Debate on the Address

Part of Sessional Orders – in the House of Commons at 5:55 pm on 15 November 1995.

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Photo of Alan Haselhurst Alan Haselhurst , Saffron Walden 5:55, 15 November 1995

I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd) and to my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Mr. Brandreth) on the excellent way in which they moved and seconded the Loyal Address. My right hon. Friend is leaving the House at the end of this Parliament, but I hope that that will not be his last contribution, as he has been a considerable servant of the House and the nation. I suspect that in the case of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester it is unlikely that another such witty speech will be delivered in the course of the debate on the Loyal Address—certainly not by me, even if my voice allows me to complete my remarks.

The Leader of the Opposition had some nerve in characterising the Queen's Speech as a lurch to the right when he has been in perpetual motion almost since he became leader of the Labour party. For the leader of the Labour party to win a headline yesterday, after his speech to the CBI, that he will not be taxing the rich must have come as faint surprise to the members of the party that he leads. When the music stops, one wonders what policies will be put forward by the Labour party under the present leadership.

We did not hear today what proposals would be made if the Labour party was managing our affairs in the next 12 months. It was all very well making points about the supposed inadequacy of the measures placed before the House, but there was not the glimmer of a suggestion of what a Labour Government might have done. Platitude after platitude tumbled from the mouth of the Leader of the Opposition, which really is not good enough if we are to have the constructive opposition that he claims to offer.

I do not see a lurch to the right in the legislative programme. Each measure must be judged on its own merits. In broad intent, the measures go very much with the grain of public opinion. What will ultimately matter is the detail—whether we get the balance of equity right in some of the more sensitive areas.

I hope that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and others on the Treasury Bench will pay serious attention to the way in which we scrutinise legislation—not in response to the Leader of the Opposition, whose big issue today was whether we should have a Select Committee to consider the one measure on immigration, but with regard to whether we should try to improve our scrutiny as a whole by using the Select Committee procedure more in conjunction with the Standing Committee procedure in ways that we have tried in the past.

We need to be concerned about the quality of the legislation that we pass. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Springburn (Mr. Martin) spent much time on the Child Support Agency, which is a classic example of how the House failed to understand some of the consequences of the original legislation. It is no criticism of the hon. Member for Springburn to say that his speech was not one that he or anyone else made during the passage of the original legislation. That is a commentary on whether our processes are entirely adequate.

On some of the difficult issues coming up in this Session, a certain amount of investigative work by the House, as opposed to the combative approach, might be helpful.