Business of the House

Debate between Baroness Browning and Lord True

Wednesday 4th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

I do not want to be disobliging to my noble friend, whom I admire very much, but I say again what I said to the noble Lord opposite. I have been trying to make that point, and I am grateful to him for reinforcing it. It is the fundamental issue which I believe noble Lords should be allowed to wrestle with. Do we want to be the sort of House that we have just been, where we have voted by that large number—288 Peers—to close down, at the behest of a Peer, without any debate? I would like to have heard other Members from the Cross Benches responding to and commenting, from the viewpoint of their experience, on the noble Baroness’s speech. As I said at the start, I would like to have heard my noble friends Lord Naseby and Lord Cormack, who wished to speak.

I have tried to explain to the noble Lord opposite that my amendment addresses the same issue. Sometimes in life you get a second chance. This amendment offers the House a second chance to address and hear a little about why this great principle of freedom of debate should be cast aside, but on a more limited scale. I do not ask, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did in her powerful speech, that the House should reject the principle of a guillotine. I put before your Lordships a proposition relating to any Bill that has been allowed only one day’s consideration in the House of Commons —we have not got this Bill yet, so it may be this Bill, but it could be any Bill—and we are discussing the principle here. This is an issue of principle about the guillotine. Surely any Bill that has been allowed only one day’s consideration in the House of Commons should receive full and unfettered consideration in your Lordship’s House.

I come back to the central point: what is this Chamber for if not to revise, consider, scrutinise and debate? I submit that there should not be curtailment of consideration on a Bill which is not an emergency Bill. There should not be a guillotine imposed in both Houses on legislation of this sort.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. When I was shadow Leader in another place during the William Hague administration, the Blair Government introduced guillotining at all stages for Bills going through the House of Commons, something that the Conservative Party robustly opposed at the time. Unfortunately, the Blair Government had their way, and that is what happens now. Having come to your Lordships’ House from another place nine years ago, I am only too familiar with the fact that, at all stages of a Bill coming from another place, the guillotine will fall and at all stages large sections of those Bills never get debated. It is incumbent upon this House to look line by line at everything that has not had the benefit of Members of the House of Commons looking at it. If we give up that duty—and it is a duty—through this measure being introduced to the House today, then I say to my noble friend that what he is proposing is very serious in its consequences for any Bill. We might all be worried about what is coming in the next couple of days, whether you support it or not, but as he rightly says, this is a principle, and we shall rue this as far as the future of this House and its role is concerned.

[Lord True]

I am very grateful to my noble friend, particularly with her great experience in the other place. I never had the privilege of serving there, but I remember that in 1975, when I was a young researcher, the late, great Michael Foot—a remarkable parliamentarian, though not necessarily always the greatest Minister—introduced five guillotine Motions on the Floor of the House of Commons in one day. That was considered such a sensational and shocking thing to do that it was on the front pages of the newspapers, and people cried “Liberty”. And here we are, in my lifetime, as my noble friend just pointed out, we now see the House of Commons treated as the lapdog when it comes to whoever is in control, whether it is the Government—