Standing Orders (Public Business)

Graham Allen Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

I am very grateful—

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Can you inform the House of your view of Members who intervene and wish to be one of the 50 who are waiting to contribute to this debate? Good knockabout stuff though it is, some Members have already intervened two or three times. Will you take that into account?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Just for a change, I can directly answer the hon. Gentleman’s point of order. The view of the Chair is that if a Member has requested to speak but makes several long interventions, that Member’s place in the speaking order will go further down the list every time they intervene. I can make that absolutely clear. I hope the House is listening and will allow the hon. Gentleman to finish his speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I want to make some progress, because I am conscious that a lot of my hon. Friends want to speak.

This is the fourth time these hastily redrawn plans have been presented to the House, which says absolutely everything we need to know about them. [Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) want to intervene? He is chuntering away.

[Mr Graham Allen]

I will gladly intervene, but very quickly, in view of what I said earlier. The hon. Gentleman is posing as a second-class Member of Parliament, but he is getting a first-class allocation of unlimited time. Perhaps he would care to give those of us who are second class a go as well.

[Pete Wishart]

May I say ever so gently to the hon. Gentleman that this is being done to us and it has taken an hour and a half and six speeches before a Scottish Member of Parliament has been allowed to speak? We will take our time and I will not rush for his sake.

I have scoured the fourth set of Standing Orders to see whether they change the first set significantly. Perhaps one curious thing could be explained to me. On the Speaker’s certification, the Speaker is now required and obliged to speak to two members of the Panel of Chairs before deciding whether a Bill will be English-only. I have a lot of respect for those on the Panel of Chairs—they do a fantastic job chairing the Committees of this House—but I have never known them to be an authority on the constitution. Surely it would be as well to ask two random members of the public for their views. The people that should be spoken to are the Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. They are the bodies that this is being dumped on and it is their devolution settlements that will be impacted, but there is no requirement on the Speaker to consult them.

The most invidious thing about the proposals is what they will do to the Speaker. The Speaker will be politicised, which is almost unforgivable. That could set the Speaker in conflict with Scottish Members of Parliament. If we do not agree with and reject one of the certifications, what are we supposed to do? We are here to represent our constituents, so of course we are going to do what we can to ensure that their voice is heard. The proposal could lead to a challenge that goes all the way to judicial review and the Supreme Court. We know that the rulings of the Speaker are unchallengeable because of parliamentary privilege, but if constituents who watch what is going on here feel that their rights are not being represented properly, we will end up in the Supreme Court and judicial review.

One of the daftest things the Leader of the House has said—I say this candidly, because I have a lot of affection for him—is that there is no such thing as Barnett consequentials. He told the Procedure Committee:

“I have looked long and hard at the issue of Barnett consequentials and I think they are a bit of both an illusion and a side issue. I don’t actually believe that Barnett consequentials exist.”

According to the right hon. Gentleman, Barnett consequentials are up there with Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. What he said about Barnett consequentials is absurd and I will give him the chance to take it back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

Let me do something that nobody else who has anything on the Order Paper can do, which is read out my amendment. If we had to listen to all the amendments that are before the House, it would take longer than a speech by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). For those who want to vote rather than turn tail and go to the Tea Room, I will press my amendment to a vote at 4 pm. It states that

“this House concurs with the Lords Message of 21 July, that it is expedient that a joint committee of Lords and Commons be appointed to consider and report on the constitutional implications of the Government’s revised proposals to change the Standing Orders of the House of Commons in order to give effect to English Votes for English Laws, and that the committee should report on the proposals by 30 March 2016.”

That amendment is supported by seven different parties in the House, and until I heard some tribalism in the debate’s early exchanges, I had hoped that Members of good will throughout the House would have supported it. It is clear that there is no consensus. There are those for and against, and I accept that that is the way this place works. However, if we are to do something of a democratic nature—such as change the Standing Orders of the House of Commons or the way that votes are recorded—I hope that people will seek consensus because they are Members of Parliament, as well as members of the Government or the alterative Government.

That amendment first saw the light of day in July and was crafted in the House of Lords by that wild maverick, Sir Robin Butler, now Lord Butler of Brockwell. Together with a number of colleagues, including the former Scottish Secretary, the former Home Secretary, and many other distinguished people from the second Chamber, he was trying to create something that could unite people not merely across parties, but across Houses.

There are clearly problems and many people have raised difficulties—today’s Order Paper runs to 17 pages, plus seven pages of amendments. I hope that everyone will accept that there are difficulties, so let us find a mechanism to resolve those problems. Let us take our time. There is no need to rush at this; there is nothing pending or desperately urgent that will not be dealt with. The Government have a majority and can do what they wish in this place. I ask only that they not be tyrannical, and that they consult. By setting up a Joint Committee they could see the evidence being prepared in the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and look carefully at the report that was published this week by the Procedure Committee. They should listen to last night’s debate—I bet many Members have not had the chance in their busy day to consider what some eminent, respected people across the House of Lords said about this issue.

We should take time to look again at the McKay proposals produced by a distinguished, and totally impartial, Clerk of this House. The views of political parties, and others, could be fed in, so that we come up with something that everybody in the House can agree on, not because it is imposed, or because “We don’t like it because they’re doing it”, but because we respect work that has been done by a Joint Committee of eminent people across the House. I hope that those warning flags will be heeded and that the consequentials for our democracy and constitution will be taken seriously with the creation of a Joint Committee when we vote at 4 pm.