Nomination of Members to Committees

Debate between Pete Wishart and Martin Docherty-Hughes

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

The Government will pass this tonight; they will get their way because they have the DUP in their £1 billion pocket, but that does not make it right or democratic. They have 48.7% of the membership of the House; they should not have any more than that proportion in terms of Committees.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) talks about democracy, but it would seem that democracy in this place cost £1.5 billion, and we face probably the greatest constitutional crisis that these islands have seen since 1922. We might also reflect on 1974, but if we really want to get a grip on the notion of how Committees are selected, we need to live with the present experience, not that of 1974, and face the constitutional crisis that we have today.

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I want to move on to what happened in the 1970s, because it is very instructive and there are real lessons that the House could learn from that experience.

We now know why this Government have been so lax in putting together the normal functioning arrangements of the House. I raised this matter on the day we came back to Parliament, and I always feared that we would reach the stage when a motion such as this would be presented to the House. All this nonsense about Select Committees and why they were delayed was mere collateral damage resulting from the Government’s intention to control the legislative Committees. Now, at last, the rest of the House and the media are alert to the dangerous path that this Government are taking us down.

This House is determined by parliamentary arithmetic, and the day that we play fast and loose with that arithmetic and the verdict of the British people is the day that we start to walk down a murky, anti-democratic path. Our membership of the Select Committees is based on the number of Members that we secure. That allows us our membership on Select Committees, and it allows for our speaking rights and for all the other arrangements. These orders do not reflect the numbers of the House. We know that because the Clerks were charged with coming up with the formulae that allowed us to determine the Committees of the House. When it came to the Select Committees, the Clerks went away and crunched the numbers and then came back and presented the results to the parties. It was expected that there would be five Conservative members, five Labour members and one from the other parties, and everybody accepted that because it reflected the arithmetic of the House.

The Clerks also said that the Government should not have a majority on Standing Committees because they do not have a majority in this House. When it came to even-numbered Committees, they agreed with the Government that there should be no majority. That was fine, and everybody agrees with that. The Clerks did the numbers and the Government accept that. For Committees with an odd number of members, however, the Clerks said that there should be an Opposition majority. Remarkably, according to the Clerks, the Government only have a majority on Committees of 13 members. If we disregard the information supplied by the Clerks of this House—the people responsible for arranging the arithmetic, crunching the numbers and coming up with the formulae—we are again entering some seriously dangerous territory.