Nomination of Members to Committees

Part of Business of the House (Today) – in the House of Commons at 9:25 pm on 12 September 2017.

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Photo of Helen Goodman Helen Goodman Shadow Minister (Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs) 9:25, 12 September 2017

I had not intended to speak in the debate, but I was so appalled by the remarks of the Leader of the House that I felt that I had to. I feel that the Leader of the House has not understood her role. Her job is not to represent the Government to the House but to represent the House in the Government. She spoke about her constitutional responsibilities, but I should have thought that her constitutional responsibilities would include defending parliamentary democracy, which this motion patently does not do.

Government Members are not being logical. They say that the Opposition are not, but the loss of logic is on their side. If the Leader of the House was right to say that she has a majority, she would not need to change the rules of the game. It is because she does not have a majority that she needs to do so. Government Members are talking as though we are in a world of two-party politics, but we are not any longer. Nobody is saying that the Members of the other parties—the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the DUP or Plaid—should not have seats on Committees. Under the formula interpreted by the Clerks, they will get their fair share of the seats. They will be represented properly. This is not just a Labour-Tory game, and the Leader of the House does not seem to have taken that into account.

Furthermore, the point made by Sir Oliver Letwin is incomplete in the extreme. He was in the House yesterday and was present during all the debates about the Delegated Legislation Committees. He knows as well as we do that when statutory instruments are produced and go to Committees upstairs, or when we use the negative procedure, they do not come back to the House. He knows that perfectly well. He also knows that schedule 7 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, which we were debating yesterday, proposes to put whole stacks of delegated legislation through those Committees.

Every single Member who has spoken and mentioned Brexit has revealed that that is the Government’s game plan. They have become so obsessed with getting a hard Brexit—not the Brexit that the British people voted for, but a hard Brexit—that they are proposing to suspend the normal rules of this House. I am very disappointed that a number of hon. Gentlemen—