International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Christopher Chope and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

That must be correct. If we have a pot with a declining amount of money, we may be taking out more from that pot for one particular topic—overseas aid. We know now that, as a result of the change in the GDP, we will be spending an extra £400 million next year on overseas aid, raising the total amount to £12.4 billion.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

If the hon. Gentleman has any concerns about spending money that the UK does not have—indeed the UK has been in deficit since 2001—nuclear weapons, and not overseas aid, should be the target. Do he and his colleagues oppose any renewal of Trident?

Daylight Saving Bill

Debate between Christopher Chope and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for putting his support for the Bill on the record, but I am sure he is not suggesting that his view is shared by all his colleagues from Scotland.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

To support the hon. Gentleman’s assertion, I point out that I was on a radio programme on BBC Radio Scotland a number of months ago on which there was a balance of contributions on daylight saving. However, the overwhelming majority of callers to the programme were against the move.

[Mr Chope]

If that is so, and I am sure it is, we are in danger of embarking on a course that will waste an enormous amount of public money and Government time. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), said in Committee that a trial involving advancing all the clocks in the UK by one hour would not proceed

“if there was clear opposition from any part of the country.”––[Official Report, Daylight Saving Public Bill Committee, 7 December 2011; c. 4.]

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[Mr Chope]

It is easy for people to assert, in a rather patronising way, that a particular measure will benefit people in Scotland, but on Second Reading some hon. Members representing Scottish constituencies expressed a completely different view. I would prefer to trust their assessment of their constituents’ wishes than rely upon some academic treatise, which I am afraid to tell my hon. Friend I have not yet had the opportunity to look at.

[Mr MacNeil]

If there is any perception of high-handedness from Westminster, last week’s figure of 1,000 new members of the Scottish National party will probably be dwarfed. That, of course, was through www.snp.org/join.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman and I are on the same side on this issue, and I am not totally unfamiliar with Scotland because I had the privilege of spending four years as a university undergraduate there. I remember those cold mornings, as a keen undergraduate, getting up early and facing the stiff east wind in the dark. I understand and feel for the people in Scotland who are faced with the prospect of having even darker mornings.

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[Mr MacNeil]

These comments about the numbers of road deaths and accidents are misleading. The graph on deaths in the mid to late ’60s shows their number falling before and during the trial but falling more steeply after it. It is possible to argue, therefore, that the trial delayed the downward glide of the number of road fatalities and that there are people who died during that period who might not have done had we not had those three years of dark winter mornings.

[Mr Chope]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. This shows how complicated the issue is and why ultimately it should be left to the judgment of Members of Parliament based on the evidence presented.

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[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, and to my hon. Friend for his point of order. For the sake of clarification, I was suggesting that the part of the Bill calling for the collection of evidence is not necessary, but we can develop those arguments in due course if there are amendments pertinent to it.

The most important thing is that I should make some progress. I have not made much, owing to the number of interventions and the amount of interest in this group of amendments. There is opposition to such a change in Scotland; I can see that there is some support as well. In the past year, the Government have basically done nothing in relation to the Bill since Second Reading. They have not considered the evidence. If they had, we might not need to allow up to 18 months for the proposed inquiry. At the moment, the Government suggest that it could take 18 months rather than one year. My amendment would reduce the scope of that inquiry, thereby reducing the costs and enabling progress to be made more quickly. Those who want progress will see merit in amendment 59, because it would focus the scope of any inquiry.

[Mr MacNeil]

The effect of darkness has been asserted in the Chamber. In fact, the most dangerous hour on the road is 3 o’clock in the afternoon, which is in daylight all the time. Another point to bear in mind is that since the trial, the fatality rate has dropped from about 7,500 a year to below 2,500 a year. The improvements in road safety have been due to a number of other factors. Daylight does not seem to be as big a factor as some Members would have us believe.

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[Mr Chope]

I am almost lost for words. My hon. Friend has come into my constituency on I do not know how many occasions to talk to I know not which businesses about the Bill. I hope that he told them that their prime responsibility should be to communicate with me as the Member for Christchurch rather than through him as the Member for Bournemouth. East. Be that as it may, I have yet to hear from these businesses. They might be run by people who are resident in my hon. Friend’s constituency, so I have no problem with that. With the greatest respect, my hon. Friend misunderstands the purpose of amendment 59, which is to bring some focus and simplicity to this issue by concentrating on the summer months rather than complicating matters by including GMT.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that tourism is more a function of temperature and that it dies down in the winter months because it is colder? If any group of people can get up an hour earlier, take advantage of the entirety of the daylight and are free to do so it those who go on holiday. On holiday, we can choose when we go to bed and when we get up without reference to an employer or anybody else.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful and persuasive point—one that I must admit I had not considered. He makes a worthwhile addition to our deliberations on this aspect of the Bill.

Before moving on to other amendments in the group, I urge the Minister to give his unqualified support to Government research on the potential costs and benefits of my proposal in the event of this Bill not reaching the statute book this Session. The Government do not need legislation or even the authority of the House to prepare a report. I have noted a certain reluctance on the part of the Government to engage in the lively debate consequent on the introduction of this Bill. If the Government are supportive of the Bill, as amended at their insistence in Committee, why have they not already produced or started work on producing a report from experts? I shall not be rude to the Government by suggesting that they have been sitting on the fence and wanting to have it both ways. That is not my nature, but I think that the Government and the Minister have to answer a number of questions about this matter.

At the behest of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), let me turn briefly to some of the other amendments in the group. Amendment 58, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and others, picks up a concern articulated in Committee that the Bill’s proposals could impact particularly adversely on faith communities. The amendment would require the Secretary of State to have specific regard to

“the interests and concerns of the principal faith communities”

in the UK. It seems a perfectly sensible amendment to me, as I would expect any amendment by my hon. Friend to be. If amendment 59 were carried, however, I believe that many of the concerns of faith communities such as Orthodox Jews would be addressed in any case because their concerns are centred principally around having darker mornings rather than lighter summer evenings. I recognise that amendment 59 would not satisfy amateur astronomers who would have to stay up even later to get a good view of the stars, but it would address the concerns underlying amendment 58.

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[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point.

Amendment 3 stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset and I look forward to hearing his speech in support of it. The amendment proposes to leave out clause 2, and I may well share the scepticism of my hon. Friends who have supported that amendment, because they obviously feel that the Bill would be better if it made no reference to what is described as the “Independent Oversight Group”.

One thing seems to be absolutely clear: this so-called “Independent Oversight Group” will not be independent of the Government. Its members will be chosen by the Secretary of State, who will be able to remove them on a whim, and subsection (3) provides that they will not even be entitled to have all their expenses defrayed, because instead of using the word “must” the Bill refers only to “may” in this regard. They will not be allowed to choose their own terms of reference and they will have to do as they are told by the Secretary of State, even to the extent that he will be able to order them not to publish their advice quickly. They might produce their report quickly, but the clause means that the Secretary of State will be able to say to them that they should not produce the report based on their findings until a given time, perhaps closer to a year or 18 months after they had been asked to start their work. So I can understand the scepticism.

My hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) and I have tabled the more modest amendment 63, which would require the independent group to be comprised of “independent academic experts”. We did so not because we believed that a group of independent academics is necessarily best suited to this task, but because the Minister promised in Committee that the group would be so limited and the amendment would prevent him from changing his mind later. The amendment would also provide the opportunity to probe him further as to how and why he believes that independent academic experts are the best people to advise on a report on the potential costs and benefits.

I have been campaigning for a long time for the Government to carry out work and produce a comprehensive report on the costs and benefits of UK membership of the European Union. I find it interesting that although the Government resolutely refuse to do that, they are prepared to contemplate such an inquiry into the costs and benefits of changing the time zones within this country.

[Mr MacNeil]

Did the hon. Gentleman fear, as I did when I heard the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) talk about sharing a time zone with Europe, creeping Euro-harmonisation, which perhaps would not be helpful at all in this instance?

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[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman gives me a great opportunity to say that independence will be better than sliced bread.

[Mr Chope]

Has the hon. Gentleman seen this little postcard-sized piece of paper, which claims that the Bill would

“boost the economy, make the nation happier, save lives, save carbon”?

It goes on to say: “Save the date”. Is not that an example of the gross exaggeration that the supporters of the Bill are using in their tactics to get people to support it?

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman mentions the claim that the provisions would “make the nation happier”. As a result of information that I received from Portugal, it occurred to me yesterday that a measure of happiness might be a country’s divorce rate. So I got my researchers, Christopher Mullins-Silverstein and Xavier Solano, to approach the House of Commons Library and ask for the UK’s divorce rate figures during the trial period from 1968 to 1970. There was a small but significant spike in the divorce rate, which fell back down again after the trial period was over. I am not sure whether the divorce rate is an indicator of happiness—I suppose it could be argued either way—but it certainly went up at that time. Perhaps the morning irritability that I have mentioned was present at the breakfast tables of the United Kingdom, and perhaps it tipped a few people over—

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[Mr MacNeil]

If the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who advocated European harmonisation earlier, curbs his enthusiasm and goes to the ROSPA website, he will find that the month of November is the most dangerous month. It is by studying what ROSPA says that I have introduced the amendment.

[Mr Chope]

I recognise the generous spirit in which the hon. Gentleman has introduced the amendment, but has he thought through the implications once every seven years, when the clocks would change on St Andrew’s day?

[Mr MacNeil]

If the clocks were to change on St Andrew’s day, giving us an extra hour on that day, we might have a 25-hour St Andrew’s day, which would probably be welcome, and—who knows?—I might get some form of promotion from the Scottish Government owing to my initiative of introducing a longer, 25-hour St Andrew’s day.

I am looking for an opportunity, and the glass is half full. By extending this olive branch, I am presenting a half-full glass and an opportunity for the trial, with the other attendant benefits, but the concern that must be listened to most is the safety concern. It is not dealt with by the data, and it was certainly not dealt with by the graph after the trial in the 1970s. Indeed, the trial may have cost lives, so let us have only a three-month period of danger, rather than a 15-month one.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Christopher Chope and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. She and I have not colluded on this, but I took the precaution of looking up the definition of “alternative” and its usage in the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary”, which says:

“Some traditionalists maintain”—

I think that she and I are both in that category—

“from an etymological standpoint, that you can only have a maximum of two alternatives (from the Latin alter ‘other (of two)’) and that uses where there are more than two alternatives are erroneous.”

However, the dictionary then says:

“Such uses are, however, normal in modern standard English.”

More is the pity, but that is the factual situation as described in the dictionary. However, the sense that I have described is how those of us who are traditionalists, as well as a lot of other people, understand the word “alternative”. Indeed, although I am reluctant ever to criticise a word that he says, earlier on we heard the Prime Minister use the word “less” when he meant “fewer”.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman is giving us a lecture on the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. However, in a previous general election—in 1992, I think it was—the Inverness seat had four candidates on roughly 25% each. How were those voters allowed any power or given any alternatives to express their further preferences, rather than having the winning candidate get only roughly a quarter of the votes?

[Mr Chope]

It is exactly the same syndrome as somebody who wins the 100 metres in the Olympics by a fraction, despite perhaps coming second or third in the semi-finals. That is the way we operate, and it is something that everybody understands.

[Mr MacNeil]

rose—

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) intervenes, may I remind the Committee that we are not discussing AV versus first past the post? We are debating a particular form in this amendment, and we are now drifting away from that a little. Perhaps we could come back to it.

[Mr Chope]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr MacNeil]

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is talking about an exact parallel. At an election, there is a division of votes, but there is no division of time in a race: everyone is striving to achieve the shortest time. That is different from a division of votes among candidates.

[Mr Chope]

Speaking from my personal experience, when I was first lucky enough to get elected to this House in 1983, I got 41.5% of the vote. When I was defeated in 1992, I got more than 45% of the vote. I did not complain about that because all my constituents could understand that the person whom they most wanted to be their MP was no longer me. That is what we understand with the first-past-the-post system. As soon as we complicate the matter with alternative systems, we get complexity. In the amendment, I am trying to reduce that complexity and mitigate the problem as much as possible.

I want to draw another analogy. If the alternative vote system proposed by the Government in the Bill were adopted, people would be encouraged to rank the number of candidates from one to however many, in order of preference. I think that a lot of our constituents have difficulty in being sure about the relative merits of one or two candidates, yet we would be expecting them to list perhaps nine candidates in order of preference. If we tried to rate fast-food outlets in order of preference, we would need not only to work out which one we liked the most, but to rank Starbucks, McDonald’s, Subway, Café Nero, KFC, Burger King and Pret A Manger in order of preference. It is quite complicated for people to rate, say, one as their sixth preference and another as their seventh. Such a voting system would be demanding and result in people having to spend a lot more time in the polling booth poring over the information about the candidates. Indeed, they would need to get a lot more information before they could exercise an informed choice.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am not sure about the constituents of Christchurch, but the constituents of Na h-Eileanan an Iar certainly have no difficulty in getting beyond the No. 2, even when it comes to fast-food outlets, which we do not have many of in the Outer Hebrides.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point.

I refer the Committee to the evidence submitted to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee by Professor Patrick Dunleavy in the 14th written submission on page 205 in the third report on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. In his important paper, he asks what the alternative vote means. Were the Bill to pass, and were there to be a referendum in which the question on the alternative vote appeared on the ballot paper, many members of the public would ask precisely that question: what does the alternative vote mean?

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[Mr Chope]

This has been a useful debate, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for what he said. I thank everybody who has participated; we have had some interesting insights. I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms) because he brought up important points about the need to give equal weight to votes and the way in which that principle is undermined by the principle of the alternative vote system.

It is semantics to say that people have only one vote, but some people’s votes may be counted more than once; that is the equivalent of saying that some people have several votes and some have only one, but if that is how the proponents of AV wish to try to campaign in the AV referendum, so be it.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) for his intervention, and I notice that he has an amendment on the amendment paper that effectively seeks to introduce the French system. I must say that when he told the Committee and me that the noble Lord Plant of Highfield and the noble Lord Campbell-Savours supported my amendment, I immediately got rather cold feet about its wisdom.

The purpose of the amendment was to try to draw out a discussion and get from the Minister a justification—whether it is satisfactory is another matter—of why the AV system put forward in the referendum is different from the AV system in London for the election of the London Mayor.

[Mr MacNeil]

I often hear Conservative party members, in particular, talking about first past the post or even advocating the form of AV that he might be advocating at the moment. Would he ever advocate that for the leadership of the Conservative party, which, as I remember, seemed almost to be AV for slow learners over the two or three weeks that it took?

[Mr Chope]

Actually, it was a very sensible system, not dissimilar to the one operated in France. Basically, there is one election and the person who gets the fewest votes drops out and there is a completely fresh start with a fresh ballot. For example, when Mr Michael Portillo sought to become the leader of the Conservative party, he had the largest number of votes—