Nomination of Members to Committees

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

So there we have it: “Great power grab 2”, the sequel, the return—“Then they came for our Committees.” This is an incredible, totally undemocratic power grab from a Government who do not command a majority in this House.

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I will make a little progress, and then give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Not content with giving themselves unprecedented powers under the repeal Bill, the Government are now trying to manipulate the Committees of this House in their favour. The nation should be very worried about what is going on, because this Government are showing nothing other than contempt for democracy in their desire to ignore and circumvent the democratic verdict of this country.

[Mr Evans]

I say to the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), that this is how it is done: a Member seeks to intervene and that is granted, and they rise to speak and then sit down. That is what a debate is all about.

It has just been said that this is undemocratic and a power grab, but we are in the Chamber of the House of Commons with a motion before us. We are going to have a vote; if the Government do not have a majority in the House, they will lose that vote. If the Government win the vote, they have a majority in this House of Commons. So let us not beat around the bush; let us get to the vote.

[Pete Wishart]

I am almost grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Yes, the Government with their grubby £1 billion deal with the Democratic Unionist party have a confidence and supply arrangement on the Floor of the House; what they most definitely do not have is a majority on the Committees of this House, which are determined by the country and how the people voted.

This minority Conservative Government have 317 Members out of the 650 Members available in this House; that amounts to 48.7% of the membership of this House. What they are therefore entitled to is 48.7% of the membership of the Committees of this House. But that is not the case for this Government; for them, democracy is a mere impediment as they grimly hold on to power and ensure they get their way in everything they try to undertake. This is a Parliament of minorities, and the structures and arrangements of this House must reflect that reality and that fact.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

All these great concerns about chaos and arrangements that will lead to this and that are an indictment of the Members of this House. They say, “If we were to respect parliamentary arithmetic when it comes to this, all it would lead to is chaos.” That says something about the membership of this House. More critically and crucially, it goes against the advice of the Clerks on the membership of Committees. I say to the hon. Gentleman: have a look at what the Clerks determine as to how these Standing Committees should be established. The fact that this House is prepared, in this vote, to overlook the good advice of the Clerks on a matter they are obliged to determine is a shame on this House.

I want to come back to Margaret Thatcher. I never thought I would be quoting her in the House. It is a novelty, and I do not think I will ever get used to it or be comfortable with it. Let me get back to what I was saying about the 1970s and to what Conservative Members are asking us to do here. They are saying that just because the Labour party did something rotten in the 1970s, we must do something rotten too, in order to address this. That is totally unacceptable to Scottish National party Members who say, “A curse on all your houses. Deal with the parliamentary arithmetic. Accept the realities and get on with it.”

I will make two points about the 1970s, and again I was intrigued when I looked into this. The Harrison amendment was introduced in the most despicable way to this House, by subterfuge and sleight of hand, but the amendment created this set of conditions for a couple of months. At that point, the Labour Chair of the then Committee of Selection died and it stopped; we went back to the normal arrangements and for the rest of that Labour minority Administration, the parliamentary arithmetic of the House was respected. The second thing about that minority Labour Administration was that it became a minority Labour Administration––that Labour Government actually won an election. The current Conservative Government never experienced that a few months ago, so we will take no lessons on this.

Let me deal with this “chaos” thing. Sometimes democracy is not all that convenient and it throws up strange results. Sometimes we just have to get on and deal with it. What you do not do is try to circumvent democracy; what you do not do is table motions like this one, which is so disrespectful to the people who voted in the election.

[Mr Nigel Evans]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman before and I want to make some progress.

What you do is respect the way that the people would do this. The most ridiculous and audacious thing in all the anti-democracy that these guys are up to right now is this new Committee of Selection. As a Select Committee of this House, it should be subject to the formula determined by the Clerks, but the Government want to give themselves an inbuilt majority. They will determine the numbers on Committees with this, so on anything contentious—anything that we are likely to object to—they will determine that an odd number will be used and so they will get their way. This is absolutely disgraceful.

I want to say something to my friends in the Democratic Unionist party, because it is important. I have heard quite a lot about this working majority issue, and I want to explore it a little. I say to them that we used to campaign together for the rights of minority parties in this House, as we all were then. I hope that they reflect on that when they vote tonight and do not just give that crowd over there a majority in these Committees. I hope they remember the campaigns that the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and I fought together to ensure that the smaller parties in this House were properly represented in these types of Committees. We fought long, hard fights together, and it is shameful to think about completely giving this over to the Conservatives.

There is another aspect to this: if DUP Members vote with the Government tonight, it will leave questions about their Opposition status and raise further questions about their entitlement to Short money. It would have to raise those questions because it would look like the Government are paying a rival political party. It is also worth noting that a High Court ruling is coming up soon about the whole grubby DUP deal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

Rather than repeating arguments, let me go through the arguments that have been raised so far and comment on them as I think fit, which I hope will be of assistance to the House.

The Leader of the House made an admirably short speech—I do not know what the shadow Leader of the House was moaning about. Normally everyone moans in this House that people go on for too long, but the Leader of the House crisply enunciated the purpose of the motion and set it out very clearly. That was an admirable thing for her to do.

I listened to the shadow Leader of the House very carefully. She moaned about references to the Selection Committee rather than the Committee of Selection. I am afraid that reminded me—we have already mentioned Monty Python once in the debate today—of the argument about the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. I do not think that what the Committee is called is significant. [Interruption.] It is just not important—arguing about what the Committee is called is not important. In addition, the Chair of the existing Committee of Selection is already paid, so the current proposal is not a change, and there is no sinister aspersion the shadow Leader of the House can cast on that. So I did not think that those arguments really had any great weight.

The substance of the hon. Lady’s argument was driven through precisely by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who put his finger on the issue: if we pass this motion this evening, it will demonstrate again—as have all the votes we have had since this Government were formed—that we actually command a majority in this House. The hon. Lady’s only possible motivation for not wanting to agree to the motion is that she wants to gum up the works.

The hon. Lady invited us to look at the Opposition Members being put forward for the Committee and to assess their reasonableness, and I do not necessarily quarrel with that—they are very reasonable people. I would argue that the Government Members who have been put forward to serve on the Committee, including the Chair, are very reasonable people. However, if we want to look at the Opposition’s approach to reasonableness and the progress of business, we do not have to go back very far; we only have to go back as far as yesterday, when the Opposition were faced with the decision of the British people to leave the European Union. They knew it was necessary to have the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and to pass that legislation, but they chose to oppose it. If they had got their way, they would have frustrated the will of the British people. Rather than abstain and try to improve the Bill in Committee, as a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends chose to do in saying that they support the principle of the Bill but it needs improvement and they have tabled amendments—the Lord Chancellor has indicated that he is going to discuss those amendments in a constructive and appropriate way—they chose to vote against the Bill to try to vote it down. A number of Opposition Members spotted the inconsistency between that approach and the referendum result and called them out on it. That betrays the hon. Lady’s real motive.

[Mr Nigel Evans]

Does my right hon. Friend find it somewhat bizarre that representatives of the Scottish National party and the Liberal Democrats are saying that Conservative Members are trying to circumvent democracy, and yet although on 23 June 2016 the British people decided to vote, by a margin of more than 1.3 million, to leave the European Union, on every piece of legislation we have brought before this House, those Members have voted against the democratic wishes of the British people?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a strong point very well, but I think my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset put his finger on it.

I listened very carefully to the arguments made by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). I should just counsel him that he wants to be a bit careful quoting Margaret Thatcher. While she is held in high regard by Conservative Members, I note that the leader of his party, the First Minister of Scotland, says that her entire political mission to get independence for Scotland was driven by Margaret Thatcher, so if he starts quoting her in this House with approbation, he may be putting his own future in his own party at great risk—and Conservative Members would not want to see that.

The hon. Gentleman’s arguments did not hold much water. Again echoing my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, if we win the vote on this motion, we will have demonstrated that we command a majority. As I said in an intervention, he is entirely right to point out that the Conservative party on its own does not have a majority in this House, but the Government do. The Opposition cannot command a majority either.