Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 4 December 1973.
Mr Derek Walker-Smith
, Hertfordshire East
12:00,
4 December 1973
I gave way to the hon. Gentleman. I did not shout out when he was questioning me, so perhaps he will be courteous enough to reciprocate and not do so when I am addressing the House. Mr. Deputy Speaker will not be pleased with me, because my speech will obviously be longer than it would otherwise have been.
But there would have been criticism either way, from whichever fund it was taken. It would have been said, "This has come out of the general fund. Why did it not come out of the political fund?" What we do not know—and I have had no answer to my repeated questions—is whether it is said that the sequestrators knew whether the money on loan, on call, to the local authority came out of the general fund or the political fund. Perhaps when the hon. Gentleman replies at the end of the day he will at last clear up that point.
I submit that this motion on the answers to these questions is fundamentally misconceived. But I consider it to be less odious than Early Day Motion No. 49, in that it lacks the ill-natured and ill-founded personal allusions of that motion to which I have an Amendment on the Order Paper, supported by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends. I do not know whether the improvement is due to considerations of prudence or, as I would hope, to a more rational realisation of the position of Sir John and the court. In any event I am glad that the printed motion has not persevered in these personal attacks.
Sir John, I am proud to say, is a friend of mine—
An Early Day Motion (EDM) is a motion put down, or tabled, on the order paper by a group of Members of Parliament calling for a debate on a particular subject.
In recent years the increasing number of EDMs has meant that time is very rarely found for them to be debated.
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