right hon. and learned Member for Epsom talked about the Government embarking on "a shabby political manoeuvre". If ever there has been a shabby political manoeuvre in my experience in the House, it is the charge against the Government on this occasion of bad faith. What bad faith?
In the Gracious Speech, they pledged themselves to give time for the discussion on a free vote of the present Bill. They did that. When the Second Reading was passed, by a more than two to one majority, they did not move that the Bill should be kept on the Floor of the House. There was no need to ask my right hon. Friend when he decided to send it to a Committee upstairs, because everybody knows that all Bills go to Committees upstairs, unless the exceptional step is taken of moving immediately after Second Reading that they should stay on the Floor.
If there was any fault in our not knowing that they preferred that it should not remain on the Floor, the fault was mine in that I never told them of the Motion which I intended to move. I have no doubt that if I had told them, they would have said, "We would rather that you did not move it. We would prefer the Bill to go to a Standing Committee", just as they told me that very thing when I told them that I was about to move that it should be kept on the Floor.
If there was any fault, it was my fault in not telling them of that intention earlier. En view of everything which has been said since, I regret that I did not do so, but to call the decision to send the Bill to a Standing Committee an element in a course of conduct showing bad faith is utterly ridiculous.
So the Bill went to a Standing Committee, which debated it, Amendment by Amendment, for 121 hours in five sittings of two and a half hours each. Then it came to the House again by sheer accident, the sheer accident being that art hon. Member opposite happened to be lucky in the Ballot for Private Members' Motions and drew No. 1 and chose to move the Motion which we debated and carried on 5th March. If he had not been lucky in the Ballot, the whole business of 5th March would never have occurred—it could not have occurred. That is why I say that it was a mere chance. I suppose that it would be fair to say, although I shall not take the time of the House by defending the proposition, that it was mere chance that the Motion was ulimately carried.
If the Government had decided to do what Sir Winston Churchill did in the middle of the war, and had asked the House to rescind its decision, there would have been a very sound Parliamentary case for doing so, a much sounder Parliamentary case for doing so than Sir Winston Churchill had at the time when he did it. They did not do that. They accepted the snap Division arrived at by accident on a Friday on a Motion which was there purely by chance. They took no advantage of that and said that this was the decision of the House and that, however it was reached, they would give effect to it.
Bad faith? What would hon. and right hon. Gentlemen have said of a Government which did not do that? It is a great shame to bedevil arguments on an important Measure, going through the House without Whips on either side and on which hon. and right hon. Mem- bers are left to exercise their own independent and conscientious judgments, serious arguments conducted on both sides with a high sense of responsibility. with cheap tricks of this kind. I am perfectly certain that the charge of bad faith was not made in good faith and ought not to have been made.