Speaker’s Statement

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I will come to other colleagues, particularly the illustrious Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash).

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. As you will recall, on Saturday afternoon, I was the Member who made the point that the Leader of the House should have been making an emergency business statement at that time, rather than relying on the device of a point of order to try to change the business today. I described it at the time as “low-rent jiggery-pokery”. Is it not time that the Government, instead of playing games with the business of the House, actually subscribed to the usual practices, informed the Opposition of their intentions and, indeed, informed the Speaker of the House of their intensions in advance, so that we can all get on with the important business we have to conduct?

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Let us focus on the arguments and the issues. As a long-serving Member of this House who is sadly no longer with us once said, “It’s about policies; it’s not about personalities. It’s not about personalities; it’s about policies.” I do not want to get into the personalities of it. I know that the Leader of the House disapproves of jiggery-pokery, because I have heard him say so in the past—if memory serves me correctly, on 26 March 2015, in the Chamber, he made the very point that he deprecated the use of jiggery-pokery.

I do not want to get into that, but I suppose what I want to say is this: there are precedents for changes in business being announced on points of order—it is not the norm, but there are precedents—and I do not want to ascribe any improper motive to the Leader of the House, whose personal courtesy to me over the years has been and remains unfailing, and I hope that I have reciprocated it. He made the judgment that he made. There was very little notice that he was going to say what he said, but that was really perhaps a product of the circumstances.

The hon. Gentleman might think that the circumstance could have been anticipated and some advance notice would have been helpful, but we were where we were. I do not complain about having to respond to points of order. The Leader of the House did not stay for all the points of order—he stayed for some of them—but I feel certain that he will since have familiarised himself with all of them. We will hear from the Leader of the House later, and I am sure we look forward to that.