Orders of the Day — Scottish Development Agency Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 2:06 am on 21 October 1987.

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Photo of Mr Archy Kirkwood Mr Archy Kirkwood , Roxburgh and Berwickshire 2:06, 21 October 1987

Yes, including the hon Member for East Lothian (Mr. Home Robertson), who keeps meeting me in the Lobby and asking whether I am looking after his interests. I find that a difficult thing to do for a Labour Member who is a gentleman farmer. However, that is a different point.

The hon. and learned Member for Perth and Kinross (Mr. Fairbairn) is a sensible enough parliamentarian to realise—[Interruption.] That may be stretching a point. He may not agree, but he has to admit that there is a growing body of opinion in Scotland that feels the need to bring some of the issues back to Scotland in sensible time and with sensible procedures, not at 10 minutes past 2 in the morning. If we had a proper Scottish assembly we would be sensible enough to organise our affairs better than this and would not need to have debates at this ludicrous hour.

I was interested in what the Minister said when he introduced the motion. I agree that, prima facie, the SDA financing limits are primarily a technical matter. The debate we had was entirely sensible. I was hoping to contribute to it before it was curtailed. I pay tribute to the hon Member for Glasgow, Garscadden (Mr. Dewar). He made an entirely pertinent speech. Nobody could say that there was padding in anything that he said. I have heard debates that have been restricted to an hour and a half under the statutory instrument secondary legislation procedure which have had a wider significance in terms of the amount of money and number of people involved. Therefore, I concede the Government's case to a certain extent and agree that it could have been a technical debate. I am not very experienced in the House, but I warn hon. Members from all parties that if we reach a situation in which the usual channels cannot accommodate problems such as this and come up with sensible answers to meet everybody's needs we shall never get all we want. If we are to go into the breach every time and make a point of principle out of every debate that deals with Scottish matters we shall all spend many fascinating hours in the House throughout the night. In fact, we may end up doing a disservice to our constituents and the people of Scotland.

We minority parties have a difficulty in that we are not involved in the direct communication within the usual channels. I do not wish to apportion blame, but, if it is true, as the hon. Member for Stirling (Mr. Forsyth) said, that as a result of what has happened tonight, we will lose a full-scale debate on Scottish industry and development next Thursday, that is a scandal. It is all very well for experienced parliamentarians such as the hon. Member for Garscadden to say that one can make one's points if one is clever enough and that one can get round the technical and narrow nature of the debate quite easily if one puts one's mind to it but that is not the point. The hon. Member for Moray (Mrs. Ewing), who was in the Chamber earlier, made a sensible contribution to the debate. She said that there are many aspects of Scottish industry such as the heavy industries and rural development that the occupant of the Chair would not allow within the remit of the debate or the rules of order.

I make a plea not only to the Government Front Bench but to the whole House to stand back from this confrontation this evening. Lay persons in the street do not understand the arcane nature of what we are about or the subtleties of the usual channels and so on. We must be careful that, in the party-political knockabout, we do not do a disservice to our constituents and to the people of Scotland.